Agora

Results in Industry: Publishing

Agora Publishing is a major international publisher and marketer of financial and health-related content. Agora has been in business for more than 30 years, produces in excess of 160 publications, and maintains offices on six continents.

The Problem

Agora had successfully shifted much of its publishing business from print to digital delivery in the early 2000s, yet:

• The company was frustrated by an inability to meet customers' increasing expectations for rapid response to new subscriptions and inquiries.
• There was increasing pressure to grow revenues through cross-selling and up-selling, but their systems and databases could not work together seamlessly.
• Rapid growth had caused Agora to exceed the capabilities and capacity of the previously installed solution, and every vendor failed to address these business challenges. The team was desperate to find a partner that would take the time to learn its business and deliver a flexible, scalable solution that worked within existing operations and did not impose a rigid process.
• Agora wanted to solve these problems without having to build a customized, unsupported infrastructure to knit together multiple databases and systems.

The Solution

After evaluating more than 50 vendors, Agora met with Message Systems in late 2005. Just one meeting was enough for Agora to recognize Message Systems was a different kind of vendor: a true business partner led by professionals who had a clear understanding of Agora's unique business challenges and could offer a comprehensive solution to the company's problems.

The initial system went live in 2006 and, through a series of subsequent releases, Agora not only solved its problems, but also enjoyed new insights and capabilities that generated revenue and increased profits. As a result, Agora was able to:

• Repeatedly test, track, measure and refine its marketing and customer communications logic for optimal response and customer satisfaction. The company now frequently adapts its messages mid-stream based on early campaign results. It may run two or more versions of a message early in the send process, quickly determine the open/click rates and purchases, and send the remainder in the format that worked best. This was previously impossible due to delays in aggregating the data.
• Instantly determine the relationship between demographics, message cadence and transaction results, and see how they work together to optimally drive sales. This includes the messages and offers that were sent, which ones customers signed up for (and from which sites), their genders and countries, frequency of engagement with the publication, campaign response rates (and how they're impacted by cadence and time), revenues, lifetime value of the customer and more.
• Continue building marketing data as the company's core asset by capturing rich data on campaign performance, then integrating it with internal and external data sources to create repeatable revenue generation strategies.
• Launch and support new divisions and product groups quickly and easily, then incorporate them into the messaging platform and operational processes. Because Agora can now leverage a single, multi-tenant solution without building out a separate infrastructure for each new group, this reduced the assimilation time of acquisitions and drove down operational costs.
• Maintain the existing Agora ERP system as its core data repository for customer information because Message Systems both pulls and updates data. Had Agora lacked its own data repository, the Message Systems platform could have performed that function too.
• Position itself for multi-channel delivery (mobile email, SMS, etc.) and send messages based on customer preferences to ensure accurate, timely delivery and determine whether or not messages were received.
• Synchronize inbound communications and transactions directly with financial systems. For example, a customer payment now triggers an automatic addition to the mailing list while an expiration triggers removal from the list and initiates reacquisition marketing processes.
• Keep their core communications data, software and processes in-house.

Measurable Success

• With Message Systems, Agora has more than doubled the recipients of their most popular e-Newsletter
• Annual business growth has spiked in excess of 15%
• Due to the power, scale and simplified management of the Message Systems solution, Agora recognized a 40% decrease in operation expenses, including data center resources, operational expense and staffing
• Message Systems' unique platform afforded the continuity and control that enabled Agora to preserve millions of dollars of near-jeopardized revenue
• Conversion rates from unpaid to paid customers increased over the past 3 years — despite a tumultuous economy
• Retention rates for existing customers spiked
• Simplified operations and increasingly targeted, effective emails increased overall sending volume without adding any administrative resources

Key Benefits for Agora

• Ability to maintain ownership of data, previously impossible with outsourced solution
• Peace of mind in knowing all sensitive customer information and business data remain private
• Enabling all communications to be data-driven ( also impossible for the outsourced portion of campaigns )