Google Analytics, MailChimp and a little bit of magic
You might wonder what do Google Analytics, MailChimp and some magic have in common. They are all highly involved in our first (super) success story for one of our clients, a financial news website.
We have boosted the number of email subscribers from 2 or 3 a day to 30 in average, gaining more than 1200 double opt-in email subscribers in a little bit more than a month.
We are talking about subscribers to a daily newsletter with financial information. No impact whatsoever in the un-subscribed rate. 
Starting with Google Analytics
It all started with the client saying that all their campaigns of increasing the number of newsletter subscribers only got them volumes but low quality which meant a negative ROI at the end of the month (really high delivery costs and very low open rate).
The subscribers that were gained naturally (not a result of a special campaign) were of really good quality: their behavior on the website was way above average.
We started by identifying the profile of visitors who subscribe to the website using a form presented in the sidebar bellow the fold. Not a very difficult task for Google Analytics, right? We created a segment for all the visitors who subscribe to the newsletter and tried to figure out what data stands out for them (we looked for data for the whole 2009).
The conclusion: most of the subscribers were new visitors and almost all of them viewed at least 4 pages before subscribing. The next thing was to create a segment and see how many of the website visitors are new and visit at least 4 pages in one session. The red highlighted area in the below chart is where we believed a little gold mine was waiting.
Before running the real time behavior targeting campaign
Using MailChimp and their great API
By now I guess that everybody in web marketing knows who MailChimp is, right? Just in case you don’t, they are a super cool platform used for newsletter or email marketing delivery. Our client was using a local solution but at much, much higher costs per delivery so it wasn’t difficult to convince them to change to MailChimp when showing them the cost benefits.
Why were we so pushing towards MailChimp? Basically because of their great API as we intended to use in order to increase the number of subscribers.
That’s where the magic comes in place
You probably already guessed by now that the plan was to use some real time behavior targeting. Well, maybe you didn’t guess, but yes… that’s what we did.
Using an in-house software we have been secretly working on (not so secret now, is it) we were asking all the new visitors seeing more than 4 pages on our client website to subscribe to the newsletter. We used an overlay window, presenting a friendly message and the form for subscribing. That’s where the MailChimp API came into place as it allowed to subscribe the users directly into the newsletter list managed by our client.
During the real time behavior targeting campaign.
Nice results, aren’t they? 9-12% conversion rate.
All of the above without doing any modifications to the website. Everything was managed from within our software, including the newsletter subscribing process on the MailChimp platform. Since we have started the campaign we have customized the targeted segment from 4 viewed pages to 5, or from new visitors to returning ones only, but the segment definition that offered us best results was new visitors seeing more than 4 pages.
What segment would you be interested in using? Have you ever give it a thought to such an approach for your website?
Being so excited by this campaign results I just realized that this is the first blogpost from this year and I forgot to say Happy 2010! I wish to everyone daring dreams and a great year from all possible and impossible points of view.
4 Comments
Maybe you can put the code to implement the popup with Mailchimp API, the real interet power is sharing acknowledge…
Thanks in advance
Hi Miguel and thanks for your message. Actually you are not the first one to bring this up so we are kind of thinking on how to make it available to more people.
I am sure we will come up with a solution, so stay close by.