Like many marketers, Key Media’s Toronto Life depends on strong relationships with its customers for survival. So when the magazine decided to turn its year-old e-mail newsletter, Preview, into a bona fide profit centre, it turned to Toronto-based relationship marketing expert Intervision CRM for help. The goal was to make the weekly missive more valuable to readers and advertisers alike, and only one month into the new initiative, the magazine has the numbers to prove it’s working.

‘In a medium that has the potential to be directly measurable, we weren’t taking advantage of that at all,’ says Jeff Halliday, GM online for Toronto Life. ‘We knew on a very high level that the newsletter was acceptable – even that some people loved it – but I didn’t really understand why.’

Preview was previously running on an application service provider (ASP) model in which data management was administered in-house. Halliday says that was OK several years ago, but changes at the magazine’s parent company led to each of Key Media’s interactive properties reporting to the individual brand’s publisher. This meant looking for an out-of-house solution.

‘At the scale that we operate at, there’s just not the capacity to keep up with the market if we’re trying to do it all internally,’ says Halliday.

The new package is composed of several elements, including what Ian Giles, director of CRM at Intervision, describes as 1:1 ad tracking (designed to evolve the advertising away from banners and buttons to more of a sponsorship or partnership model), regional targeting, e-mail personalization, viral marketing (adding ‘tell-a-friend’ features), and multi-tiered content programs.

‘You can now look and see how a customer is using information and understand predisposition to be attracted to your offer,’ says Giles. ‘So it’s really improving the quality of the leads that you’re going after and packing it with a lot of information that would sustain the segmentation of approach in terms of targeting those users.’

One of the most intriguing of the new elements, says Giles, is the regional targeting through which Toronto Life plans to tailor both the content and the advertising of the newsletter to fit individual Toronto neighbourhoods. Giles says they’re currently in the analytics and research phase.

‘What we will be able to do is target that information more to a ‘regional’ level so that if you live within Cabbagetown or Riverdale, we’ll be able to focus information there and then really focus the relationship with advertisers in that area.’

It’s an ambitious and labour-intensive plan, but Halliday says advertisers are telling him this kind of specificity is what they want. ‘If we can start offering local versions of the site or local newsletters it’s all up,’ he says.

Already, since switching to the new format, click-through rates for feature content have risen over 13%. That’s because measurement allows Halliday to report what kind of content is most popular back to the editors so that the editorial can be adjusted accordingly.

The ‘open rate’ (the percentage of received newsletters that are actually opened) is up to a whopping 40% (up from the 30% Halliday says represents a figure that wasn’t even tracked weekly). He expects the open rate to climb ‘significantly higher’ as Toronto Life further leverages the possibility for audience differentiation that CRM techniques can offer.

The changes have also already translated into bottom-line revenue gains. According to Halliday, first-quarter to second-quarter revenue on a month-to-month basis has risen 12% and the click-through rates on the new special offers for such things as travel getaways is 5% to 10%. The newsletter has about five advertisers weekly.

‘We’re now able to report specifically on the performance of advertisers’ creative,’ says Halliday, who adds that the special offers are a ‘leading indicator of where we’re going with our e-mail strategy.’

Great success so far, but Halliday says there is still much to accomplish.

For instance, currently only 20% of Preview’s readers also subscribe to Toronto Life (Halliday declines to reveal the total number of newsletter subscribers). He says the 80% who don’t subscribe opted to receive the newsletter via contests and some viral distribution. Still, he concedes, ‘We need to begin building a relationship with them with the aim of ultimately selling a subscription to them.’

Toronto Life is also looking at other marketing initiatives related to its digital properties Preview and TorontoLife.com. In a bid to capitalize on segmentation, Halliday says additional newsletters, such as something that plays to ‘foodie culture,’ are being accounted for in next year’s budget.

As well, in the fall, a special daily newsletter dedicated to the Toronto International Film Festival will launch. Says Halliday, ‘This is one of those areas where we can really use our digital properties to supplement what we do with our magazine.’