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Case Study of Wiley Publishing and Lyris ListManager

The Wiley Publishing portfolio includes best-selling brands in both the consumer and technology areas, such as For Dummies, Betty Crocker, Bible, CliffsNotes, Frommer's, the Unofficial Guide, Visual, Weight Watchers, and Webster's New World.

Goals and Challenges

As part of its customer loyalty strategy, Wiley Publishing offers several opt-in email newsletters on its Web sites. Two of the most popular are Cliffsnote-a-Day and DummiesDaily, for which the company's Internet Newsletter team develops original content each day. The lists also generate revenue from advertising.

"Our goal was to send a million messages each night," explained James Sample, Director of IS Infrastructure at Wiley Publishing. "This wasn't easy, because we have strict requirements for speed, cost, and automation."

Wiley Publishing had previously outsourced the delivery of its newsletters, but found the service to be unreliable. Missed mailings caused a flurry of complaint calls from list members, and jeopardized relationships with advertisers who had contracted for specific delivery times.

The Solution

Wiley Publishing evaluated several email list systems on both Windows and Unix, intent on finding a solution that would allow automated mail scheduling, interface customization, and high-speed message delivery. Sample found that Lyris ListManager with a Microsoft SQL Server back end was the ideal choice.

"We tested mailing speed, reliability, and logic of mail transaction handling. In all areas, ListManager was extremely scalable and really shined," Sample commented. "The Diamond-level license we purchased has easily been delivering 200,000 messages per hour, completing our nightly sends with several hours to spare."

Sample's team leveraged ListManager's powerful SQL database by automating all subscription functions, administrative messages, and daily content distribution. The system also uses ListManager's SQL-based subsets to deliver its newsletters in both Text and HTML formats. Subsets also enable Wiley Publishing to distribute targeted mailings based on list member preferences and profiles.

Results

Wiley Publishing has improved its email newsletter business in several ways with Lyris ListManager.

Mail delivery costs are down. Since outsourcing Wiley Publishing's large-scale lists would be prohibitively expensive, running ListManager software in-house allows Wiley Publishing to keep the operation profitable.
Content creation and delivery is improved. The Internet Newsletter team is thrilled with the new system: they're able to create content once in .XML format, schedule delivery at any time, and then move on to other work while ListManager takes care of distribution and membership administration. James Sample remarked that, "With Lyris, our system has not failed to deliver the newsletters - more than a million a night - over the last five months."
List membership is increasing. Sample credits this to ListManager's reliability and user-friendliness. The Customer Service department no longer receives complaints from list members who missed a mailing, or had difficulty joining or leaving a list. The example set by the IS Infrastructure and Internet Newsletter groups has been so impressive that Wiley Publishing is considering migrating other newsletters and systems to ListManager. "We expect that within 24 months we'll be sending close to 4 million emails a night," Sample said, anticipating an even more successful future with Lyris ListManager.