The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter

The Client

The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter (CPR) is a U.S.-based online newsletter that analyzes elections and campaigns at the federal and gubernatorial levels. 

The Situation

CPR was looking to meet its subscribers’ expectations by providing a seamless, user-centric website that showcased its content. Its goal was to close the gap in how readers could seamlessly subscribe and click through from the CPR weekly newsletters for direct access to paywalled content. Additionally, the organization wanted to increase reach and engagement with an elevated layout, swift user experience, improved search function, and resilient performance to meet the traffic peaks during the election seasons.

The Challenge

The Cook Political Report faced several challenges:

• Low rates of converting readers into subscribers
• High rates of customer service requests for troubleshooting password issues and accessing content
• SEO and website speed affecting browsing experience
• Insufficient search module didn’t meet readers’ needs 
• Upgrading a highly customized site to Drupal 9 

The Solution

CPR partnered with web design and development agency Vardot. Together, the teams tackled the continuous improvements by performing a comprehensive site audit that studied the site's health, traffic analytics, and visual heatmaps. Then, Vardot redesigned CPR’s subscription UX and paywall content, and continuously monitored users' behavior. Additionally, the team utilized Drupal 9’s capabilities to enhance editorial tools to make them more accessible for site editors. They used Acquia Search to improve the site search experience, and streamlined customer service by tightly integrating the new site with third-party tools, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Zoho, and Recurly. Acquia Cloud Next helped ensure fast performance, with flexibility to account for CPR’s unusual traffic spikes during election seasons.

The Results

Since the new site launched, CPR has seen increased renewal rates, significant decrease in refund requests due to access issues and increase in customer satisfaction scores, particularly with premium accounts.

Additional improvements include:

• Added 500 subscribers in one month, a gross revenue increase of $175,000 when presuming the annual rate
• Increased retention rates from 76% to 90% 
• Voluntary churn rate has dropped from 6.26% to 1.94%
• 20% increase in individual subscribers since June 2021
• 14% increase in quarter over quarter revenue due to streamlined conversion process
• 84%  increase in unique page views on the subscription page
• 51% reduction in page load times
• 2x impressions and clicks in organic search results comparing the past six months' periods