MLive Media Increases Digital Revenue by 39%

The 'My Michigan' program offers cultural experiences throughout the state of Michigan to MLive Media subscribers, building loyalty, engagement, and exceeding all goals.

Paraphrased from Rebecca DuShane, Marketing Team Lead at MLive Media Group, 08/13/2015

Faced with a diminishing print subscription audience, MLive Media Group, in partnership with Advanced Central Services — Michigan, decided to find innovative solutions that would help them add value to their subscriber base while at the same time attracting new subscribers.

This required multi-channel promotional efforts as well as extensive transparent communication with the media company's existing subscribers.

All departments needed to be aligned from circulation and distribution to editorial, marketing, and sales in order to turn things around. A company-wide passion for supporting growth in Michigan, led to the development of the 'My Michigan' membership program.

Our task: 'My Michigan' is a Michigan-loving, members-only benefits program available exclusively to MLive Media Group's subscribers. It features cultural experiences and offers from Michigan’s most cherished destinations and organizations, as well as exclusive editorial content and experiences.

The 'My Michigan' initiatives included increasing the value of relationships with partners and subscribers, building loyalty and engagement, improving subscriber retention opportunities, and increasing subscriber acquisition.

This program allowed MLive Media Group to augment first-party data resources and they were able to meet the needs of both existing and future subscribers with targeted content and benefits, while also growing future sales growth and revenue opportunities.

The experience: To ensure that the needs of current and future subscribers were met, MLive Media Group built their membership site to be fully responsive regardless of device (smartphones, tablets, laptop, etc.).

Additionally, they worked to make the membership site a one-stop-shop for all subscribers, offering account management functionality, benefit information, and more. They also provided subscribers with exclusive access to their daily digital edition content platform.

Choosing to keep their news portal website, MLive.com, open access means MLive Media Group had to look for other ways to offer members exclusive content in the fastest of growing platforms (both digital and mobile).

With this in mind, MLive Media Group offered subscribers exclusive content on their digital edition platform and certain membership content-benefits, such as their Amplified music series.

Results:

• 2014's actual revenue exceeded their budget goal by 1.5%.
• Digital revenue increased 39% from 2013.
• Promotional expenses were under budget by 22%.
• Digital and email starts increased by 71% from 2013.