• by Sara Guaglione , January 17, 2018

Home design site Apartment Therapy increased its onsite conversion rates by 63% with the use of a digital marketing solutions provider PostUp and its audience development solutions.

Conversions are people who are served newsletter pop-ups and sign up to subscribe, versus people who see the module and opt out.

Combined with cooking site Kitchn, parent company Apartment Therapy Media achieved a 90% increase in new onsite newsletter subscribers since the publisher adopted PostUp's solutions in May 2017, compared to the year prior.

Apartment Therapy also doubled its number of active subscribers -- those  who opened or clicked an Apartment Therapy email  -- in the last 45 days, to 500,000, according to Chris Mainenti, senior manager of the company's email, acquisition and retention.

The average open rate of its newsletters is 40%-50% daily.

Apartment Therapy sought to connect with site visitors through email but had limited resources, Mainenti said. It turned to PostUp to tap into its custom audience development solution.

PostUp’s technology is behind the pop-ups on the sites, each tailored to where the reader lands. When a reader clicks to a real estate page, for example, they are served a chance to sign up for Apartment Therapy’s real estate newsletter.

“We have seen nearly a 70% increase in our engagement since migrating over to PostUp. This can be attributed to our hyper hygiene practices, inbox monitoring, workflow enhancements, A/B testing, advanced reporting and end to end collaboration with our editorial teams,” he said.

Those hygienic practices identify subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked any the site’s emails in the last 45 days and moves them to a separate segment for re-engagement.

Apartment Therapy also experimented with “what words are resonating” in its newsletters, along with layout, images and subject lines used.

Using the word “space” instead of “home,” for example, resulted in more newsletters getting read.

With the testing, “we could get the ultimate pop-up variation that was going to work the best,” Mainenti said.

Emails subscribers are Apartment Therapy’s “most loyal and engaged audience,” and fostering a relationship with them through email means “we don’t have to rely so much on the Facebook and Instagram algorithms all the time," Mainenti  added.

“In this industry, we are seeing all the highs and lows. A lot of us fell into the whole algorithm mindset: scale, scale, scale and Facebook and Twitter and worrying about all these platforms. The littlest algorithm tweak can knock your traffic for a loop.”

But email subscribers, Mainenti said, “are very engaged cohorts, so it is super important to diversify your portfolio” -- which is “what started this conversation” about conversion rates and getting readers to subscribe to newsletters.

“We are really all about engagement -- we will take a hit on scale, for highly engaged audience that keeps coming back for more,” he added.

Apartment Therapy is also using PostUp for newsletter series, such as a new commerce newsletter launched last summer called "Retail Therapy," with links to product finds and online shopping.

“Email is its own revenue stream,” Mainenti said. The company is ramping up its efforts in the affiliate marketing space, and it is looking to include sponsored products relevant to the theme of each newsletter.

Apartment Therapy Media claims it reaches more than 20 million monthly uniques across its websites, newsletters and social media platforms.