The results

The journey stood out as DailyMail+’s top-performing engagement experiment at the time of launch and delivered fast, measurable results:

30-day impact (treatment vs. control group)

• +14% in unique visits
• +13% in breadth of content (distinct sections visited)
• +7% in session depth (sessions with more than 100 seconds of engagement)

“The Subsets Platform has enabled us to plan and execute these retention experiments with speed and accuracy. What once used to take multiple months – from campaign ideation to launch, then analysis – can now be done in very little time. The depth and breadth of the results analysis we can generate from Subsets has been invaluable.”
– Andy Wilson, Head of Retention, DailyMail+

The challenge

Like most media businesses, a key priority of DailyMail+ is to keep subscribers engaged.

Specifically, the DailyMail+ team aimed to proactively re-engage audiences with declining engagement before subscribers became dormant, thereby reducing their churn risk.

Identifying subscribers with declining engagement was challenging. Since behavioral data was not available in the CRM system, the retention team required support from the internal data team to model and add new data, which prevented the retention team from creating segments, setting up experiments, and measuring the impact.

As a consequence, the team would often resort to broader linear journeys and rely on the CRM data, such as open rates and click-through rates, to understand the impact.

The solution

The DailyMail+ implemented Subsets’ AI-driven retention automation platform to support the retention team in becoming autonomous in their retention efforts. Subsets is connected to engagement data and CRM channels, enabling the retention team to utilize AI-generated behavioral audiences, create experiments, and measure the impact across engagement, retention, and CLV metrics.

Detailed case study

The hypothesis

The DailyMail+ team believed the best way to re-engage their at-risk subscribers was through targeting behavioral audiences with personalized journeys. They hypothesized that the decline in engagement was not driven by a loss of interest but by a loss of habitual patterns.

If they could proactively target subscribers in a declining engagement state with a personalized reminder of the DailyMail+ content they used to read, along with other stories readers were most engaged with, they could perhaps re-engage them before it was too late.

The main success metrics they wanted to analyze were unique visits, breadth of content, and deepened engagement, all over a 30-day period. For DailyMail+, they recognize that these engagement metrics, in particular, impact retention, as they directly relate to the habit formation of their readers.

The solution

DailyMail+ used Subsets to identify the target audience, set up the experiment, and manage the full re-engagement journey, without needing support from their product or engineering team. The process was owned entirely by the retention team, and the dynamic audiences were integrated directly from Subsets into their CRM.

1. Identify at-risk behavioral audiences

DailyMail+ uses Subsets to identify behavioral audiences across its paid subscribers to uncover retention, engagement, and upsell opportunities.

One audience that the Subsets platform surfaced to the DailyMail+ team was in-life subscribers with declining engagement over the past weeks.

“Subsets is a hugely intuitive, easy-to-use tool. It is laid out in such a way that anyone can pick it up and understand it within minutes, impressive, given the big data and huge complexity that go into the platform.”
– Andy Wilson, Head of Retention, DailyMail+

2. Orchestrate personalized journeys through CRM

With an audience identified within the Subsets platform, Subsets automatically orchestrates the experimental design and syncs the treatment group to DailyMail+’s CRM.

Because the audience behavior showed declining engagement, DailyMail+ wanted to experiment with re-engagement strategies to learn if they could deepen session times and unique visits.

One of the additional strengths that Subsets brings is that the platform automatically detects behavioral information, such as the top content categories of individual subscribers. This can be used within the audience to personalize content recommendations. Through the CRM, Subsets orchestrated which subscribers to receive specific flows such as “Femail”, “News”, and “Showbiz”.

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3. Automate the results analysis, measuring the exact engagement lift over time

Having already managed the audience segmentation and experimental design, Subsets continues the process by automating the results analysis, ensuring the team can run the entire cycle independently.

Going into the re-engagement experiment, the DailyMail+ team aimed to achieve a lift in unique visits, longer session times, and an increase in breadth of visits.

Subsets tracks the impact across various engagement metrics automatically and also provides the impact over different time windows, such as 7 or 30 days, to provide insights into changes in reader habits, which is the ultimate goal of driving engagement.

“Although speed to launch is a big benefit, the depth and breadth of the results analysis we can generate from the platform have been invaluable. We are aiming to validate a number of campaigns, turn these 'always-on', and let Subsets select the customers for targeting and trigger the campaigns.”
– Andy Wilson, Head of Retention, DailyMail+