DailyMail+ is a premium digital subscription service by the Daily Mail, with over 400,000 global subscribers.

The results

DailyMail+ used Subsets to experiment with whether personalized article recommendations could improve retention, after a manual pilot had already shown promise. The team ran the same campaign against five audiences at once, each measured against its own control group.

• Out of 5 audiences, 3 delivered a statistically significant retention lift
  
  • Audience 1 (decline in usage): +6.2 ppt uplift
  • Audience 2 (decline in content breadth): +4.9 ppt uplift
  • Audience 3 (decline in minutes usage): +5.3 ppt uplift

The challenge

The DailyMail+ team had recently unlocked the ability to automatically personalize article recommendations via email - but hadn't yet proven the concept could scale. A manual, one-off version of the campaign had shown early signs of working, but the team had no structured way to test it rigorously across different subscriber audiences, isolate which segments actually responded, or measure impact with statistical confidence.

The solution

Using Subsets, the DailyMail+ team designed and launched a weekly personalized article recommendation campaign, surfacing content aligned to each subscriber's individual reading behavior. A partner of both DailyMail+ and Subsets, an award-winning digital performance marketing agency, supported the concepting and creative of the campaign.

The email leveraged personalisation to not only present subscribers with content from a section they showed interest in, but also those they hadn’t yet, to encourage breadth of reading:

Using Subsets, the team could:

• Run the campaign as a controlled experiment across five subscriber audiences at once, rather than targeting the base as a single group
• Measure each audience against its own control group, showing not just whether personalization worked, but for whom
• Track cohort-based retention throughout the experiment, validating statistical significance before acting on the results

Three audiences came back with a clear positive result, with deeper content engagement and renewal-stage retention up to 6.2 percentage points higher than the control group. That gave the team a defensible case for turning the winning audiences into always-on personalization flows.