Company
The Motley Fool
Industry
Media
Website fool.co.uk
Location
UK
The Motley Fool UK (www.fool.co.uk) is one of the country’s most popular financial websites with 1.5 million subscribers and over 600,000 unique site visitors a month. The multi-award-winning website specialises in helping people redefine the way they think about and interact with money – offering practical advice on a range of personal finance issues, including debt management, price comparison and insights into the mortgage, property and pension markets.
Much like its US counterpart, Fool.co.uk offers investment and financial advisory services to its subscribers. However, while it shares close corporate and operational links with the US, its UK financial services and offerings are designed to appeal to its local subscriber base. For example, while US subscribers are very interested in stocks and investment, its UK customers are much more likely to be interested in financial products and services.
As part of its service, Fool.co.uk publishes many articles to supplement the advice offered on its site. When a new article or paper is published, hyperlinks are included in the company’s weekly email newsletters or daily email promotions so that subscribers are notified and can download them from the site.
EMAIL IS CRITICAL TO OUR BUSINESS, GENERATING ALMOST ONE THIRD OF OUR UK REVENUE. SELLIGENT OFFERED THE FEATURES, BENEFITS AND SCALABILITY OUR BUSINESS NEEDED, WITHOUT HAVING TO GO TO AN OUTSOURCER.
Email drives more than 30 percent of the company’s UK revenues. Indeed, email is the primary marketing channel for customer acquisition and a strong driver of partner advertising. In addition to traditional transactional and acquisition marketing emails, Fool.co.uk sends out electronic versions of its finance newsletters to hundreds of thousands of individual subscribers at a time.
Fool.co.uk also uses email, in particular transactional email, as an integral part of the new customer sign-up process as well as a platform for advertising and vendor sponsorship. Both uses play a direct contribution to the company’s revenue-generating structure. After studying replacement options, business heads in both countries resolved to deploy a single in-house email delivery system rather than using a third-party such as an ESP or external email management company.
Fool UK was particularly concerned that further in-house application development or a move towards outsourcing would raise critical questions about the level of security, control and deliverability rates. There were also concerns about the scalability of a home-grown solution. So, to accommodate all these needs, it opted for Selligent’s industry-proven, in-house email marketing platform.
Major estimates that the most immediate benefit delivered by Selligent’s solution was an increase deliverability rates from around 85% to 99%. Had the Fool’s UK business opted for an outsourced email delivery option, it would have continued to pay for a delivery to each of those addresses every time the mailing list was used – generating unnecessarily high bills and having an adverse effect on its reputation with key ISPs.
Over time, Selligent’s reporting system has also helped the company easily and clearly analyse individual subscriber responses to each of their email deliveries. This has allowed the company to hone subscriber profiles and provide highly tailored editorial and advertising content. On top of this, Fool UK can now send more emails than ever before – typically growing the list by thousands of subscribers per month – but without having to increase related spend.
By employing Selligent’s proven email delivery, integration and campaign management technology, Fool.co.uk has gained a core competence in email that is critical to ensuring the success and growth of its marketing programs. Built from the ground up to handle the complexities introduced by spam and high-volume sending, Selligent provides the Fool with superior reliability for sending as well as the information and the tools to proactively address delivery problems as they occur.
