How Daily Insight Group uses real-time data and triggered messages to power publishing and eCommerce
300%Purchases
35%Click-through rate
Personalization at scale
Combining practical advice, with the ancient wisdom of Astrology, Tarot, Numerology, Feng Shui, and I Ching, Daily Insight Group creates intuitive tools for solving modern-day problems for people around the globe.
dailyinsightgroup.comDaily Insight Group is a publisher network of popular entertainment websites including Numerology.com, Tarot.com, and Dailyhoroscope.com. Founded in 1995, Daily Insight Group forged partnerships with other large publishers and quickly grew into a prominent content network offering Horoscopes, Astrology, Numerology, Tarot and gaming.
Today Daily Insight Group provides daily horoscopes and astrology readings to millions of users each day. They have also built a successful eCommerce business to augment their content offerings and have embraced next-generation technology to create a sustainable advantage in the ever-evolving publisher landscape.
At its core, Daily Insight Group is a publisher network, which means that timing and relevance are of the utmost importance. As humans, our attention spans have become shockingly short. We are inundated with content every waking moment, which has given us license to ignore the vast majority of the media we see each day. Publishers must be vigilant, always looking for new and innovative ways to serve the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Daily Insight Group began to experience significant pain with their previous email program when they started to move away from “batch and blast” communications to a more integrated 1:1 approach. They realized that to truly engage their user base they needed to treat their customers like people, rather than user segments. The problem was, that their technology was simply not built to handle multiple real-time data feeds.
Tammy Williams, General Manager
Daily Insight Group has millions of users in different time zones, across multiple websites. Each of these users has one of twelve different zodiac signs that all react differently to various astrological events. Layer content specifications, purchase history, and product recommendations on top of this and you can start to understand why 1:1 personalization was such a complex proposition.
Like most publishers, Daily Insight Group relies heavily on email to drive traffic, purchases, and retention. Email touches every aspect of the customer lifecycle and has remained Daily Insight Group’s most reliable and profitable marketing tool. Daily Insight Group’s goal, like the majority of eCommerce companies, is to turn free subscribers into paying customers. Cordial gives them the tools they need to ensure that every customer has a unique, engaging, and personalized experience.
Daily Insight Group’s most popular acquisition tool is the Daily Horoscope. To sign up, users simply enter their email address and Zodiac sign, and each morning at 6am they receive their personalized horoscope for that day. On the surface this sounds simple, but the infrastructure required to automate the sending of millions of messages to users in different time zones is actually quite complex.
Cordial allows Daily Insight Group to automate message send time and query multiple databases in real-time to create personalized messages for each of their horoscope subscribers. Messages are built using Sculpt templates and blocks, and, at the time of send, compile a unique message for each user based on their location, language, and zodiac sign.
Tammy Williams, General Manager
When a user subscribes to Daily Insight Group’s Daily Horoscope emails they are gifted with 20 Karma Coins. Karma Coins are digital currency that powers Daily Insight Group’s eCommerce arm and can be purchased through the website. They are used to purchase products that augment and enhance the user experience such as personalized Tarot readings, astrology forecasts, and personality reports.
Before using Cordial, when users would sign up for the Daily Horoscope emails, Daily Insight Group would periodically send them product focused emails to incentivize first purchase. These emails were sent manually so there would often be large spans of time, hours or days, before we would follow up with a user with a product email.
After migrating to Cordial, Daily Insight Group was able to create a series of triggered welcome messages that sought to educate users about their eCommerce offering and how to use their gifted Karma Coins to make their first purchase. Each of these messages is personalized based on the what they know about each subscriber — astrological sign, birthday, location etc. — and arrive in the inbox immediately following sign up to maximize the likelihood of opens and clicks. The series also has conditional logic built in so if a user makes a purchase on-site or from an email, they are automatically removed from the remainder of the messages.
Unlike most traditional eCommerce businesses, Daily Insight Group’s customers visit and purchase at irregular intervals, usually based on emotional events in their lives. If a user is going through a breakup or a career change, they are more likely to seek spiritual guidance from Tarot cards or astrological readings. For this reason, users can go months or years between engagement cycles.
To try and pull users back to the site more frequently, Daily Insight Group is experimenting with Triggered messages based on astrological events combined with information from a user’s birth chart. A birth chart is unique to every person, and is based on the specific time (up to the minute) that you are born. Each person’s birth chart responds differently to specific astrological events, which affords DIG an opportunity to send highly personalized communications to their users to re-engage them.
Cordial Experiments enabled Daily Insight Group to run a series of subject line tests to help increase the engagement rates of their Daily Horoscope and Welcome Series emails. Unlike traditional A/B testing, Cordial Experiments uses machine learning to test multiple message variations in real-time, removing the need for statistical significance and reducing the amount of ineffective subject lines that are surfaced. As users open and click, Experiments shifts message volume to the highest performing variant, guaranteeing that Daily Insight Group’s users are always receiving the best performing message.
Tammy Williams, General Manager
By switching to Cordial, Daily Insight Group was able to simplify campaign creation by using real-time data feeds to programmatically personalize Daily Horoscope emails. With personalized triggered messaging running and subject lines quickly validated using machine learning optimizations along the way, email revenue increased. Implementation of cart abandonment triggered messaging increased click-through rate by 35% and purchases by 300%.
