At Axios, I optimized a $3 million acquisition budget, saving $500K (with LLMs), and expanded organic acquisition by 50%, including zero-party data that would increase leads to premium products.
Increased Pro Leads: I collaborated with the Product team to increase the number of Pro lead forms on site, increasing acquisition to 10K “top-funnel” leads to Axios events and organic leads to Axios Pro from site lead forms.
For fun, I built an A.I chatbot with Python At Stanford’s Continuing Studies as part of my tuition benefits.
A simple solution with a lot of juice!
This Axios Events "pop-up" is attractive to those who don't want a daily newsletter but are ready to build a relationship with the brand by getting vocational email invites to events.
This Axios Events "pop-up" is attractive to those who don't want a daily newsletter but are ready to build a relationship with the brand by getting vocational email invites to events.
The impact: This is a "top funnel" approach to increasing a marketable database that will eventually connect readers to other Axios products.
With over 500 tests on marketing concepts, a marketing message that conveyed a promise to "Elevate" a reader within their city, paired with locally relevant visuals (there's a river in Austin that many people paddle on), and a reference to lifestyle enhancements, was the winning combination to not only acquire a new subscriber under $5, but a younger audience under 45yrs of age motivated to sign up for a weekly local newsletter by email.
The impact: A more diverse demographic of subscribers that advertisers care about and readers benefitting from the local lifestyle content writers invest a lot of time covering.
"Sticky sliders" with the marketing promise "Be a step ahead" and the sense of recency "see today's edition" achieved up to a 2% CTR and drove readers who spent at least 15 seconds on the site to a page with a higher conversion rate.
The impact: an increase of organic (free) subscribers that are more intent on getting a weekday newsletter because they're motivated to "Be a step ahead" in their city.
Sometimes a cookie-cutter approach to ads can't scale.
These paid ads leveraged locally relevant images that achieved the lowest cost per new subscriber.
