Bonnier News boosts subscription growth with Oracle Eloqua

Bonnier News is a leading media company in Sweden and Scandinavia, selling news subscriptions in digital and printed formats in niche markets such as business, medicine, communication, sustainability, construction, public service, and more. Its flagship business publication, Dagens Industri, reaches more than one million unique desktop and mobile visitors per week and has over 120,000 premium subscriptions.

As part of its efforts to overcome challenges in the print media landscape, Bonnier News recognized an opportunity to boost online subscription revenue for Dagens Industri, a key growth brand for the company.

However, Bonnier News also recognized shortcomings in its lead generation efforts. The company did not have a cohesive multichannel lead generation strategy that could make use of its customer data. Beyond the editorial focus on its website channel, other channels were underused and lacked a unified strategy for growth. Bonnier News also stored data in silos and lacked a way to segment contacts into marketable audiences.

In 2018, the publisher began looking for a marketing automation solution for Dagens Industri to help drive and convert multichannel leads into paying subscribers.

Bonnier selected Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation to replace its previous marketing automation system and to meet the need for a lead management solution to help combat declining sales in the print media world.

By using Oracle Eloqua for lead generation and nurturing, subscription revenue for Dagens Industri’s leads grew more than 50% for three years in a row. Oracle Eloqua now handles the company’s entire multichannel lead-generation strategy, including multibrand data utilization, personalized segmentation, cross sales, campaign orchestration, effective content management, automated processes, and all the other customer journeys, enabling a unified ecosystem that makes use of customer engagements.

Lead nurturing—bolstered by over 60 lead scoring models generated with Oracle Eloqua—has become the heart of Bonnier News’ subscription growth strategy with the advanced segmentation capabilities. This has enabled Bonnier to balance long-term growth needs with smarter usage of its data. The modern, multichannel marketing approach has resulted in other benefits as well, raising inbound registrations 1,862% year over year, and 164% higher revenue from Facebook lead generation with the help of Eloqua’s synchronized audience management practices.

Nurture campaigns with trigger emails based on website and optimized segmentation have yielded 54% more opens, 24% more click-throughs, and a 48% increase in actionable leads with Oracle Eloqua.

Bonnier News also experienced its highest ROI gains to date as well as a 22% year-over-year increase in email-generated direct sales. As a result, the organization has hired more sales reps to meet the growth in leads generated through marketing automation and started several new sales departments within the company.

Bonnier News also uses Oracle Eloqua’s Contact Washing Machine application for improving phone number formatting and match rates when building Facebook audiences and blocklists. These efforts helped to achieve a 42% increase in direct sales from social media channels and doubled the yearly sales from Facebook leads for the other brands between 2020 and 2021.

Bonnier News will continue to build out the use of Oracle Eloqua, scaling automation strategies across its other media brands. In the past three years, Bonnier News has won Oracle Markie awards for CX innovation in the categories of Best Use of Data, Best Lead Management Program, and Best Demonstrated ROI in Marketing.