StyleBlueprint is a Women's Digital Lifestyle Magazine based in Nashville, Tennessee. This women-owned and led company, founded by Liza Graves, is one of the Southern United State’s fastest-growing digital lifestyle brands, anchored by its daily articles, curated local guides, and travel coverage. Women read StyleBlueprint to find inspiration to engage with their community, embark on new adventures, and make their lives a little more beautiful each day. They have 3.5M unique readers per year.
Before Retention.com, they were heavily focused on giveaways, promotions, and contests to grow their audience. Having tried every prospecting campaign and tool, growing their database was increasingly challenging for them.
Performance Results
Bring on the Challenge
Before partnering with Retention.com, StyleBlueprint was facing significant challenges in growing their email database. They relied heavily on a single employee who dedicated 75% of her time to find ways to grow their email lists including executing giveaways, promotions, and other audience growth strategies. Despite these efforts, scaling their email list became an uphill battle.
For StyleBlueprint, the importance of a thriving email database couldn't be overstated. As an independent publisher, email marketing was at the core of their business strategy from day one. StyleBlueprint realized that creating a solid strategy for consistent audience growth that they could confidently rely on was non-negotiable for their success.
After exhausting various prospecting campaigns and tools, it became clear that they needed a more effective solution to drive more reliable and consistent email database growth.
Jay Graves, COO of StyleBlueprint said, “It’s pretty brutal out there for publishers. Any publisher that tells you that they haven't been impacted by the changes Google has made in the last year is not telling you the truth. With Google’s changes and us being email 1st, we wanted to be prepared for it while still maintaining quality”
The problem we set out to solve was simple: Grow StyleBlueprint’s email database consistently for long term success, without heavily relying on tech giants.
Retention.com to the Rescue
One evening at dinner, Jay ran into a friend who asked if he had heard of a tool called Retention.com. Jay hadn’t heard of it, so his friend explained that it could help acquire prospect emails. Initially, Jay was skeptical. Having tried every prospecting tool available, he often ended up with spam-filled databases, which was a major issue for him. But his colleague reassured him, saying, "We've had pretty good luck with it." Intrigued, Jay decided to run a few tests.
However, given the frequency of emails Blueprint Inc. sends out, Jay knew they had to be cautious.
StyleBlueprint activated Retention.com’s Grow product for their email series and Meta persistent audiences for their custom audiences on Facebook. Both of these tools are geared towards their acquisition growth goals.
Retention.com’s implementation team made sure that they had a careful onboarding process, engaging only with those most likely to appreciate their high-frequency communication. The implementation process included creating a fully automated onboarding, welcome and retention series including maintaining final hygiene in a way that they never have to touch it again. The team ensured that they had auto-suppressions in place for anyone who was already on StyleBlueprint’s email database.
This was huge for them.
“Retention.com is a reliable and automated way to grow 1st party audience for publishers. This audience is ours, we OWN it and is not subject to the whims of a large tech giant, I would call this a publisher’s dream”
Jay Graves
COO, Blueprint Inc.
The Results
- StyleBlueprint added between 100-200 active emails per day to their database.
- They acquired 760k+ in new contacts from the Grow product, maintaining a 40-50% open rate and 2.5-5% click-through rate.
- They also grew their Meta Audiences by 2M+ from start to date.
- This freed up 75% of an employee's time on acquisition and list growth campaigns, allowing them to focus on higher priorities—a significant win for the team.
- Jay says “With Google’s changes and us being email 1st, having Retention.com in place was a huge lifesaver for us. It is a reliable, automated way to grow 1st party audience for publishers. The process is fully automated and the ability to not tinker with it, which I couldn’t even get with Meta is a huge win for us. With Retention.com, one of the main wins is that we get volume, it was just what we needed for audience growth! Using the data from retention.com in conjunction with custom audiences on Facebook and Instagram is my absolute favorite strategy. That allows us to both do email and be multi-channel and cost-effectively reach out to people on social.”
