What’s behind a “144% GROWTH” headline?
Have you ever been dazzled by an impressive growth stat, only to be left wondering if it was the result of a marketing strategy designed for long-term growth, or just a happy accident?
The truth is, sometimes it can be both. As a marketer, you could put hours of work behind a campaign, convinced it will deliver your best results yet, only to realise it absolutely flopped. Or you might pull together a quick reactive campaign that ends up really moving the dial for your business.
As a marketer with more than fifteen years’ experience across industries including publishing, real estate and personal finance, I can tell you that both have happened to me at some point. Yet campaigns are often a flash in the pan… Long term, measurable and solid growth is where the real value is.
When I ran the subscriber loyalty programme for The Week magazine, I achieved 144% year-on-year growth for The Week Bookshop.
That number wasn't a moment.
It was a year's worth of incremental gains, A/B tests, internal battles, design tweaks and customer psychology. So instead of just posting the stat, I want to take you behind the scenes to explain what led to that growth, because that's where the really useful stuff lives – and it doesn’t fit nicely into two lines on a CV!
The context
I joined the Dennis Publishing subscriptions team as Loyalty Manager for The Week magazine, owning the loyalty and engagement strategy for The Week Society and the sub-brands within it, which included a wine club, a bookshop, a theatre ticket white label site, and an affiliate programme – some of my favourite things!
The logic was simple: The Week is a current affairs magazine providing readers with a curated overview of the news. The audience is ABC1, highly engaged, and culturally curious. They trusted us to curate the news for them, so why not extend this trust into other things they care about – namely, book, wine and theatre recommendations? And not only providing them with the recommendations, but a place to buy them, too?
The magazine reviewed books the latest books. If a review piqued a reader’s interest, we wanted to be the place they went to buy the book. And if they enjoyed the book, they'd associate that recommendation – and that feeling – with us. It was a customer engagement play as much as a revenue one.
When I came into the role, the The Week Bookshop was already up and running on Shopify. The foundations were there, but there was plenty of room to build.
Step one: the basics, done better
The first thing I noticed was that the magazine page ads for The Week Bookshop weren't working as hard as they could be. The logo was tucked away in the bottom corner of the page, almost as an afterthought. I moved it to the top, giving the brand more prominence and making it immediately clear what the page was about.
I had a conversation with the production team about page placement. Previously, the bookshop ads had no fixed home in the magazine. I worked to get them positioned closer to the book reviews section, so that a reader who'd just finished reading about a book they wanted could turn the page and find a prompt to buy it. Simple yet powerful, reducing the distance between consideration and action.
Finally, I also worked with the editorial team to get a callout box added directly onto the book review page itself; a simple prompt that told readers they could buy the book at a discount through us. This meant that even in issues where we didn’t have a bookshop ad, there was still a reference and a call to action for The Week Bookshop.
Step two: let the content do the work
Early on, the page ads tended to be themed, for example "books for the great outdoors". These were thematically appealing, but disconnected from what readers were actually engaging with in that issue.
I pivoted. Instead of curating themed selections, I leaned into the magazine's own editorial, featuring recently reviewed books, the ones fresh in a reader’s mind. And by surfacing what was selling well and labelling those books as bestsellers, I introduced an element of social proof. If other readers like you are buying this, maybe you should too.
Those page ads were reflected on the website as product collections, making it easier for people to find what they were looking for, and creating a seamless customer experience from print to website.
As a result of these changes, net revenue increased by 82% within seven months.
Step three: INTERNAL POLITICS
Internal politics doesn’t usually get referenced in case studies, but if you’ve ever worked in a business with multiple revenue streams, you’ll know the friction of managing competing team targets.
Magazine space is valuable, and the ads team were always looking to reclaim a page if they thought they could sell it. That meant I had to regularly make the case to leadership for why the bookshop deserved its space – balancing the ads team's need for immediate revenue against the loyalty programme's longer-term value to the business.
I presented a simple but effective argument: I mapped our page ad frequency against our sales figures, and the correlation was clear. More consistent presence in the magazine meant more sales. The publishing director agreed, and I secured two guaranteed page ads per issue, which I then scheduled strategically across the loyalty programme pillars.
It's a reminder that being a good marketer isn't just about the customer-facing work; knowing how to bring people inside the business with you is just as important.
Step four: making email work harder
Alongside the in-magazine activity, email was a critical channel, and one I was determined to optimise properly.
Over time, I A/B tested almost every variable: day of the week, time of day, subject lines, design layouts (image-led vs text-led), pricing or no pricing, CTA button placement, CTA button colour. Each test generated a learning, and each learning informed the next send.
I also introduced list segmentation, prioritising our most engaged subscribers to improve deliverability and relevance.
The cumulative effect of this sustained testing meant that open rates improved significantly, and CTR increased from 3.5% to 15%. We hit that figure more than once, so it wasn't a fluke. It was the result of months of testing, refining, testing again and refining further.
Step five: improving those customer metrics
Using Shopify's built-in tools, I introduced a series of nudges at the checkout stage to cross-sell and upsell.
Customers were offered a branded leather bookmark, and an exclusive discount for our own book, The Art of The Week. I also tested "customers also bought" cross-sell prompts tied to specific titles. If someone was buying one book, we'd suggest an additional title that readers with similar tastes had enjoyed.
I also set up automated abandoned basket emails to recover lost sales, and post-purchase emails a week or so later recommending other popular titles — keeping the bookshop front of mind and encouraging repeat purchases.
Each of these interventions was relatively small, but together, they had a measurable impact on increasing average order value (AOV), items per order and repeat customer purchases.
The 144%: a campaign built on everything that came before
By the time we got to the end of the year, growth had been building consistently month-on-month. But the headline stat – 144% year-on-year sales growth – came from a Black Friday campaign. Yet it deliberately avoided feeling like a Black Friday campaign.
Rather than leaning into urgency and discounting, we went the other way. We designed a "gift card" creative: a stylish, premium-feeling insert that landed with every subscriber copy of the magazine that week. The messaging was simple: a thank you for being a loyal subscriber, with £5 off their next purchase; no minimum spend. A genuine gift.
The design mattered. By presenting a discount as a gift card rather than a promotional voucher, the offer felt more considered and more premium, entirely in keeping with The Week’s positioning and our subscribers’ expectations.
The magazine landed on a Friday. We followed up with an email on Saturday, which also served as a gentle nudge for subscribers to open their magazine, tying neatly back to our original objective of keeping subscribers engaged with the publication itself.
The result was 144% year-on-year growth. But here's the detail that made me most proud: a month later, the data showed that the £5 discount hadn't come at the cost of profitability. AOV dipped slightly over the campaign weekend, as you might expect, but the overall AOV for the entire month was still higher than it had been six months earlier. We hadn't sacrificed margin for volume; we'd grown both.
So, what's the point?
The point is that 144% didn't come from one smart idea. It came from:
Stronger branding
Advertising positioning
Letting the content do the heavy lifting
Persuading other teams to give space to marketing
Months of email A/B testing
Checkout optimisations
A campaign concept rooted in customer psychology rather than promotional mechanics
None of these things are big and flashy, but together, they build momentum, and that's what growth actually looks like behind a headline stat or a Linkedin post.
Next time you see an impressive number, ask what's behind it. Was it a one-off that's hard to replicate, or a considered, holistic approach that takes a little longer to explain, but delivers continued growth?
_ _ _ _ _
I’m George, I specialise in customer engagement, retention and loyalty. I work with businesses looking to deepen their customer relationships and drive measurable commercial growth. If that sounds like you, click the button below to contact me.
