Recipes for success

Increasing customer engagement is at the heart of everything we do here at Abacus. Whether that’s finding ways to generate more traffic on a website, growing subscription sales, providing advertisers with better audience and response or developing and launching brand new products and services, success relies on building a strong relationship with the consumer.

So we spend a lot of time thinking about how to develop customer engagement. Fundamental to our approach is to see this as an ongoing process – the engagement stairway. Moving customers up this stairway is key to delivering any of these business goals. For most clients that starts on the bottom step with anonymous users – people who know about and even consume your product or service but who are unknown to you. Generally, these users represent the top of any conversion funnel – they’re your growth potential. Read more about our recipes...

Our list of recipes

Anonymous users

Grow audience

Turn anonymous into registered users

  1. Search engine Optimisation - Best practice when using Webvision Cloud–› 
  2. Metered gating –› 
  3. Use gating to encourage anonymous users to register –› 

Anonymous users

Increase conversion

Capture incremental data in exchange for content

  1. Progressive profiling 

Registered users

Increase engagement

Maximise registered user engagement

  1. Welcome campaign 
  2. Increasing engagement by targeting suitable content –› 
  3. Use gating to encourage anonymous users to subscribe –› 
  4. Virtual events for a stay-at-home audience –› 
  5. Deliver a relevant experience with personalised content –› 

Engaged users

Increase ad revenue

Improve yields with targeted display advertising

  1. Create vertical channels to deliver high-yield –› 

Diversify ad revenue through creative marketing solutions

  1. Sponsored microsites –› 
  2. Native advertising –› 
  3. Lead Generation 

Qualified prospect

Increase conversion

Turn engaged users into paying customers with a free trial

  1. Metered sampling of existing paid product using free trials –› 

Subscriber

Reduce churn

Maximise customer value and subscription usage with a proactive messaging strategy

  1. Delayed recurring payment trials 
  2. Segmented emails 

Subscriber

Reduce churn

Optimise renewal rates with intelligent engagement-driven campaigns

  1. Engagement-based renewal offers –› 

Subscriber

Reduce churn

Engage lapsed customers with an intelligent re-engagement campaign

  1. Campaign Monitor integration 

Retained subscriber

Increase subscription revenue

Maximise the yield/value of paying subscribers

  1. Add on products (e.g. reports) 
  2. Incremental upsell (e.g. Silver to Gold) –› 

Retained subscriber

Reduce churn

Increase the effectiveness of corporate subscriptions

  1. Corporate self-service module 

Loyal user

Increase subscription revenue

Grow new subscription revenue using an ‘invite a friend’ advocacy campaign

  1. Campaign Monitor integration 

Complete recipes

Annoymous

Grow audience

Ensure your content is easiy found and indexed by search engines

Read our hints and tips to make sure you optimise your site for search engines.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Quality Content
  2. Indexing content
  3. What to avoid
  4. Making changes and 301 redirects
  5. Google search Console and sitemaps
Annoymous

Grow audience

Turn anonymous traffic into valuable registered and known users

A known and qualified audience is highly valuable to your business and your advertisers. It allows you to know who is consuming your product, how different cohorts engage with your product and to sort out which traffic is really meaningful to your business.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Segmented messages
  2. Segmented navigation
  3. Metered access
  4. Gating pages
  5. Registration forms
  6. Welcome new users
  7. Reporting
Anoymous

INCREASE ENGAGEMENT & INCREASE REVENUE

Create and run a commercially successful virtual event for a stay-at-home audience

Virtual events are becoming an increasingly important route to engage with your audience and reduce face-to-face contact as your customers come under pressure not to travel.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Business models
  2. Create event sections or microsites
  3. Event products in ADvance
  4. Gatekeeping and segmentation
  5. Third party providers
  6. Case studies
  7. Leverage data
  8. Ongoing engagement
  9. Measuring success
Qualified

INCREASE ENGAGEMENT

Deliver a relevant experience with the personalised content widget

The personalised content widget is a great way to help build a personal and relevant experience for your users, increasing and maintaining engagement by providing content based on their own individual preferences.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Adding the widget to your site
  2. Setting up capture forms
  3. Creating relevant messaging
  4. Refining the widget
  5. Those little extras
Qualified

INCREASE ENGAGEMENT

Increasing engagement by targeting suitable content

Many websites cater for diverse audiences interested in different types of articles. Promoting the most relevant articles to each segment of your audience will lead to increased engagement.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Ways to collect interest information
  2. Custom attributes for form questions
  3. BI queries based on demographics
  4. Targeting content using filters
  5. GDPR
  6. Examples
Annoymous

Grow audience & Increase conversion

Understand the concepts behind gating models

There are many different gating models supported by Webvision Cloud, and they can be easily amended to fit new requirements or to test and refine changing offerings. This recipe describes the ingredients and method for setting up a simple three-level gating model where different levels of access are granted to anonymous users, registered users and subscribers. Once the principles are understood, the recipe can be adapted to support varied business requirements.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Outline access requirements
  2. Create categories for premium articles
  3. Add premium categories to articles
  4. Create online products in ADvance
  5. Plan access denied messages
  6. Create messages and rules
  7. Test user journey and rules
Qualified

INCREASE AD REVENUE

Create vertical channels to deliver high-yield, context-based advertising for your commercial partners

Subdividing the content of your site with a broader information architecture allows for an increase in advertising inventory and the opportunity to increase rates for access to targetted audiences.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Increase inventory
  2. Correctly tag articles
  3. Target advertising
  4. Viewability and sticky adverts
  5. Create sector-specific newsletters
  6. Popularity of your vertical channels
Qualified

INCREASE AD REVENUE

Build richer commercial relationships using native advertising

Native advertising provides an attractive opportunity for your advertisers and commercial partners to deliver in-depth information about their brand to your audience. By using Webvision Cloud to serve this content the client benefits from the association between brands and you can develop a premium revenue stream.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Commercial propositions
  2. Identify the nature of the content
  3. Get the most out of the content
  4. Client showcase
Qualified

INCREASE CONVERSION

Turn engaged users into paying customers with a free trial

One of the most effective ways to turn engaged users into paying subscribers is to demonstrate the benefits of a subscription. Dynamic free trialing allows you to decide exactly which users get access to the trial and exactly what content is delivered in this way.

By carefully measuring uptake and engagement throughout the trial process you can amend the offer to achieve maximum conversion. Once your customer has committed to a free trial they are on the first step of the customer journey.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Free trial configurations
  2. User journeys
  3. Target audience
  4. Trail product
  5. Data capture form
  6. Marketing messages
  7. Segmentation messaging
  8. Access denied messaging
  9. Engage with your free trialists
  10. Follow-up campaigns
  11. Success reporting
Subscriber

Reduce churn

Optimise renewal rates with intelligent engagement-driven campaigns

The subscriber campaign module within ADvance can be used to create multiple targeted campaigns per product, with automatically triggered messaging tailored specifically to segmented groups of subscribers. The onboarding/engagement/renewal cycle begins on day one of the subscription!

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Onine Products, Product Offers and variants
  2. BI queries to segment renewal audience
  3. Create subscriber campaigns
  4. Subscriber campaign priority
Qualified

Increase subscription revenue

Maximise the yield/value of paying subscribers

Webvision Cloud allows you to package your premium content in multiple ways and to create offers and upsell to existing subscribers. Subscriptions can be offered at different price points. Once subscribed to the simpler product, recipients can be targetted with tailored upgrade offers.

View this recipe

In this recipe you will cover the following:

  1. Tiered packages of premium content
  2. Target audience segments
  3. Defining target silver subscribers
  4. Offers
  5. Access denied messaging
  6. Segmented messaging
  7. Renewal messaging

So the first, critical task is to find out who they are. Many Abacus clients use metering and gating – access control techniques – to move these users towards registration and the second step on the stairway. But getting a user to fill in a registration form is just one part of that process. You also need to develop and effective onboarding strategy to ensure this first contact isn’t the last. Only once a user is onboarded and engaged can you be fully effective in marketing to them – let alone successfully converting this engagement into a sale.

And even once you have made a sale there’s another critical onboarding stage to ensure this valuable new user gets the best from the product or service they’ve paid for. An ongoing programme of value demonstration then becomes essential to ensure you keep their business and create the opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.

Ultimately if you can improve engagement at each step you’ll build brand loyalty. And this leads to the customer taking the final step on the stairway and becoming an active advocate for your services. Not only are these clients your most loyal customers, they are also key to business development opportunities and they’re the most likely to recommend you to new users.

Thinking about the engagement stairway is especially helpful in that it clearly demonstrates each step as a discreet stage in an overall process. Not all users will move through all steps and sometimes they might move backwards for a while. And that’s all fine so long as you’ve got a strategic plan for each step that goes beyond the software and technical components to include a whole raft of elements including marketing and messaging, user research and testing, budgeting and success measurement.

And that’s where our cookbook of Recipes for Success comes in. We’re packaging together a range of step-by-step guides that cover all these elements as well as pointing to relevant instructions and how-to’s already available elsewhere on the help site. There are recipes for every step on the engagement stairway and together they provide a powerful set of tools for your business that will help you get the most from our platforms. Bon appetite!