Florida Trend Achieves 50% Open Rate by Leveraging Dynamic Contact Segmentation

A state-leading publication for the Florida business community

Magazine Florida Trend is a state-leading publication that covers business and general news topics in Florida. The publication is targeted to company owners, C-level executives, government officials, leaders in the business community, and anyone interested in business. 

The publication has several verticals with specialized content aimed at different target groups. Some of these topics are new businesses, startups, and SMBs, content for specific sectors such as healthcare, hospitality, and education, yearly topics about business relocations, and specific pieces directed toward recent college graduates and professionals in business school.

Robb Lee, digital operations manager at Florida Trend, leads the team responsible for the web publication of the magazine, as well as the different newsletter campaigns sent to both the magazine audience and the company’s independent lists of subscribers.

On the lookout for a fairly-priced Enterprise plan to support high email volumes

The team at Florida Trend used to work with an email platform subcontracted by their web host provider. The company was sending approximately two million emails per month, but with their fast-growing subscription lists, they started facing high charges whenever this mark was exceeded. 

“With our previous email provider, the charges were very expensive every time we exceeded the 2 million email mark. Since we were looking to launch other newsletter verticals, we knew the best decision for the business was to increase our plan to 3 million emails per month,” explains Robb. “I started researching different email providers but none of them seem to check all our boxes, and the prices were very high. When I came across Sendinblue, I was gladly surprised by the immediate response from the sales team. I also appreciated how accommodating the team was to make sure everything worked out to win us as a client” says the manager.

The team at Florida Trend chose the Sendinblue Enterprise plan for its attractive price and all the additional services included to support their high volume of emails. “It was a matter of days for the team at Sendinblue to set up the solution for us. They were also very proactive with the migration part, which was extremely helpful”.

Saving time and gaining autonomy thanks to Sendinblue

Supporting their large number of monthly newsletters, Sendinblue has proven to be the most effective solution for the team at Florida Trend. The company sends campaigns to their all-access, digital, and print subscribers. They also send dedicated email blasts constantly, as well as their daily and weekly aggregate newsletters. This means the team relies on both the dynamic contact segmentation and the email marketing features for the success of their campaigns.   

The digital manager explains that “the web editor in my team and I are the two people in charge of the newsletters. With Sendinblue we can do everything we need. He does the daily sendings with the platform using the email marketing feature, and I use Sendinblue to set up the lists with the contact segmentation function. On the platform, everything is simplified. Creating a newsletter can be done without hassle. It is very user-friendly and pretty intuitive, which is amazing for our daily activity and gives us so much autonomy. And if we ever need to know how something works, the available tutorials and the documentation in the help center are great.”

Robb also mentions how important it is to have their own Customer Success Manager as part of the Enterprise plan by Sendinblue. “Having a dedicated person from the team working with us since the beginning of our journey has been excellent. The relationship we maintain is phenomenal. If we ever encounter any issue, we just need to communicate it and in a matter of minutes we have a response from our success manager” 

Reaping the benefits of a 20% base open rate to show to their advertisers

For Robb, choosing the Enterprise plan by Sendinblue was a great investment considering the value for money and the success that the solution has brought to the company.

“Sendinblue takes very seriously being compliant in terms of data protection, so one of the main benefits of using the platform is that we can have cleaner email lists. It has also been much easier to maintain them this way with the different functions the solution has,” explains the manager. 

This is reflected in their improved email campaign performance, as the company has been able to create and grow a much more engaged subscriber base. “Since we switched to Sendinblue, our campaigns are consistently above the 20% base open rate, which is amazing for our business and for clients looking to advertise with us,” says Robb. “Our real estate newsletter, for example, has total open rates exceeding 50% on some occasions. Being able to show these types of results to our advertisers is just incredible,” explains the manager. 

The team at Florida Trend, also values the reporting capabilities of the platform. “With the campaign reports, I can spot immediately if something is wrong and correct it right away. Whether it is a low click rate or a high bounce rate, I can take immediate action for the next campaign,” says Robb. 

The team is eager to explore and use more features of the platform, particularly transactional emails and marketing automation. They look forward to transitioning from building campaigns manually, to having more automated processes, particularly for the list-building and the daily and weekly aggregate newsletters sending.