Gedi Digital accelerates audience engagement and operational efficiency with OneSignal

✅ With OneSignal’s data integrations and segmentation capabilities, Gedi’s marketing team gained full control over their messaging strategy, eliminating reliance on developers and accelerating campaign execution.

✅ With OneSignal’s HTML and in-app messaging (IAM) templates, Gedi Digital’s marketing team gained the autonomy to launch and update campaigns without developer support or app store delays—resulting in a 22% increase in iOS subscriptions.

Gedi Digital is a leading publisher in Italy and Europe, owning La Repubblica, one of Italy’s top newspapers, among other prominent media outlets like Radio Deejay. As a media company, Gedi operates across diverse channels, including print, digital, radio, magazines, and multimedia. The company’s mission is clear: create and deliver valuable content to the right audience at the right time.

As the digital arm of a multifaceted company, Gedi Digital faced several unique challenges. Each branch of their business — newsrooms, streaming platforms, and radio — had distinct needs, requiring a fine-tuned approach to mobile engagement. However, balancing simplicity, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, all while satisfying diverse audiences was no easy task.

Gedi’s previous custom messaging tool exacerbated these difficulties. It lacked essential functionalities like segmentation, API integrations, and performance insights, leaving the team “totally blind” to user engagement. The newsroom staff, for example, had no way to gauge whether a push notification about politics performed better than one about business or crime. Additionally, the tool couldn’t manage web push notifications or scale to accommodate Gedi’s expanding needs. The platform was not only insufficient but also expensive, providing little return on investment.

As Gedi Digital pivoted away from its custom, but rigid engagement solution, OneSignal emerged as a critical component of their scaling efforts.

Where they previously lacked flexibility, the OneSignal platform could be easily integrated into their existing systems and adopted across multiple websites and use cases.

Beyond that, Gedi Digital unlocked visibility into invaluable performance metrics like subscriber counts and click-through rates to assess the impact of their notifications across their various publication sources.

After evaluating their options, Gedi chose OneSignal for its scalability, offering the potential to add advanced omnichannel features in the future, while providing a cost-effective solution today that outperformed their expensive and outdated custom tool.

OneSignal transformed Gedi’s ability to deliver notifications in real time — a critical improvement for live sports streaming and breaking news. Complaints about messaging delays, once a significant pain point, became a thing of the past. With OneSignal’s API and event streams, Gedi could ensure timely and engaging communication with its audiences.

Thanks to OneSignal's HTML and IAM templates, the marketing team at Gedi gained newfound independence. They can now make campaign updates without relying on app developers or submitting time-consuming app store updates for every minor change to their app flows. This reduces their time to market for new campaigns and frees up valuable development resources.

This recent autonomy has proved fruitful beyond front-end productivity - Gedi achieved a 22% increase in iOS subscribers directly attributed to OneSignal's in-app messages.

Gedi leverages OneSignal’s segmentation capabilities to create tailored messaging experiences for its many different audiences. It also found value in OneSignal’s HTML templates, which simplified the creation of complex branch logic for different content types.

Between personalizing push notifications and streamlining their in-app messaging strategy, Gedi saw a significant increase in iOS subscriptions - activations grew by 80% in the second half of 2024, compared to the same period of time during the previous year.

Although still in the early stages of using OneSignal’s APIs, Gedi has already seen improvements in data sharing and integration. For example, they can now link additional metadata — such as the author of an article or the tags involved — to their messaging campaigns. This level of detail enables them to provide more relevant and personalized notifications to their audience.

With OneSignal’s support, Gedi Digital has not only solved its immediate challenges but also laid the groundwork for future growth and innovation in its mobile engagement efforts. As they continue to streamline and scale their engagement strategy, Gedi looks ahead to opening new possibilities through in-app messaging (IAM), SMS, and email in the future.