Atlas News saves 30+ hours of busywork per week switching from Mailchimp to Klaviyo

Atlas News is an online media outlet for intelligence professionals, covering global conflict, international relations, national security, and more. A pioneer of intelligence-driven journalism, the publication shares its reporting via a paywalled online site and, soon, newsletter subscriptions—managing its customer data and email sends with Klaviyo.

Learn how Atlas News saved by choosing Klaviyo as their customer data and email platform

Challenge

Atlas News had a siloed tech stack. Their email marketing flowed through 3 different platforms:

• Their Quintype website, which they used to take in sign-ups and subscription purchases
• Mailchimp, which they used to send offers and transactional messages via email
• Beehiiv, which they used to send email newsletters

None of these platforms fully integrated with each other—not even Mailchimp and their website.

“On Mailchimp, we would have a list of 30,000 people and it was just 30,000 people,” says Stephen Nix, CEO of Atlas News. “There was no way to determine what actions people took on our website—we could only categorize them by logged-in user, or not user.”

On Mailchimp, we would have a list of 30,000 people and it was just 30,000 people. There was no way to determine what actions people took on our website.

The core technical problem: like most news outlets, Atlas News’s website is an RSS feed, and the code categorizes articles by topic, date, and other parameters. Mailchimp wasn’t flexible enough to read that code and ingest behavioral data in custom, actionable ways—so Atlas News couldn’t send target marketing emails based on the topics readers followed, or the number of articles they read.

Mailchimp and Beehiiv connected even less successfully. The Atlas News team had to manually download and upload sign-up data from one platform to the other—busywork that chewed up 30+ hours a week.

“It wasn’t scalable for growth,” Nix says.

Solution

Klaviyo stood out as an alternative. It could do everything Mailchimp and Beehiiv did, allowing Atlas News to consolidate two platforms into one. The team could also store all their customer data in the platform and leverage it as a CRM, which drove major total cost of ownership savings.

One estimate Atlas News received, for siloed email and customer data platforms, cost over 10x more per year than Klaviyo.

Klaviyo was infinitely customizable, unlike Mailchimp. “We chose Klaviyo because there was no limitation to what we could do,” Nix explains. “We could have 1,000 custom parameters per person if we wanted. From a coding perspective, it was open-ended. Rather than ‘What does this platform do?’ Klaviyo allowed us to say, ‘What do we want to do?’ We know the platform can do it.”

Rather than ‘What does this platform do?’ Klaviyo allowed us to say, ‘What do we want to do?’ We know the platform can do it.

Atlas News wanted to set up 30+ custom profile properties to track whether each user was a paid subscriber; which and how many articles, on which topics, they had read over their lifetime; and how they were engaging with emails.

Their team collaborated with a Klaviyo onboarding specialist and developer to set this up. They were able to execute the plan while they imported and warmed their email list—custom coding added no additional time to the migration. All told, it took roughly 1.5 months.

Since then, sending targeted emails has gotten simpler. In Klaviyo, Atlas News sent their first major, targeted email campaign to everyone that had visited the website, logged in, and registered, but hadn’t set up a paid account. Creating it only took a few clicks. With their old stack, it would have taken a week, Nix says.

Open rates—a major KPI for Atlas News, since they send largely informational emails—have jumped by 2x+ since Mailchimp days. Next, Atlas news plans to launch paid, vertical-specific newsletters, sent and optimized for conversions via Klaviyo.

Strategy

Paid newsletters fit into the Atlas News funnel like this: they’ll drive traffic to the website, and encourage visitors to create an account and sign up for a free, ad-supported newsletter. Then, they’ll encourage unpaid newsletter subscribers to sign up for paid, vertical-specific newsletters.

The paid newsletters will send to unpaid subscribers, too, but cut off after some teaser copy—with a CTA to buy a subscription to access the full version.

Nix and his team will use show and hide blocks in Klaviyo’s email builder to create the full and paywalled newsletters in the same email build—using their custom parameters to ensure only paid subscribers see all the content. They also plan to use Klaviyo’s A/B testing to find the optimal length for the teaser copy non-paying subscribers see.

Nix is excited to get started with their simplified tech stack and Klaviyo’s intuitive UI.

“I would absolutely recommend Klaviyo to another media organization, because our industry is relationship-based,” he says. “I know a lot of other news companies have to use separate platforms to manage customer engagement data and email, and are trying to figure out how to connect them. We just use Klaviyo for both.”

I would absolutely recommend Klaviyo to another media organization, because our industry is relationship-based. I know a lot of other news companies have to use separate platforms to manage customer engagement data and email, and are trying to figure out how to connect them. We just use Klaviyo for both.