HW Media Newsletters Tool

Moving Communications Forward: The HW Media Newsletter Hub

HW Media promotes knowledge, engagement, and networking through a leading digital community for real estate, financial services and fintech professionals. Established as the most influential source of news and information for the U.S. mortgage and housing markets, HW Media embraces four brands: 

• HousingWire – The U.S.’s most influential source of news on housing finance.
• FinLedger – Specialized in fintech news and knowledge.
• RealTrends – The source of timely and trusted information and analysis over residential real estate.
• Reverse Mortgage Daily – The latest reverse mortgage news.

Knowing that there is an overlap between the audiences for each brand, HW Media was looking for a solution that would encourage readers to subscribe to newsletters across brands, expanding the reach of its integrated communication and offering readers refined content options according to their preferences.

The Strategy

The newsletter subscription project started with strategic recommendations on how to reach HW audiences based on the understanding of each audience segment’s critical business operations. With this understanding, Trew KnowledgeWe set off on a journey to understand the overall newsletter solution that would drive the best user experience through consultation, workshops with key stakeholders, and strategic exercises that helped clarify the objectives, values, priorities and capabilities. Together, the strategy teams defined several goals that guided the entire project:

1. Empower readers with HW Media newsletters
2. Drive relevant subscription options
3. Create a centralized hub for managing preferences and full suite of newsletter offerings
4. Promote each brand’s unique newsletters and variety for each user segment
5. Tailor newsletter suggestions based on the audience’s preferences and needs 
6. Promote the distinct writing styles of HW Media’s talented authors

The Solution

The clear view of the audience segments, their personas, and User Experience (UX) tactics for achieving the desired outcomes were taken into account for TK to design the HW Media Newsletter hub and the tools we could introduce across each web presence. The new solution puts together a newsletter subscription tool that displays tailored newsletter subscription options based on a set of conditional audience s criteria and responses. This customized user experience and messaging helped foster loyalty and value for the readers, making it a self-serve destination where users can subscribe and review all of the subscription options, in one place. Additionally, we wanted to capture individual subscription opportunities based on the content that readers were viewing to further create relevant touchpoints and value for the readers. This led to the following key developments:

The newsletter subscription tool features

1. Custom block with conditional form logic to identify key audience segments 
2. Form questions that narrow recommendations based on a set of criteria that best align audiences with newsletter benefits
3. Presentation of all relevant HW Media newsletter inventory customized for the persona with suggested subscriptions
4. Instant subscription sign-ups 
5. Upsell premium newsletter options with HW+ calls to action to increase paid subscriptions

The HW Media newsletter hub features

1. Dedicated landing page of newsletters for easy access and management of preferences 
2. Inventory of all newsletter subscriptions across brands and Writers to follow
3. One-click subscriptions 
4. Filters based on topics and Writers
5. Promoting premium HW+ memberships to help drive paid subscription features

Specific Newsletter subscriptions for Topics & Writers

1. Dedicated subscriptions for individual Writers and Topics 
2. One click subscriptions 
3. In-content subscription placements

These unique solutions designed and developed by TK also incorporated a popular subscription platform known as Piano. Leveraging the Piano platform to create a Single-Sign-On (SSO) experience, the tool that allowed HW teams to manage customers’ identities and various points of entry to help drive the most relevant engagement and preference management for subscribers, empowering the entire personalization experience. While making subscriptions accessible is one part of the formula, the other key ingredient to ensuring that campaigns and personalized segmentation could be possible, was a further integration powered by CRM. The newsletters workflow is subsequently managed through a Hubspot integration which provides the backbone for engagement and nurturing while driving more value for the readers and advertisers.

WordPress Gutenberg

As with many WordPress multisites we see today, part of the solution was also intended to provide efficiency and flexibility of the newsletter solutions to ensure that admins had opportunities to place the right call to action, within the site experience. Leveraging the power of Gutenberg blocks, the newsletter hub, its specific subscription CTA’s, and subscription preference tool were built as block components that allowed flexibility for being placed anywhere within content, or on any site within the network extending the capability of the solutions. 

Ask us how we can help build a custom newsletter solution designed for your specific audience needs and contact us today.