Stacked Marketer

Stacked Marketer is one of the most successful marketing newsletters. Emanual Cinca’s brainchild scaled from a small newsletter to a full fledged media company with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Like any success story, Staked Marketer’s path to where it stands today was full of challenges that had to be overcome the right way.

This is a story of one challenge in particular – when they found themselves limited by their tech stack and tools. Read on to explore how things turned around for them once Refact helped consolidate and streamline their editorial workflows, refreshing the brand and overall design along the way.

Stacked Marketer is a remarkable media company with a massive audience that keeps growing. Besides the Stacked Marketer newsletter, they also offer other products, including Tactics, Psychology of Marketing and the paid community product, Stacked Marketer Pro.

Over the past year, our partnership has evolved from small technical services into a robust, comprehensive collaboration. Stacked Marketer’s team first approached us for consulting on isolated technical issues, and they were so happy with the results that they gradually increased our role in their design and development. Finally, we worked together to give their branding and design a complete makeover, and improve their website. We are proud of our part in Stacked Marketer’s successful growth. This case study goes over our more significant contributions.

Let’s rewind to over a year ago. Stacked Marketer was already rolling out its flagship newsletter along with Tactics and Psychology of Marketing. However, these newsletters had no visual connection. They didn’t have a cohesive look that signaled they were from the same company, making them unrecognizable to the audience.

They were seeing more people unsubscribing from the newsletters simply because they couldn’t tell these newsletters were from the same team. It is always nice to have solid brand identity recognizable across brands, but for Stacked Marketer, this was a must-have. Without understanding why they were receiving them, more subscribers were likely to opt-out.

At the center of our collaboration with Stacked Marketer is the redesign of all their graphic assets. We redesigned their branding and logo. We also revamped and redesigned their website into a high-impact, engaging, and reader-friendly experience. Our efforts have brought new life to Stacked Marketer’s visual identity across all channels and assets. We also redesigned their premium offering, Stacked Marketer Pro, with its own visual identity.

To make sure all visuals continue to align with Stacked Marketer’s new brand identity, we put together a brand new brand book. This brand style guide lays out everything that makes Stacked Marketer stand out graphically, including its iconography and typography. Everything has been perfected to speak the same design language.

This is about more than a new look – it’s about setting a lasting standard for how they communicate visually, ensuring consistency across all channels and methods they use to reach out to their audience.

To create a new and improved website, we used the WordPress-native Gutenberg blocks for their flexibility and ease of use. You can learn more about that in this article. A significant part of the new UI/UX efforts were focused on creating a new homepage.

We recreated the Stacked Marketer website’s home page to enhance the user experience for our visitors. Our goal was to provide a seamless and captivating reading experience right from the outset. With these tweaks, the home page now serves as a helpful guide to help Stacked Marketer’s audience navigate the site with ease, enabling them to quickly and efficiently find the information they need.

Stacked Marketer was built around a simple concept: provide marketers with valuable information, knowledge, and resources. The newsletters they sent out handled a part of that. Making their mission a reality, though, meant a different kind of product altogether, one that could bring together resources and members into a community of learning.

Stacked Marketer Pro was initially planned as a place where members could access their community and the resources offered by the newsletter’s team. But turning that vision into a product that actually worked for both the team and its members required more than a membership plugin and a paywall. It required rethinking how new members would be onboarded, how content would be delivered and discovered, and how the experience would feel different from simply subscribing to another newsletter.

Onboarding That Personalizes the Experience

The first thing we built was a multi-step onboarding system that collects information from both free and Pro members when they sign up. Rather than dumping new users into a generic dashboard, the onboarding flow gathers details about their experience level, interests, and business model. That data syncs automatically with Campaign Monitor and is stored locally, which means the platform can personalize what each member sees from their very first visit. A new member interested in paid acquisition sees different recommendations than someone focused on SEO or email marketing.

We also built a deep link system that tracks which content a visitor was looking at when they hit the paywall. After they sign up, that same content appears in their dashboard so they can pick up right where they left off. It is a small detail, but it removes friction from the conversion flow and makes the first experience feel seamless rather than disorienting.

The Learning Hub: A Custom Dashboard for Self-Directed Learning

The original homepage of Stacked Marketer Pro was replaced with the Learning Hub, a fully custom dashboard built from 15 purpose-built Gutenberg blocks. The Learning Hub brings all resources into one easy-to-navigate interface where members can access courses in progress, see personalized article recommendations based on their interests, manage their bookmarks, and keep up with upcoming content.

The recommendation engine behind the Learning Hub uses a custom algorithm that factors in each member’s experience level, stated interests, and business model. Rather than showing the same content to everyone, the platform surfaces what is most relevant to each individual. Members can also bookmark articles, reports, and courses, and those bookmarks are automatically categorized and displayed in their dashboard for easy reference.

Content Notifications and Ongoing Engagement

To keep members engaged beyond their initial visit, we built a post-publish notification system that lets members subscribe to be notified when scheduled posts go live. The system processes emails in the background using a custom queue with retry logic, so the editorial team does not have to worry about deliverability bottlenecks or manual sends. Members can manage their notification preferences through a dedicated email preference center that uses token-based authentication, meaning they can update their subscriptions without needing to log in. The preference center connects directly with Campaign Monitor so every list stays in sync.

Monetization and Conversion Tools

On the revenue side, we built an offerwall system that presents special offers to new members immediately after signup. The system tracks clicks in a custom database table and includes rate limiting to ensure fair usage, with detailed statistics available in the admin panel for the Stacked Marketer team to monitor performance.

We also implemented a smart exit-intent popup system that can be configured on a per-page basis, with cookie management to respect user dismissals. These tools give the editorial team control over how and where they promote Pro memberships and partner offers without requiring developer involvement for each campaign.

A Job Board with Advanced Filtering

As part of the broader Pro experience, we built a job board with an advanced salary filter that supports range-based queries, including open-ended ranges like “$100,000+.” The filtering system uses custom meta queries to ensure accurate results, giving members a practical tool that adds ongoing value to their subscription.

40+ Custom Gutenberg Blocks and a Background Processing System

Across the entire Stacked Marketer platform, we developed over 40 custom Gutenberg blocks that give the editorial team full control over the site without touching code. These blocks span navigation (menus with accordion behavior, search, account management), content presentation (archives, table of contents, share buttons, galleries, reading time indicators), membership functionality (paywalls, login, checkout, onboarding flows), marketing (testimonials, FAQs, deal showcases), and the complete Learning Hub dashboard system. Every block was designed to work within the established brand identity so the team can build and update pages that feel consistent and polished.

Behind the scenes, all email-related operations run through a background processing system with queue management, automatic retry logic, and timeout prevention. This ensures that notification emails, onboarding sequences, and preference updates process reliably even at scale, without slowing down the site or requiring manual oversight.

We also built custom hooks into Gravity Forms for rate limiting and spam prevention, smart redirect logic that handles existing versus new users differently, and custom event tracking for SparkLoop and Google Analytics. A dedicated post-visit tracking system records which content members engage with, providing the editorial team with engagement statistics that inform future content decisions.

Stacked Marketer had to deal with the limitations of out-of-the-box technology and limited features. Once they partnered with Refact they now work with the right tools for their team so they can publish their best work more efficiently than ever.   Since the updates were deployed, Stacked Marketer has grown steadily gaining new subscribers every month.