Personalization

  • Winning Category: Personalization
  • Campaign: PCH.com personalizes the online experience
  • Client: PCH.com
  • Technology Partner: Evergage

The Lowdown: Leading multichannel direct marketer Publishers Clearing House, is a widely
recognized provider of value-based merchandise, magazines, promotional offers and digital “play and win” entertainment for consumers. The main goals for this campaign were to increase game playing among site visitors, engage players and keep them onsite longer and convert players into customers.

The team needed an intuitive solution that wouldn’t require a lot of technical implementation or overhead. They also needed a way for the online marketers to analyze, create and manage the campaigns and messages themselves, without needing to rely on IT or data scientists. The marketers needed to do the persona profiling, continuously test new messages, see how they performed and make changes on the fly. Another key challenge was to see if initial test results could be repeated.

Using Evergage’s real-time web personalization platform, PCH.com was able to analyze, create and test relevant messages for its audience, based on whether the user was engaged or not. Different messages (which talked to the player in a manner appropriate based on previous plays) were shown to different users based on where they were in the cycle. By testing, PCH.com was able to determine whether or not the messages were driving results. With this information they were able to optimize messaging and target different segments with specific messaging.

Since implementing real-time, personalized web messaging, PCH.com is accomplishing its goals of lifting website engagement, with an average lift of 12% in revenue-per-thousand visits. More specifically, different types of targeted messages have brought in varying results. For example, a personalized header bar for existing customers has shown a 36 percent lift in engagement, while a similar message for unengaged users has seen a 19 percent lift in new customer acquisition. In addition, a popup message promoting an exclusive prize to already engaged users netted a 26 percent increase in games played.

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