Personalizing newsletter prompts on a Sanity editorial site by reading behavior
Editorial site on Sanity. The brief from upstairs: casual readers get a gentle newsletter nudge, heavy readers get the full subscription pitch, and nobody gets both. Modeling the prompt component is the easy part, the targeting is the question. Can conditions like pages read this session and topic interests actually be composed, and does evaluation happen fast enough to change what a reader sees mid-session? Our last attempt at this involved a cookie and a prayer
1 answer
Yes to both. Audience conditions are written in CQL and compose with and/or, so your heavy-reader audience can be something like:
session's stats' pageviews > 3 and user is returningand you can fold interests in too:
user has shown interest in ["politics", "business"]Interests are one of the 100+ signals available, and audiences are evaluated in real time on each interaction, so a reader who crosses the pageview threshold mid-session gets the subscription pitch on their next page, no cookie bookkeeping on your side.
For the "nobody gets both" requirement, set up two experiences on the same slot, one per audience. When a visitor matches more than one, experience priority (a unique numeric rank per slot) decides which wins, so give the subscription pitch the higher priority and the nudge becomes the catch-all below it.
Worth knowing this pattern has form in your industry: Brazil Journal, a media outlet, saw +93% newsletter subscriptions with this kind of behavioral targeting.
The priority rank answers the nobody-gets-both requirement neatly. Will build it this week and report back.