Building an engagement and retention-first strategy for an Italian media group

An Italian media group had experienced significant subscriber growth during the pandemic, and were keen to retain their new readers in order to achieve their long-term subscriber goals. They asked us to “help build an engagement-first organisation that thrives at understanding, engaging and retaining its subscribers”.

Our engagement consisted of three parts. Firstly, we conducted a diagnostic where we evaluated and benchmarked our client’s existing performance, looking at how they engaged and retained their subscribers. Alongside this, we explored best practices and recommendations from experts within the Financial Times, so that the client could think proactively about how they could measure value and score their customer engagement.

During the strategy phase, we hosted a series of workshops and consulting sessions in order to co-develop a retention-oriented North Star strategy. This included a detailed methodology of outcomes, hypotheses and experiments, so the client knew exactly how to get to their goal.

In the final implementation phase, we established best-in-class data practices to measure RFV (the Financial Times’ engagement metric), implemented a propensity model and a content recommendation engine. Alongside this, we created a bespoke strategy for increasing customer engagement and actionable steps so that the client could reduce involuntary churn as a result of payment failure.

• Provided an ambitious North Star goal with buy-in across the company
• Provided a best-in-class roadmap for marketing and data-related capabilities across technology, people and internal processes
• Inspired the Newsroom to become audience and engagement focused, with measurable targets for reaching engagement goals