Integrate Direct Mail for a Winning Winback Campaign
The Motley Fool is a financial publishing company that provides business and investing advice to DIY investors. The company also offers several premium services, and Stock Advisor is their entry-level subscription product. Many people who sign up for Stock Advisor go on to purchase The Motley Fool’s other premium services, so Stock Advisor members have huge lifetime value potential.
Because The Motley Fool has a generous trial period for their Stock Advisor service, there are always memberships that lapse, creating thousands of monthly winback opportunities. Email campaigns alone weren’t moving the needle, so the Fool reached out to us for help integrating direct mail into their digital strategy.
Stock Advisor members receive two stock recommendations each month. Historically, even the Fool’s average picks have tripled the S&P 500 over the last 13 years. We decided to highlight the missed opportunities of not taking Stock Advisor’s proven financial advice by showing the stock performance for the top three recommendations each member received over the course of their subscription. Regret can be a powerful motivator. If only they’d kept their subscription and followed the Fool’s advice …
Members’ overall stock picks vary based on the month they joined Stock Advisor and when their subscriptions lapsed, so everyone’s top performing stocks are different. We wrote an algorithm to pull in the current performance for all possible stock picks to calculate the percentage by which each was beating the S&P 500. We highlighted this relevant (and compelling) data across direct mail, email, and online for a cohesive campaign.
The best part? The entire process was automated. Using APIs to feed the lapsed customer data from The Motley Fool to our system, we were able to send weekly winback campaigns easily and efficiently. The results speak for themselves. The new self-mailer outperformed the control by 16%. And with 25k winback opportunities each month, that’s another 4,000 subscribers!