Scaling for Success: How FOS Grew Its Audience 20x In 18 Months

Since 2019, FOS has been dedicated to keeping our readers informed about the broad ecosystem of sports and business. Our newsletter provides readers with a curated rundown of trending topics and analytical deep dives – keeping business professionals abreast of key market signals. However, just as the business of sports has grown exponentially in recent years, Front Office Sports has increased our readership 20x over the last 18 months. To handle this surge of audience scale, we turned to Campaign Monitor.

Campaign Monitor provides powerful, easy-to-use email software that is designed to be customizable for individual business needs. For our Growth & Product teams, Campaign Monitor provides in-depth analytics to identify our most engaged readers, allows us to A/B test different subject lines, and most importantly their customer support team is always there when we need a hand. 

As our newsletter distribution exploded from 25,000 to more than 500,000 (and counting), Campaign Monitor helped us keep up with our growing email technology needs while allowing us to build custom tools and dashboards utilizing powerful API integrations. Edgar Walker — VP of Audience Operations for Front Office Sports — says Campaign Monitor empowered his team during our hyper-growth period. 

“As our audience has grown, it has been imperative to have a platform and system that we can rely on,” Walker said. “Campaign Monitor has been extremely reliable, has scaled exceptionally well, and has allowed us to grow much more sophisticated with our distribution and data, all while staying lean and fast as a team.”

Seamless Customization At Your Fingertips

While Campaign Monitor provides an in-depth look at email patterns, the ability for customization is what sets their software apart for our team. Design elements and functionality can be fully personalized for each email campaign, which allows our team to create distinct identities for each of our newsletter brands – like Front Office Sports College and Sports Section – with the ability to seamlessly switch back and forth within the same account.

Another customizable aspect of Campaign Monitor is that it integrates with over 100 tech partners. Our team integrates our SparkLoop account in order to track newsletter sign up referrals – which helps us continue to reach more readers month after month.

So Easy, A Media Startup Can Do It

While changing software solutions can be a bear, our transition was seamless and immediately improved our key audience metrics. 

Moving from our old email software provider (ESP) to Campaign Monitor allowed us to account for wider reach and improved our email deliverability overnight. Since switching ESPs in early 2020, our unique open rates have increased by 5-10%.

Flexible long-term data solutions and a robust API have allowed us to build proprietary data tools around a variety of insights, and user profiles to pinpoint any issues on an individual reader basis.

Maintaining a direct 1:1 audience relationship at scale is a tall task, but thanks to Campaign Monitor we have been able to thrive in this area.

Customer Support That Doesn’t Suck

As our readership grew 20x over the last 18 months, Campaign Monitor seamlessly scaled with our technology needs. While many other email platforms require companies to share an IP address with a large group of clients, Campaign Monitor elevated us to a dedicated IP address to ensure that we were able to maintain our aggressive email deliverability goals. 

This transition was largely in part to their customer support team. Their Chief Deliverability Officer spent time with key internal stakeholders to ensure an efficient transition to our new dedicated IP. 

The biggest testament to the premium support provided to us by Campaign Monitor however, was evident in a time of crisis.

Last December, as FOS prepared to launch a new newsletter brand, Google experienced a widespread outage that prevented Gmail users on our list from receiving the email. Campaign Monitor’s dedicated support team helped us avert long term IP and domain damage by working through a solution overnight – ensuring a successful newsletter was delivered to our readers the next morning. 

Partnering For Potential

In just 18 months Front Office Sports has grown from a promising newsletter product with an audience of 25,000 readers, to two daily newsletters with multiple emerging brands and an audience over 500,000 strong.

Campaign Monitor has been integral in that growth and will continue to be critical for the future of our business, allowing us to fulfill our commitment to covering the business of sports and growing our audience. When you have a clear vision for success, a strategy to expand, and the desire to build something custom and unique, there is no better partner.