A Fortune 500 media company wanted to measure audience involvement to gauge interest in content and support a business case for new digital and print products for a daily newspaper.

Media companies, like many content providers, have access to more and more data from and about their audience. The problem is gathering data, sometimes from sources the company doesn’t know about, quantifying the data, integrating diverse data sources and metrics, and then leveraging the data to make sound business decisions.

I analysed data from email newsletters (clicks, opens, social shares), web searches (web analytics, website entry pages, high page views), incorporated customer feedback and insights from focus groups to identify relevant data spikes that could provide fertile new content areas for both digital and print platforms.

My team built a new email newsletter and a podcast, both aimed at customers who wanted entertainment and people-related stories, photos and exclusives. For the email, we tested various designs, which resulted in a series of templates, all visually rich and photo-heavy. The result was an email newsletter that quickly gained many thousands of subscribers, with open rates higher than our benchmarks, and incremental revenues from subscriptions, targeted advertising in the email and paid content links, as well as a new podcast that addressed a heretofore unrecognized audience. The data also resulted in a range of metrics and recommendations for print, advertising and other content activity.