Email personalization is a gamechanger for publishers. Just ask Mumsnet.
Mumsnet is a giant—and a gem—of the UK internet with 9 million unique visitors every month. Newsletters are their secret weapon for driving traffic and keeping that massive community totally engaged.
Their strategy was rock-solid, covering everything from daily news blasts to those vital, long-term series for new parents. But even Mumsnet, a true digital trailblazer, hit a wall when their technology couldn’t keep up with their ambition for true email personalization.
😩 The pain point: When basic segmentation kills email personalization
Matt Ellis, Mumsnet’s Head of Audience and Revenues, knew the drill. Like many big publishers, they were stuck in the cycle of basic email segmentation. Their editorial team was brilliant, hand-picking links for quality, but no matter how good the links were, the delivery was one size fits all.
Think about it: thousands of subscribers, yet everyone got the same links. This approach to email personalization left so much on the table.
As Ellis puts it: “The payoff of delivering much more relevant content is so much better than what we’ve been doing for years and years, which is sending the same thing to the same people over and over again.”
They were essentially leaving a mountain of clicks and engagement sitting right on the table, all because their old platform wasn’t smart enough to deliver the email personalization their subscribers craved.
🧠 The game-changer: Hello, Echobox AI magic!
Mumsnet decided they deserved better than generic newsletters and made the brilliant move to Echobox Email. The game-changer? True per-subscriber email personalization.
Echobox’s AI doesn’t just guess; it analyzes what you click, when you open and much more to build a unique profile. Then, it generates an email tailor-made just for you! This is email personalization at its most advanced.
Ellis was thrilled to leave the old, narrow approach behind: “We switched to Echobox for the personalization and the ability for it to unlock 500–600 pieces of content rather than just the narrow selection that we previously had.”
Mumsnet found a fantastic balance. They lock in their key content (hello, sponsorship revenue!), and the AI handles the rest, ensuring maximum relevance through constant email personalization.
The result is truly mind-boggling scale: “With Echobox, we’re not sending one email out, we’re sending potentially 115,000 different emails out to people. That’s huge.”
🥳 The big win: Mumsnet’s email performance transformation
The switch was instant success, proving that when you prioritize advanced email personalization, the numbers follow:
| Key Performance Metric | The Improvement |
| Open Rate | A whopping 23% Higher |
| Click Rate | A fantastic 15% Higher |
This highly personalized approach is creating a powerful “halo effect,” spreading traffic across the entire Mumsnet site. Plus, they finally found a partner with great support. Instead of submitting a ticket and waiting a week, Ellis says the Echobox team is “super responsive, super accessible. It’s really great.”
Mumsnet is now planning to create dozens of niche, automated newsletters, proving that when your system is built for publisher success and true email personalization, scaling is surprisingly easy.
The final word on finding a solution that actually delivers on email personalization? No hesitation from Matt Ellis: “Absolutely. Nobody else offers what Echobox is offering. We spoke to a lot of ESPs and they all talk about personalization, but they don’t really mean it. Echobox does, and it works.”
