Success Story
Harvard Business Review Complex Chinese
Building a deeper relationship with readers via a personalized reading platform on LINE
Harvard Business Review Complex Chinese turned its official LINE account into a micro-CRM platform, which allowed the brand to manage member data all in one place and offer personalized services via account binding and member tags. The brand achieved 8% lift in return visits by members. It also curated a series of campaigns centered on “the working professional” to regularly share high-quality content, helping the brand strengthen loyalty and maintain a two-way communication channel with readers.
About Harvard Business Review Complex Chinese
The English edition of Harvard Business Review (HBR) was launched in 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing (HBSP). In the century since, HBR has nurtured many new ideas that contributed to the advancement of leadership, innovation, strategy, and management. It has had a long-lasting influence on global management practice. Many renowned scholars and experts have published original articles in HBR which later became books, including Peter F. Drucker, Michael E. Porter, Charles Handy, Gary Hamel, and Kenichi Ohmae.
HBR publishes articles from the world’s most famous scholars and experts. 80% of the articles in the HBR Complex Chinese edition are the same as its English counterpart, while the remaining 20% comprises local perspectives. This helps ensure new ideas and practices can be adopted in Taiwan. The publication offers seven forms of learning content: printed magazine, e-magazine, digital subscription, podcast, the Leader Program, the Leader’s Club, and enterprise PLC talent development services. It aims to help Chinese-speaking audiences find the path to success in an unpredictable and ever-changing environment. Using a hybrid mix of offline/online learning services, HBR offers knowledge that can be turned into instantly applicable tools.
- Industry: Magazine/journal publishing
- Company Size: Enterprise (over 300 employees)
- Location: Taiwan
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Goal: (1) Personalized engagement via LINE to increase percentage of return visits
(2) Increase the depth of conversational marketing application to strengthen long-term reader loyalty
Products Used:
- BotBonnie | Conversational marketing platform
One-stop CRM platform for personalized services on LINE
Harvard Business Review Complex Chinese (hereafter HBR) has been committed to building a convenient, easy-to-use reading platform that can offer more informative and useful articles to working professionals. For example, HBR optimized the article categories on its website to make article searches faster and more accurate. It also introduced new ways (e.g., podcasts) for readers to enjoy “reading” and receive the latest news in the workplace.
However, as social apps became more widespread, HBR not only wanted to maintain close contact with readers through social channels, but also wanted to attract readers back to its website and increase subscriptions by analyzing traffic data and obtaining reader profile insights. To this end, HBR adopted Appier’s BotBonnie conversational marketing platform and turned the official HBR LINE account into a custom-built micro-CRM platform. Using BotBonnie’s account binding feature, the brand was able to let users bind their member data with a single tap. Users could then access customized LINE menu functions, such as article browsing history and “saved-for-later” articles. When new articles on topics a user follows is published, or when a user hasn’t finished reading an article, HBR can send LINE messages to notify them. By partnering with BotBonnie to build a micro-CRM platform, HBR was able to provide more personalized services and interactions, as well as build a more holistic digital experience for members.
In addition to regular article notifications, in 2022 HBR launched the “HBR 100 Reading Challenge”. The campaign used BotBonnie’s Account Binding and Daily Check-in kits to engage readers on LINE. The system pushed relevant business articles on users’ chosen topics, which increased readership and prompted users with free membership to convert to a paid membership. The campaign successfully achieved 8x the number of bound accounts compared to previous campaigns.
Reinforce reader loyalty by leveraging precise user tagging and segments
HBR believed that when it came to social engagement in today’s world, the key to winning was to provide personalized experiences. Besides the LINE account binding feature which provides a custom menu, BotBonnie can also tag and segment different members based on their membership type. HBR used unique tags for three target segments: regular members, trial members, and subscribed members. The brand then pushed relevant articles to each segment based on their topics of interest, such as career development, information technology, and marketing and public relations. This enabled HBR to not only manage member data in one place, but also precisely push content that readers are interested in, thus reinforcing loyalty. HBR successfully achieved 7-8% lift in the percentage of LINE users who returned to its website after tapping a personalized message.
During the Lunar New Year period of 2022, HBR launched a “Change Your Workplace” campaign on Meta platforms. Leveraging immersive conversations on Messenger, HBR tagged customers to collect user profile data that could be used in the future for precise targeting with messages. During the campaign, users could enter a Messenger chat via posts on Meta platforms. In Messenger, HBR deployed BotBonnie’s Persona Kit to change its profile photo and engage users in a “situational conversation” that enables the brand to understand users’ needs in the workplace. The users are then tagged based on this information. After the conversation, users could also scratch for a 2022 lucky charm right in Messenger.
HBR Complex Chinese Department of Marketing Associate Director Wei-Ting Wang says, “Since partnering with Appier BotBonnie, we’ve been able to quickly create exciting marketing interactions on social media and build a two-way communication channel with existing and potential readers. With this accumulated experience in using tags, we hope to better understand readers’ needs and create more personalized messages and experiences.
Utilize Meta’s Recurring Notifications to cultivate readers’ reading habits
Recurring Notifications can help brands circumvent the 24-hour time limit for engagement with push notifications. Brands will be able to regularly push messages to users who have opted-in to recurring marketing messages, thus bypassing the time limit for engagement.
Between September 2021 and March 2022, HBR leveraged Meta’s Recurring Notifications with support from BotBonnie to promote its new podcasts. By regularly pushing new episode notices to subscribed users, HBR aimed to reach new audiences on Facebook with this new content form and get users into the habit of tuning in.
Using Recurring Notifications ensured that podcast-related information was only delivered to users who were truly interested, helping HBR avoid being blocked by uninterested users. Finally, this feature was also effective in increasing the number of regular listeners.