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June 2, 2003 - Strategy Direct + Interactive
Regular Features

Webbed Feats
Making news profitable
Toronto Life e-mail newsletter uses CRM techniques to pump revenues 12%

by Samson Okalow
page D 3

Like many marketers, Key Media's Toronto Life depends on strong relationships with its customers for survival. So when the magazine decided to turn its year-old e-mail newsletter, Preview, into a bona fide profit centre, it turned to Toronto-based relationship marketing expert Intervision CRM for help. The goal was to make the weekly missive more valuable to readers and advertisers alike, and only one month into the new initiative, the magazine has the numbers to prove it's working.

"In a medium that has the potential to be directly measurable, we weren't taking advantage of that at all," says Jeff Halliday, GM online for Toronto Life. "We knew on a very high level that the newsletter was acceptable - even that some people loved it - but I didn't really understand why."

Preview was previously running on an application service provider (ASP) model in which data management was administered in-house. Halliday says that was OK several years ago, but changes at the magazine's parent company led to each of Key Media's interactive properties reporting to the individual brand's publisher. This meant looking for an out-of-house solution.

"At the scale that we operate at, there's just not the capacity to keep up with the market if we're trying to do it all internally," says Halliday.

The new package is composed of several elements, including what Ian Giles, director of CRM at Intervision, describes as 1:1 ad tracking (designed to evolve the advertising away from banners and buttons to more of a sponsorship or partnership model), regional targeting, e-mail personalization, viral marketing (adding "tell-a-friend" features), and multi-tiered content programs.

"You can now look and see how a customer is using information and understand predisposition to be attracted to your offer," says Giles. "So it's really improving the quality of the leads that you're going after and packing it with a lot of information that would sustain the segmentation of approach in terms of targeting those users."

One of the most intriguing of the new elements, says Giles, is the regional targeting through which Toronto Life plans to tailor both the content and the advertising of the newsletter to fit individual Toronto neighbourhoods. Giles says they're currently in the analytics and research phase.

"What we will be able to do is target that information more to a 'regional' level so that if you live within Cabbagetown or Riverdale, we'll be able to focus information there and then really focus the relationship with advertisers in that area."

It's an ambitious and labour-intensive plan, but Halliday says advertisers are telling him this kind of specificity is what they want. "If we can start offering local versions of the site or local newsletters it's all up," he says.

Already, since switching to the new format, click-through rates for feature content have risen over 13%. That's because measurement allows Halliday to report what kind of content is most popular back to the editors so that the editorial can be adjusted accordingly.

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