How do you increase engagement and re-engage the audience that has stopped listening?

News headlines, social media updates, newsletters, emails, whatsapp, text messages – and that’s before you even get up in the morning! The sheer volume of content that’s demanding our attention these days is phenomenal. So it’s no wonder publishers and media companies have to fight to get their voices heard and their words read.

Engagement is the holy grail in publishing. Ensuring you have a loyal band of followers who read your pages, interact with your website, listen to your podcasts and open newsletters is key to success. The more engaged your audience is, and being able to measure and prove that, ensures your proposition for advertisers is a valuable one. But engendering that customer loyalty and understanding and gauging engagement isn’t easy. Where do you start? And how can you start to re-engage customers who have gone cold?

• Understanding your audience: getting a true picture of your readership is the best place to start. An audience management system to collate and analyse data such as their job, location, salary bracket, spending habits and reading and viewing habits will give you eagle eye insight into your audience. In the case of a men’s fitness magazine – what sport are they into? How often do they exercise? And what products do they consume? This all helps to build a picture and will feed into activities you can do to improve engagement levels.
• Insight: analysing data from your website (page visits etc.), from email campaigns, from social media – stats such as click throughs, bounce backs, open rates, likes, shares, retweets etc – together, this data will help build the behavioural picture of what your audience does when they’re engaging with you. This behavioural picture integrated with the audience information, starts to build a three dimensional picture and you can use this insight to improve engagement.
• Targeted content: is vital for improving engagement. Understanding what sections of the newspaper, magazine or website interest a reader – holidays, fashion, business – means you can aggregate the content that interests them. Offers link in to this too – giving readers an incentive that appeals to them has been proven to impact engagement levels.
• Readers at risk: audience management can also help publishers detect readers and subscribers who might not have engaged with the content for a while. If this is the case, the system can post a red flag to alert the subscription team that this audience member is at risk of not renewing their subscription. The team can contact these readers to find out why they have dis-engaged and work with the marketing team to find ways to re-engage the readers who have lost touch.
• Engaging CRM to improve engagement: there is no one answer to the engagement conundrum, but CRM is a great place to start. A single platform, which pulls together all the strands of the publishing business, will help you to get a handle on your audience, how engaged they are and give you the insight you need to act on it and put in place procedures to improve engagement or reverse any negative trend.

To learn more about how CRM can help you manage your audience, read our white paper How media and publishing companies can improve audience management or contact one of our team on:0118 3030 100  www.workbooks.com

Download the Whitepaper