Introduction
Founded in 2011, Brit + Co has gone on to become one of the largest lifestyle media brands in the US. With feet in the world of publishing and e-commerce, Brit + Co partners with some of the world’s largest retailers such as IKEA, Starbucks and Amazon, giving them exposure to Brit + Co’s engaged online community of over 175 million people.
Challenge
- Reduce heavy workload on a small team
- Increase newsletter engagement
Approach
- Use Echobox automation to streamline complex workflow
- Automatically generate personalized emails to increase open and click rates
Challenge
With traffic from social media becoming more and more unpredictable, Brit + Co decided to focus their attention on their newsletter offering.
There were two main issues to solve: low subscriber engagement and a lack of time for strategic planning.
The two were interrelated. Like many publishers, the combination of a small team and a time-consuming, manual newsletter workflow meant that there was little time to really optimize. As a lean team of roughly 10 full-time employees, producing 150 pieces of content and hundreds of social assets weekly, the manual demands of newsletter creation diverted precious time and energy from other initiatives.
This meant, as Brit + Co’s VP of Product and Growth, Jemal Swoboda, recalls, the company’s newsletters weren’t reaching their full potential.
Swoboda and his team used to share only once a week on their most engaged day, but the constraints of a small team and heavy workload meant that there was no time for further optimization and engagement remained low.
“I’d used our previous email solution for probably almost a decade and a half. What we started noticing, though, was that the cost was really amping up, and it was a very manual process with the newsletters needing to be rebuilt each time.”
The importance of having an engaged newsletter audience was obvious. When compared to users coming from social media, newsletter subscribers spent far longer on Brit + Co’s website. Crunching the numbers, Swoboda found that while others might spend 45 seconds on the site, newsletter subscribers generally always spent upwards of three minutes. Having an engaged user base was vital for ad revenue and partnerships.
Approach
Standing in the way of reclaiming this time was a heavily manual workflow. “I’d used our previous email solution for probably almost a decade and a half,” Swoboda told us, “and you just get used to it. What we started noticing, though, was that the cost was really amping up, and it was a very manual process with the newsletters needing to be rebuilt each time.”
We needed to help take some of the workload off of our small team. Echobox has really helped in that way.”
Swoboda estimates that the staff responsible for creating and sending newsletters had to spend around three hours each and every week on their creation. Streamlining this process with automation seemed like the obvious solution.
“What we wanted to create was a situation where you can set it and forget it, with some curation as needed. We needed to help take some of the workload off of our small team. Echobox has really helped in that way.”
The process now is as simple and straightforward as possible. Brit + Co have their content feeds connected to Echobox, allowing them to automate the creation and sending of newsletters, drastically cutting down manual effort. This “set it and forget it” capability, requiring minimal human curation, has been a game-changer for the team. Not just this, the platform’s intuitive design has also ensured a smooth adoption for the content team.
A reduced workload with automation, however, is only half of the equation. Increasing performance is even more important. Echobox is constantly analyzing the engagement data from Brit + Co’s newsletters, building a detailed picture of each individual subscriber. With this information Echobox tailors each send, meaning that each subscriber receives a version of the same newsletter that is personalized to them — their habits and their interests. In effect, this means a whole suite of personalizations, from send times, to what content is included and to which order the content is presented. Each change is designed to maximize open and click rates.
With these personalizations, Brit + Co can not only save their staff valuable time, but produce real results for the business.
Results
The implementation of Echobox has delivered tangible and impactful increases in performance for Brit + Co. The time dedicated to newsletter assembly, which once consumed around three hours per week, has been slashed by 89% to only 20 minutes. This translates into a remarkable time saving of over 10 hours per month, allowing the team to concentrate on content creation, video production, and staying ahead of trends, all activities that are crucial to help Brit + Co attract and retain audiences.
“For me, being able to trust Echobox’s automation is huge.”
Brit + Co rely on Echobox to do the heavy lifting and have automated 80% of their sends. Added to this, Echobox allows them to have the final say over each edition.
Brit + Co’s use of Echobox’s AI-powered personalizations have contributed to a notable surge in newsletter open rates of around 50%. Now, Brit + Co consistently see 40-50% open rates, a significant improvement from the previous 30% obtained with their previous email solution.
Conclusion
Brit + Co’s use of Echobox is just the first step in what Swoboda intends to be a total revamp of their newsletter offering. In the future, Swoboda hopes to make far greater use of Echobox’s segmentation and analytics capabilities to refine their newsletter strategy even further. But it’s Echobox’s automation that will be the greatest help. “For me, being able to trust Echobox’s automation is huge. Now I know that if I can do the work on our side it can be really effective.”
Would Swoboda recommend Echobox to other publishers? “100%. I would highly recommend it. It takes a little bit of trust and having an open mind that it’s going to be a new process. But ultimately it will save you a lot of time.”
