Community Engagement Platform and Content Personalisation for a Digital Publisher
Media & Entertainment
What They Were Facing
Beacon operated 12 digital publications with a combined audience of 45 million monthly unique visitors, but only 180,000 registered users and 42,000 paying subscribers. The editorial team had no data on which content drove conversions, audience engagement was measured only by pageviews, and the comment system was a toxic wasteland that deterred community participation. Newsletter open rates had declined to 14%, and the publisher had no personalisation capabilities — every reader saw the same homepage regardless of interests.
How We Solved It
AQBEE deployed a community engagement and personalisation platform on Salesforce integrated with the publisher's CMS. Data Cloud ingested reading behaviour, engagement signals, and subscription data to build rich audience profiles. Marketing Cloud powered personalised newsletters with dynamic content blocks selected by Einstein AI based on each reader's interest graph. An Experience Cloud community platform replaced the legacy comment system with moderated discussions, reader profiles, and reputation scoring. Salesforce Flows automated the registration-to-subscription funnel with personalised conversion prompts triggered by engagement milestones. A metered paywall was integrated via MuleSoft, with Einstein determining the optimal article limit for each reader segment to maximise conversion without sacrificing engagement. Tableau dashboards gave editorial teams content performance analytics tied to subscriber conversion and retention.
The Impact
Personalised conversion funnels and optimised metered paywall nearly tripled paid subscribers from 42,000 to 118,000 within 12 months.
AI-personalised newsletter content increased open rates from 14% to 38% and click-through rates from 2.1% to 8.7%.
Moderated community platform with reputation scoring increased quality reader comments by 320% while reducing toxic posts by 91%.
Higher subscription conversion combined with personalised ad targeting increased revenue per unique visitor by 67%.
“We had 45 million readers and only 42,000 paying subscribers — that is a conversion problem. AQBEE built a personalisation engine that treats every reader as an individual, serves them content they actually want, and nudges them toward subscription at exactly the right moment. We tripled our subscriber base in a year, and our community section went from a toxic comment section to a genuine discussion forum. The editorial team finally has data on what content drives real business value.”
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