Case Study: Fastest Growing Food Content Publisher Eliminates ESP Bill and Boosts Revenue With Native Ads

The Publisher

Spanfeller Media Group (SMG) is a fast growth media company, headed up by Jim Spanfeller, former CEO of Forbes. The Daily Meal (TDM) was the first site launched by SMG in the early months of 2011. Since then it has proven to be one of the fastest growing content sites ever and the fastest growing site within the food sphere.

The Situation

As an online publisher that is constantly producing content for distribution, The Daily Meal was manually compiling newsletters several times per day to distribute to their subscribers. This was time-consuming, resource intensive, and the furthest thing from automated. There was also no monetization effort in place which left TDM feeling like they were leaving money on the table every single day. Jim Spanfeller created an in-house solution--he assembled two teams: one team to search for automation options for their daily email distribution, and another team to look into monetization opportunities. Little did he know that they could find solutions to both at Gold Lasso. 

The Solution

Gold Lasso’s AnnounceCast Send allows you to automate and monetize your email newsletters and send with a powerful enterprise-level platform without an ESP bill. Here’s how we did it.

Template Design & Automation

First we created a simple, easy-to-use template that could be used in conjunction with The Daily Meal’s RSS Feed, which is updated several times throughout the day. Using the AnnounceCast Send platform, we created an RSS-to-Email campaign that was set to automatically pull the RSS feed into the template and send each time the feed is updated with new articles.

Monetization

We added two unique native ad units that were customized to the look and feel of the new template -- including color scheme, fonts, and image sizes. There is also a content recommendation strip at the bowwwttom of the email. We also recommended an interstitial ad unit on The Daily Meal’s website that is triggered when a subscriber clicks on links within the newsletter to read a story. The interstitial unit is a lightbox showing the subscriber that they are still on The Daily Meal’s website with a headline of The Daily Meal inviting them to review a targeted offer. Subscribers can simply click the “No Thanks” button on the offer or wait 10 seconds for it to disappear.

The Conclusion

Combining forces with Gold Lasso, Spanfeller was able to maximize its growth in a most efficient way. While Gold Lasso adopted the tasks of automating and monetizing email newsletters, Spanfeller was able to focus its in-house efforts on other projects. “We don't pay for email automation and we monetize our newsletters in cutting edge ways. Gold Lasso has been and continues to be a great partner,” says Jim Spanfeller, President of Spanfeller Media Group. This verifies the importance of an outside source bringing in new concepts and approaches to create an overall increase in subscriber satisfaction and an increase in profits.

Click here to download Gold Lasso's "Email Monetization Playbook," the definitive guide for publishers -- offering more than 150 tips for optimizing email monetization with concrete examples, illustrations, and pitfalls to avoid.