Background
The Dallas Morning News is a print and digital publication serving the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas. Founded in 1885, today, it has one of the largest circulations in Texas with a social media audience of 1.5M and an online audience of 1.8M.
Mission
The mission of Dallas Morning News’ engagement was twofold 1) to modernize and transform an organization with Pushly’s digital tools and 2) to increase profitability via subscriptions and ad revenue, utilizing Pushly as a new marketing channel.
Implementation
Once Pushly was integrated with the website, it gave Dallas Morning News’ readers a choice to opt-in to receive web push notifications on topics of interest to them. Pushly’s notifications were displayed in users’ web browsers, enabling them to click on those notifications and arrive directly to the publisher’s site.
As Pushly collected reader behavior data, it further segmented them, fine-tuning notifications and bringing the readers back to the site with new content. Further, Pushly’s AI technology was able to choose topics to show to the users that are similar to the ones that brought them to the website, showcasing more of the publisher’s content and keeping the readers on the website longer.
Results
Increased quality of traffic. In the words of the Dallas Morning News, the digital publication would rather receive 10K sessions from Pushly than 100K from Facebook. That’s because users who visit the website via Pushly are genuinely interested in the topics covered.
Deeper engagement. Pushly-driven visitors tend to explore pages beyond the first click. Once they land on the website, they visit other pages with similar topics, spending more time on the publisher’s website.
Increased loyalty. The first-party connection promotes brand loyalty because the relationship is built between the user and the website. Furthermore, the readers now trust the website to deliver content relevant to them and come back to it for new content.
Better CPMs for advertisers. Pushly’s ability to perform high-level audience segmentation leads to better ad targeting. Advertisers advertise on the publisher’s site because they see better CMPs from well-segmented traffic.
“We really started it just as a test. When we saw the results, we were shocked — in a good way. We added many more users than we expected, and then started strategizing about how to use the tool for more than just daily breaking-news alerts — and how to spread this tool beyond the newsroom’s Audience team.” -Mark Francescutti, Director of Digital Marketing Operations and Engagement.
Bottom line
With the implementation of Pushly, The Dallas Morning News has been able to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time in the right manner. As a result, Dallas Morning News has been able to increase the quality of its readership, fostering deeper connections with its readers. A loyal audience means higher subscription revenue. In addition to the higher subscription rates, having a loyal audience allowed the publisher to generate reliable ad revenue, achieving the goals the website had for using Pushly as an additional marketing channel.