In today’s crowded digital publishing landscape, it’s more important than ever to not only attract new readers but also retain them. One of the key ways to do this is through audience segmentation, particularly by reader loyalty. By identifying and targeting readers based on their level of engagement and loyalty, publishers can tailor their content and marketing strategies to better meet their readers’ needs and interests.
Segmenting audiences by loyalty allows publishers to identify their most valuable readers, those who are most likely to engage with and share content, and develop strategies to keep them coming back. Learn how Marfeel segments audiences based on loyalty and the benefits and insights you can extract from each segment—even from users who prefer to browse privately. After all, the absence of data can also generate meaningful insights.
How does Marfeel determine reader loyalty?
At Marfeel, we model our loyalty funnel based on the customer segmentation model RFV (Recency, Frequency, and Volume). Invented by the Financial Times, RFV is an engagement score that is actionable for every website. RFV provides a clear and measurable way to segment users and identify the most valuable readers. Marfeel, in turn, shows publishers the content consumption trends of their most loyal readers in various ways throughout the platform.
How is RFV calculated?
- Recency: when was the last time the user visited my website?
- Frequency: how often does the user return to my website?
- Volume: what’s the average number of pageviews this user consumes?
RFV scores run from 0 to 100, where 100 means the reader comes back every day and reads several articles each time, as recently as yesterday.
Audience loyalty funnel
Find the audience loyalty funnel in Compass to see the loyalty of concurrents in real time.
- New (RFV = 1): A first time visitor in the last 30 days
- Fly-by (RFV ≤ 10) A user that has visited more than once your site but not enough to remember your brand
- Casual (RFV ≤ 35) Casually came to your website over the last 30 days, remembers your brand but is not loyal to it and it is unlikely to come directly to your website. Typically would enter through Social or Search. It’s a good segment to be activated because it has the potential to become loyal
- Loyal (RFV ≤ 60). Users that come to your website often and identifies with your brand. Likely to convert.
- Lover (RFV ≤ 100) : Your most loyal reader. Comes almost every day and reads multiple stories. Can’t live without it.
- Private (RFV = ?): Users who did not give their consent to track their engagement level.
Article RFV
In Compass, click on the three dots next toAudience loyalty funnel to Plot it to the main graph and visualize the distribution among the different segments of the funnel.
The histograms for each post will now reflect the average RFV for the article:
Compass automatically assigns a score to each reader and aggregates it to provide an RFV score for each article. For example, an article read by users with RFV scores of 10, 12, and 20 will have an RFV of 14, indicating that overall the content is resonating with casual visitors.
The same RFV attribution can be applied to any dimension, such as Author, Section, Topic, Tag, etc:
The aggregate loyalty score for each section shows which kind of readers are gravitating toward which section, painting a picture of the value for each section in terms of acquisition and retention.
Gain more insights from the audience loyalty funnel as it relates to engagement [link], advertising, and subscriptions [link].