How Morning Brew powers their multi-million dollar media empire with Hightouch

Results

Drove increased acquisition and retention

• Increased email engagement to reduce churn and improve deliverability
• Reduced CAC and improved ROAS across all channels via better audience targeting
• Improved attribution by taking advantage of ad platform conversion APIs
• Supported an entirely new revenue stream via on-site personalization

Challenge

As a media company, a large portion of Morning Brew’s revenue comes directly from advertising and sponsorships across the company's many newsletters. The marketing team has two core goals: reducing churn and acquiring new subscribers. Their focus is on converting high-quality individuals who will remain engaged, rather than simply increasing subscriber numbers.

To maintain high email deliverability and domain reputation the marketing team does two things: first, they ensure they are sending emails only to engaged users and second, they make sure all promotional emails are highly relevant to each customer.

To build their subscriber base, their advertising team needs to acquire users efficiently. They aim to achieve this by improving ad targeting and suppression strategies, and by focusing on lookalike audiences with the goal of maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS) and decreasing customer acquisition cost (CAC). Additionally, they strive to convert those engaging with Morning Brew’s channels into newsletter subscribers to add more high-engagement individuals to their email list.

The problem was that the marketing team lacked the ability to activate user data and audience-building capabilities to unlock the personalization and targeting needed for their marketing campaigns. Anytime the team wanted to send a marketing email or launch a new advertising campaign, they had to pull a manual CSV of the needed data. Morning Brew's legacy process meant they spent time at the start of each new campaign pulling CSVs rather than working on high-impact tasks. This manual process prevented the team from being agile with their data and limited their ability to react quickly to audience trends and campaign performance.

Solution

Morning Brew’s business is built on personalization and relevancy—engaging users across channels with relevant content. To do this, the marketing team knew they needed a solution that would give them immediate access to all their customer data so they could:

• Eliminate IT bottlenecks and manual CSV processes
• Unlock faster campaign velocity
• Build richer audiences for campaign targeting

Because all of Morning Brew’s data resides in Snowflake, they wanted a solution that integrated with their existing infrastructure. This need ultimately led them to implement Hightouch.

What is Hightouch

Hightouch is a Composable Customer Data Platform with a full suite of products to allow you to build audiences, create customer journeys, rapidly experiment, and optimize campaigns with AI all directly from your existing data warehouse (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, etc).

How a Composable CDP Works

The “composable” approach is the modern version of legacy Customer Data Platforms like Segment and Salesforce Data Cloud. This approach unlocks four main benefits for marketers:

1. Flexibility:

• Traditional CDPs are limited to basic customer data like users and events.
• Composable CDPs allow you to access any data like data science models, product catalogs, accounts, reservations, and more.

2. Single-Source of Truth:

• Traditional CDPs force you to duplicate your data to their system leading to double the cost, long implementations, and multiple slightly different sources of Truth.
• Composable CDPs allow you to sync data directly from wherever your data lives today meaning it is more secure and you have one source of truth

3. Fast Implementation:

• Traditional CDPs require a huge technical lift to set up. You must integrate your existing data manually and conform to their rigid structures.
• Composable CDPs allow you to start syncing data immediately from where it lives today. With Hightouch it's so fast that you will have your first use case live before you sign a contract.

4. Closed-Loop Analytics:

• Traditional CDPs have limited analytics solutions causing marketers to struggle to easily piece together insights on their campaigns from disparate sources.
• Hightouch provides highly-flexible campaign analytics allowing you to tie performance to business metrics and explore using any trait, audience, or custom parameter.

Outcomes

1. Optimizing churn flow for high email deliverability

Morning Brew relies on their emails to be delivered to their users; without that, their main revenue source would be gone. The one major impact on email deliverability is the sender's reputation, which can be affected by sending too many emails to low-engaged subscribers. Because email deliverability is critical for Morning Brew, they set up a churn flow to send a series of emails educating the user on the value of the newsletter they subscribe to, then confirm they will be removed from the list, purging or reviving those low-engagement users. Previously, the churn process relied exclusively on engagement data housed within their ESP and could not account for subscriber metadata.

With Hightouch, all engagement data and metadata are automatically sent to their email tools. This automation allows them to utilize more than just newsletter engagement signals in their churn flows, helping to nurture high-value subscribers, improve engagement, and maintain high deliverability scores.

2. Powering hundreds of audience segments across paid media

Morning Brew's paid media strategy focuses on suppressing existing subscribers on Facebook and LinkedIn to optimize ad spend but preventing retargeting someone who has already subscribed. However, they wanted to send conversion data of new subscribers via the platforms’ conversion APIs to optimize campaign attribution, help train the algorithms to find high-quality people similar to those who converted, and launch new experiments targeting different audiences. This wasn’t possible due to the time it would take to build the audience segments and manually upload the data into the platforms.

Since implementing Hightouch, Morning Brew now has access to all their customer data, enabling them to send conversion events and build segments based on attributes such as job title, industry, and engagement data. They’ve expanded from suppressing subscribers to creating hundreds of customer segments for testing new strategies.

3. New revenue stream from on-site personalization

Morning Brew's newsletter isn't the only place where millions of people consume their content. The website attracts millions of visitors each month, presenting an opportunity to generate additional revenue by displaying partner advertisements and promoting paid events.

With access to any data point and the ability to build any audience, Morning Brew powers dynamic on-site personalization. They leverage engagement data from other channels to encourage visitors to sign up for paid events or other newsletters of interest. This capability has unlocked a new channel for Morning Brew to monetize their first-party data, providing more opportunities for partners and increased relevance for users.

What’s next

Morning Brew is leveraging Hightouch to continue experimenting with email targeting, creating more customer segments to optimize their ad campaigns, improving their churn flow, enhancing their deliverability, and driving high-quality growth. With complete access to their customer data, they are unlocking new revenue streams by monetizing their first-party data offerings to advertisers.