MarketingSherpa Video Archive

Content Optimization: Reduce redundancy, improve relevance and increase engagement

Diana Primeau, CNET, and Tony Doty, MECLABS



When Diana Primeau, Director of Member, CNET, and her team viewed CNET’s newsletter portfolio they saw a successful program with strong performance metrics.

However, at a deeper level, Primeau began to discover CNET’s extensive 26-newsletter program was not serving customers in the best way possible. Some newsletters were no longer relevant to the audience, some were redundant, and some included sections that didn’t engage the audience at all.

This meant, for Primeau's team as well as the editorial team at CNET, thework spent preparing this large library of newsletter content was not paying off. Primeau wanted to find a way to provide value without bombarding the CNET audience with unwanted emails.

"Maybe you’re saying, 'Newsletters, why should I care?' You have to remember, we drive all these clicks back to the site. Again, we're providing value to our users, giving people content where they want it, how they want it," Primeau said.

Primeau’s four-step process for revamping CNET's newsletters was to:
  1. Take a deep dive and set up criteria to assess the entire newsletter portfolio to find what can be deleted or consolidated

  2. Communicate to stakeholders what the process was and why it was happening

  3. Implement the changes

  4. Create a customer communication plan

In the end, Primeau achieved a 3.32% increase in open rate, a 7.62% increase in clickthrough rate, and saw less than a 5% drop in subscribers.

Watch the video replay from Optimization Summit 2013 to learn more about Primeau’s efforts and her top takeaways you can apply to your own content optimization efforts.

Download the slides to this presentation

Related Resources

Web Optimization Summit 2014 — May 21-23, New York City

Email Marketing: How CNET re-engaged inactive subscribers

Win-back Campaigns and List Cleansing: How CNET re-engaged 8% of its email list

Email Marketing: CNET increases engagement by cutting nearly half of newsletter portfolio