The Philadelphia Inquirer has been "asking on behalf of the people" since 1829. Locally owned and headquartered in Center City Philadelphia, it has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes and connects to its audiences through multiple brand platforms, including newspapers, Inquirer.com, e-Editions, apps, newsletters, podcasts, and live events.

The results

The Philadelphia Inquirer used Subsets to test whether inviting disengaged trial subscribers to ask its reporters questions, through its Curious Philly feature, could improve retention. A single email, personalized by region, moved both engagement and retention ahead of the control group.

Low-engagement trial subscribers:

• +6.8 percentage point retention rate lift vs control
• +10.5% more pageviews vs control

The challenge

Like most publishers, a key priority for The Philadelphia Inquirer is building a reading habit with new subscribers before their introductory offer ends. The team wanted to reach trial subscribers who had barely engaged since signing up, before the switch to full price turned into a cancellation. Finding those subscribers early, and proving whether an engagement campaign actually kept them, would have taken significant analytics and engineering time.

As a result, the team previously had to rely on broad onboarding emails and CRM-level metrics like opens and clicks, without a reliable way to connect an engagement campaign to whether trial subscribers stayed on past their offer.

The solution

Using Subsets, the team first identified a high-risk audience of low-engagement trial subscribers: readers around five to six months into a low-cost introductory offer. They then sent this audience an email inviting them to put their questions to Inquirer reporters through Curious Philly, the newsroom's "You ask. We answer." feature.

Each subscriber received a version of the email personalized based on where they live: Philly, Cherry Hill, Lower Merion or Greater Media. Each version had its own illustrated header naming the subscriber's area, local example questions, and an "Ask us" button. The suburban versions also invited readers to sign up for their local Inquirer newsletter.

See examples of the campaign below.

Using Subsets, the team could:

• Identify subscribers at risk early in their subscription, rather than waiting for cancellations at the end of the introductory offer
• Test the campaign against a control group, so any change in behavior could be attributed to the email itself
• Track retention as well as engagement, rather than judging the campaign on opens and clicks alone

For low-engagement trial subscribers, the campaign lifted pageviews by 10.5% and retention by +6.8 percentage points compared to the control group. Two elements stood out:

• Inviting subscribers to ask a question gave them a reason to engage - rather than asking them to read more, the email invited them into a conversation with the newsroom and showed what Inquirer journalists do for their community
• Regional personalization made the email feel local - a compelling header naming the subscriber's own area, paired with local example questions, made a broad newsroom feature feel relevant to each reader

Using Subsets, the team could see that a single, well-targeted email was enough to move retention for one of its hardest-to-reach audiences, and could act on that result with confidence.