• by Jess Nelson , September 6, 2016

Fans 1st Media grew its email list from zero to 400,000 subscribers in under a year after partnering with PostUp for its email marketing automation services.

Founded by Cox Media Group, Fans 1st Media is a portfolio of news sites tailored to particular interests, such as sports or finance.  One of the company’s sites, Rare.us, leverages social media to deliver national news to American readers. 

“Ninety-nine percent of our leads were coming from Facebook at the time, and we really wanted to diversify our product,” says Scott Markle, senior director of audience and business development for Fans 1st Media.

Rare America has over 1 million fans on Facebook, but Fans 1st Media wanted to build a more direct relationship with its readers outside of social media. To grow its revenue model, the company turned to email as the channel with the highest return on investment per dollar spent.

Markle had previously worked with Salesforce’s ExactTarget and investigated MailChimp during his search for email partners, but he says he was drawn to PostUp for its automation and full-service capabilities.  

“We’re a small team and everyone wears a lot of hats so we could only devote a little bit of attention to email marketing,” says Markle. PostUp, he says, became an extension of his marketing team by augmenting in-house resources.

Buying an email list to begin with was out of the question, and Markle advises against this tactic, citing its ineffectiveness. The bought subscribers are “much less likely to click -- it's just not worth it,” he says. “The people who are already fans of our content are the most engaged and will provide the most value over time.”

Fans 1st Media worked with PostUp to develop an on-site targeting campaign to recruit email subscribers, leveraging A/B testing to analyze how different messages would engage with subscribers in different ways.

Markle says Rare.us has just under 400,000 email subscribers now, almost exactly a year to date from when the company first began working with PostUp.

Although the company’s leads are still primarily driven by social media, Markle says that 20% now come from outside sources including email. Markle confirms that Fans 1st Media has already been able to see a correlation between email marketing and increases in engagement and revenue.

“It’s not a significant source of revenue yet, but it’s a nice bonus and we’re continuing to see it grow,” says Markle.