Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities. Here’s our latest installment:
Best Digital Classified Innovation (circulation 75,000 – 250,000): PalmBeachPost.com
Entry submitted by:Dan Shorter
General Manager
PalmBeachPost.com
What’s the easiest and cheapest way to add about $250,000 in annual classified revenue?
Answer: Create an automated e-mail system which notifies customers when their ads are about to expire, offers a discount to keep their business and allows them to go online to renew themselves or click a button to be direct-connected to the phone center to renew – and maybe place another ad.
PBNotify is a program which scans our customer classified ad database each day, searching for listings about to expire and then e-mails the customers with the text of their ad as well as ways to renew the ad.
We developed an automated system because our call center reps couldn’t make all the renewal calls.We were leaving money on the table because we didn’t have time.
So we used computers and e-mail. Our goals were to create an easy-to-use program that would allow us the most flexibility and make it possible to reach out to each type of customer with a different message.
For example, we send different and appropriate messages to real estate, autos, merchandise and recruitment customers with category-specific instructions on how to renew their ads.
Our main challenges were to contact as many of our customers as possible, keep the system simple so it could be easily expanded to include our sister publications, make sure we did not contact those customers that did not want to be contacted and try to track the results of this new campaign as much as possible.
Our team spent many hours working on the requirements documents needed to build the program to ensure all our criteria were met and that the program would serve our needs for several years.
With the requirements complete, our in-house programmer took the spec and had the program available for testing in December 2006.
Since PBNotify’s launch in early January 2007 we have sent out over 30,000 renewal notification emails to customers and received a response rate of at least 5 percent. (We say “at least 5” percent because we are unable to track customers that dial into our Call Center to renew their ads when receiving the renewal notification. This is our response rate without including these customers.)
Our online classified ad placement system alone has seen over 600 new renewal ads since the launch of PBNotify. These 600 ads account for $60,000 that may not have been realized without PBNotify.
Since our online system accounts for about 25 percent of our ads, we estimate the call center will receive triple the number of renewals this year – or more than 1,800 ads for $180,000+.
We included several items in the notification e-mails to make it easy and intuitive for the customer to renew their ads:
• An image of their ad and all the specific ad information to help the customer remember which ad they need to renew (since some customers have multiple ads).
• An eStara link which when clicked will connect the customer directly to the correct call center sales team to renew their ad.
• A link which directs the customer to our online ad placement site where they can renew their ad 24 hours a day.
We believe because of its financial impact as well as making it easier for our customers to renew ads that PBNotify is worthy of a Media Innovation Award.
The project was led by Tim Wambach with programming by Dale Swaim and with overall plan management by Gina Wilcox and Dan Shorter.