By Tara McMeekin
Associate Editor

On Dec. 17, 2001, Orlando Sentinel Communications, publisher of the Orlando Sentinel, completed installation of Unica Corp.’s Affinium software to support its marketing automation initiatives.

Orlando Sentinel Communications, a business unit of Tribune Co., publishes the Orlando Sentinel as well as operating OrlandoSentinel.com and Go2Orlando.com. The Sentinel (daily, 249,544; Sunday, 369,096) is using Affinium to create and deliver customized offers and messages based on individual reader preferences.

Orlando Sentinel Communications is using the campaign management and e-messaging modules of the Affinium system — Affinium Campaign and Affinium eMessage.

The front and back of the Orlando Sentinel’s four-page Reader Rewards print piece, which is mailed to those subscribers that don’t receive it via e-mail each month.
Photos courtesy Orlands Sentinel Communications

Affinium Campaign allows Orlando Sentinel personnel to read its database and lay out campaigns that include multiple channels such as mail, telephone and e-mail.

“We can designate a campaign to high-income folks in our market that we will contact via e-mail [or via direct mail],” said Chuck Farraj, marketing information manager for Orlando Sentinel Communications. “We can then do a telemarketing follow-up and Affinium will manage all aspects of that by reading the underlying data and following whatever rules you’ve told it to do, including the management of the post contact.”

The Affinium system will also automatically generate a second mailing to those who haven’t responded to the first one.

“Those types of campaign management things can be set up in advance and be tracked very easily using the campaign management tool,” Farraj said.

Orlando Sentinel Communications is currently using Affinium to market circulation subscriptions for the Orlando Sentinel as well as classified ads for the newspaper. Farraj said they are working on creating more newsletters to targeted groups of readers as well, which they hope to have completely deployed by June. Affinium allows the Orlando Sentinel to offer newsletters in both HyperText Markup Language and plain text format.

“We really want to grow our interactive relationship with these customers by beefing up our e-mail newsletters … and help market those as viable information choices people can make, but also as viable sponsorship opportunities for some advertisers,” Farraj said.

Orlando Sentinel Communications already has interactive offerings, such as hurricane updates and interactive real estate features.

There is currently a product development group deciding which of the upcoming newsletter features should be targeted to certain groups of readers.

“I’m sure they’ll tap the database to get some insights in what they want to decide to offer but they’re also balancing it against the cost of creating the content and what resources would be available or what topics seem to be of interest in editorial,” Farraj said.

He said a key element of the system, in addition to allowing the Orlando Sentinel to do e-mail marketing — rather than outsourcing to vendors as they had done in the past — is the tracking tools Affinium provides. The tracking capabilities are extensive and record who the Orlando Sentinel has contacted, in what manner they were contacted — e-mail, direct mail, or telemarketing — and what the person’s response was.

“This is especially useful in the areas of the e-mail marketing where the click-through tracking capabilities really come into play,” Farraj said. “We know which link on any e-mail we send is clicked by which user and what action they took when they did that.”

How it works

When a new subscriber signs up for a subscription to the Orlando Sentinel, their e-mail address is collected, and from that point forward they receive a “Reader Rewards” retention-oriented newsletter every two weeks. The Reader Rewards newsletter includes a special offer, such as a free cup of coffee at a participating vendor, and it also includes information on what’s coming up in the print version of the newspaper.

“The retention aspect of sending an e-mail where we’ve got some kind of free thing and a reminder about the quality of the product, we think will really help our retention efforts, plus it’s a lot cheaper than printing it on paper,” Farraj said. The Reader Rewards newsletter is also available via direct mail.

The Orlando Sentinel is working on implementing a feature that would send new subscribers an e-mail offer to place a classified ad for half-price. The offer would be the very first e-mail the subscriber receives from the Sentinel.

There is currently a midday update that goes out via e-mail, which includes the latest headlines and any breaking news since the morning paper and you don’t have to be an Orlando Sentinel subscriber to receive the update.

“That’s a pretty popular feature,” Farraj said.

The midday e-mail update also helps generate traffic to OrlandoSentinel.com, which is updated throughout the day.

Orlando Sentinel’s affinity for Affinium

“One of the neat things about [Affinium] is it uses MIME to recognize which formats the user can receive, so it basically will send HTML to anybody that it can and text to those who can’t receive it,” Farraj said.

Tribune Co. and Orlando Sentinel Communications looked at five other vendors before choosing Unica.

“We chose Unica over all those other ones as having the most comprehensive functionality and what we felt was one of the better designed approaches,” Farraj said. “There’s an argument within that industry on how you get data to feed these systems. Many say you have to take your data and put it into their proprietary format. Unica is one that says, ‘We don’t care what format it’s in, we can read any format of data’. That big plus made it a real winner in our mind.” Farraj added.