As consumers have moved increasingly to online news consumption and have many more options available, print publishers have seen their revenue plummet. For many, it’s been tough to adapt to a digital strategy that actually works. Paywalls have been mostly a disaster, driving subscribers away toward the abundance of free content. Display ads and sponsored content have helped, but direct-selling programs are labor-intensive and costly, making them entirely out of reach for thousands of small, niche publishers.
Using an ad network to auto-fill inventory has been somewhat successful, but these rely heavily on cookies for audience targeting, creating four huge roadblocks. First, cookies have never been very accurate. They’re device-specific, so they can’t distinguish between multiple users on a shared device (a tablet used by several household members, for example), meaning the data they gather is murky and inaccurate. Cookies also can’t follow users from one device to another. The cookie trail is lost if a user switches from a laptop to a mobile phone.
Second, cookies aren’t opt-in. Until recently, cookies have tracked users entirely without their consent and, most often, without their knowledge, raising privacy concerns. Third, ad blockers and private browsing have put the kibosh on cookie-based tracking, as media reports about how companies are using—or misusing, as the case may be—audience data have eroded trust, making users increasingly suspicious and uncomfortable. Finally, the recent ban on third-party cookies by all major browsers has pretty much rendered ad network cookies null and void.
Meanwhile, publishers have also struggled to take advantage of social networks to drive revenue—or perhaps more accurately, social networks have taken advantage of publishers. These platforms have stolen away a huge share of ad spend and pushed publishers’ content off the newsfeed, robbing publishers of the opportunity to get in front of their audience.
The final blow is that social traffic is 100% referral traffic, which means if a user does click through to a publisher’s site, the publisher has zero access to user data. Because they can’t get to know those referral visitors, it’s impossible to learn their interests and use that knowledge to serve up more of what they like to keep them engaged and coming back.
So, what’s a publisher to do? To adapt to this new reality, publishers must take more control of their audience relationships and build a stronger one-to-one connection instead of relying on third parties. Here’s how to get started with a three-step digital strategy that puts publishers at the helm and drives new revenue.
Step 1: Own Your Audience
Own your audience. Rather than relying on third parties like cookies and social channels, focus on building your subscriber base through signups for your email newsletters. Because people rarely share an email address, and it’s the same across every device, email is a more accurate and effective unique identifier than cookies. And unlike social channels, you can interact with users directly over email, cutting out the middleman.
With this direct engagement, you can build a more complete picture of what users want by tracking their behavior and learning their interests, even across devices and channels. And, because email is fully opt-in, users have automatically permitted you to understand their behavior, so there’s a much higher level of trust.
Step 2: Leverage Owned Channels Over Third-Party Channels
Use direct channels like email and push notifications to engage subscribers as much as possible instead of social and search. Again, with social media and search, you’re letting a third party (3P) control your audience relationship. These gatekeepers dominate the ad revenue and user data, making it impossible for you to learn about their likes and interests. Shifting your focus toward the channels you control means you also control the user data.
Step 3: Send Relevant, Customized Content
Now that you know more about what each subscriber wants, you can leverage those channels to send personalized content to each individual. Instead of a batch-and-blast, one-size-fits-all email or message that goes to every subscriber, customized content has proven to be far more effective for engaging subscribers and cultivating a lasting relationship.
For GoGy Games, an online gaming platform, sending custom push notifications has been a big part of their successful engagement strategy.
The ability to send the right message and most relevant notification to each user is very important. They’re looking for something personalized, and the popularity of the game is also very important. They want to play what everyone’s playing and that alone has helped drive click-thru rates up substantially.
Tal Hen, GoGy Owner
This customized content strategy has already been used by publishers like GoGy, Assembly, Salem Web Network, Dysplay, and Farmers’ Almanac to:
- Deliver over 2 billion notifications a month
- Drive a 25% lift in traffic
- Drive a 40% increase in pageviews
- Drive a 35% increase in revenue.
While the strategy has proven effective, you might be wondering:
Who has the time and resources to send personalized emails and push notifications to hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers?
That’s where automation comes in. The Jeeng platform offers a simple, automated solution to send subscribers personalized push and email alerts with zero hands-on effort. Jeeng’s machine learning technology, built specifically for publishers, learns user preferences and online behavior to serve up highly relevant, customized, and targeted notifications that drive user engagement.
In addition to providing a fully automated solution, including the ability to schedule notifications to optimize engagement, Jeeng even allows publishers to monetize their push and email sends to add revenue streams. With Jeeng’s revenue sharing model, publishers can add this powerful automated engagement solution with zero up-front costs.
By building a personalized content distribution strategy leveraging channels that allow publishers to own the audience relationship, publishers can drive more traffic—and higher-quality traffic—back to their own pages, therefore driving higher revenue. Learning what your audience likes is absolutely critical in this process, and you simply can’t do that when you’re relying on third-party referral channels. Taking control of that relationship with owned channels is the best way to build a digital strategy that grows your audience and revenue.
To learn how the fully automated Jeeng can help:
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