Customer profile
IBJ Media, the parent company of the Indianapolis Business Journal, Inside INdiana Business, and The Indiana Lawyer, depends on subscription revenue and clear customer communication to support its newsroom operations across multiple brands. Optimizing that process requires precise, behavior-driven workflows that handle engagement and renewal communication seamlessly while running efficiently in the background.
IBJ Media had already built a sophisticated renewal architecture across multiple enterprise-level marketing automation platforms. The system included segmented messaging, differentiated paths for auto-renew and manual subscribers, payment-failure handling, and dynamic content driven by subscription data.
The challenge
“These platforms are expensive, and they come with technical constraints that most teams don’t discover until they push the limits of automation,” said Byron Hardie, Chief Digital & Technology Officer at IBJ Media. “If we were going to switch, Delivra had to match the best in the market, eliminate some of those friction points, and offer a more flexible pricing model.”
Results
Using Delivra’s Air platform, IBJ Media implemented a fully automated renewal and engagement workflow tailored to its internal processes and subscriber data. The system differentiates between auto-renew and manual subscribers, dynamically adapts messaging based on payment status, automatically handles failed transaction communications, creates structured winback onramps, and triggers personalized engagement emails based on behavioral thresholds — all without manual intervention.
Rather than relying on rigid templates, IBJ Media built a custom automation framework powered by API integrations and custom fields. Subscriber subscription data flows directly into Delivra, where triggered workflows reference those fields to deliver accurate, dynamic messaging aligned with IBJ Media’s internal systems.
The result is a renewal and communication engine that is scalable, precise, and fully data-driven.
Enterprise capability without enterprise friction
With Delivra, IBJ Media maintains a sophisticated, always-on renewal and engagement system that protects subscriber revenue while strengthening touchpoints across the customer lifecycle.
“Delivra delivers the UI, automation depth, reporting, and API flexibility you’d expect from an enterprise platform — without the enterprise baggage. We’ve used almost everyone in this space. I was skeptical at first, but they delivered.”
Byron Hardie, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, IBJ Media
