Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
Yo Tyler, what's up? my God, it's snowing. Yeah. We're getting, we're getting some snow in the forecast too. hey, welcome to another, a paywall podcast. have Tyler here, Tyler channel from a newsletter glue. I'm Pete Erickson from leaky paywall. And we're here to talk subscription success. Ready to go. Okay.

Tyler (00:01)
How's it going? It's snowy. It's cold.

to go.

Pete (00:55)
So last week I had the pleasure of presenting to the AAN Publishers Group, Alternative Association of News. They're a great resource for local news publishers. And one of the questions that came up in our session really struck me and it was, subscriptions worth the customer service hassle? I thought that was a super interesting question. I know you work with quite a number of local news publishers.

So, and we haven't talked about this before. I thought we'd just jump in and talk about it. How's that sound?

Tyler (01:30)
Yeah,

yeah. Honestly, I've never heard that one before from a publisher who's considering a paywall or any kind of membership system. yeah. ⁓

Pete (01:35)
Mm-hmm.

It's a good one.

It's a good one.

Tyler (01:46)
Yeah, so

we're publishers that we're listening, where they... Do you think most of them had paywalls already? I would assume not, Yeah.

Pete (01:55)
It was a mix. It was a mix.

There definitely was a group of donation focused news publications. And ⁓ I think we also know that some, some publications come in with the pure advertising model. So, ⁓ that, that was, that was the crowd that we had. ⁓ and thinking about it, I think it falls kind of into that category of being nervous about setting up a paywall. So.

Yeah, you might know that you need the revenue, but you're still thinking, I don't really want to piss off my readers. Right. I think it kind of falls into that bucket. And we have a, we have a whole podcast on that. but I want to dive into that because the two, sort of follow ups I got to that question were I got to manage payments and I got to manage login issues. So those were kind of like the two big pain points that, ⁓

I I wanted to tackle each one ⁓ and let's just jump into it. First of all, ⁓ the answer to, subscriptions worth the customer service hassle is an absolute yes. I think you might agree with me on this one. ⁓ The revenue gain, if you just look at advertising versus ⁓ subscription.

Tyler (03:14)
For sure, for sure.

Pete (03:22)
It's enormous. Each new paid subscriber that you bring on board brings in enormous amount of profit as far as revenue dollars go versus, you know, ad clicks and impressions. And as far as like payment hassle, I think one of the big things to keep in mind today is as things really progresses is work with best in class solutions. And that's what, you know, the two of us do.

And that's what makes things work well. So as far as payments, if you're gonna take payments for subscriptions, in my opinion, you have to use Stripe. I don't think there's really another solution even close that throws off the benefits that Stripe does. Would you agree with that?

Tyler (04:12)
Absolutely. Streamline your processes into one system ⁓ like Stripe. I see publishers wanting to offer like seven or eight different payment gateways. Don't fall for that because that will eat into your support burden that comes along with having a paywall.

Pete (04:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'd say PayPal is probably one of the other runner ups that comes into the mix. We deal with authorized net quite a bit, which is really a legacy payment ⁓ gateway. And I'm not gonna talk about those two very much. I really just wanna talk a little bit about Stripe. So ⁓ I don't get paid for promoting Stripe. We are a Stripe verified partner here and we've been using it for, I don't know, a decade. It's been a long time.

So things that Stripe does incredibly well, way better than others. First of all, ⁓ when we set it up and somebody, let's say somebody subscribes on a publication, there's a My Account page with a very clear cancellation link on it, right? So what you want, you don't wanna be managing these things. You want your paid subscribers to be managing their own payments, right? So they can cancel it anytime they

click the button, they can drop off some feedback if they want, but that is ⁓ part of what's necessary. And there are rules and regulations, especially in the EU that are coming up that really do require this, but make the cancellation really simple. Also, Stripe lets you set up upgrades and downgrades on subscription plans super easily. And they take care of the proration of the...

subscription so if somebody goes from like monthly to annual they will prorate you know whatever has been already paid on the monthly apply it to the annual subscription and it all happens invisibly in the background. ⁓ Their dashboard is fantastic you need to make it you want to give someone a credit or whatever ⁓ manage manage a subscriber you can just jump in and do it it's it's super easy it doesn't happen a lot in the paid subscription model at least

from my viewpoint, but the dashboard is really, really good. ⁓ The other thing I want to say is that Stripe does churn reduction better than any other payment processor out there. ⁓ I've talked to a lot of, we've worked with different payment processors. I've talked to a lot of publishers and ⁓ agencies and consultants that work with different payment processors. And the data is pretty interesting. Like when there's a credit card failure,

⁓ because of lack of funds or whatever it is. I've seen Stripe try nine times. That's the highest I've seen, but they'll try a bunch of times to recharge that. They use AI to figure out when's the best time to try recharging the payment. And if the payment finally fails, there's a whole marketplace for churn reduction out there to pick up. So,

As an example, there's a great solution called Churn Buster. We actually use it ourselves and what it will do is it will kick in a series of a 30 day ⁓ email campaign. think it's like 12 emails that get sent, that get dripped out over the 30 days and each email is like, hey, please update your credit card, right? And ⁓ you set up so you click the link and you just go to the publisher's website URL, fill out the new credit card information.

It gets updated and done. And it really takes care of 99 % of the hassles for dealing with churn out there. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. your responsibility for like managing the cancellations, know, payments, cancellations, upgrades, downgrades, and churn reduction is like pretty close to zero. It's just amazing.

Tyler (08:21)
Yeah, yeah, and I'll just add from a hyper technical perspective on on Stripe if you ever decide to change your pricing and you want your existing subscribers, you know to go from let's say nine dollars to twelve dollars per month in the future. Let's say we have that happen all the time publishers you should be doing this at least maybe once a year maybe once every two years like you should be raising your pricing on your existing subscribers at some point.

⁓ Stripe makes this possible. It's very difficult with other payment gateways. Just know that if you go with Stripe, this process can be done without too much fuss.

Pete (09:05)
That's a really, that's an excellent point. There's, there's like, like free money right there, right? You just, I mean, it's not free, but you, yeah, every year or two, yeah. Increase your pricing and, and, uh, yeah, we can, we can help with that. I'm sure others can help with that. Um, know calling a Stripe transfer can help with that. Um, there's, there's resources. So, um, the other thing I wanted to mention about, um,

Stripe is

Something I forgot. I can't remember what it was. There's something else. ⁓ now I know what it was. I know what it was. If you're using AuthorizeNet or a different payment gateway, ⁓ I know other paywall systems have managed payment intents on there. ⁓ Stripe will gladly migrate you for free all your ⁓ paid subscriptions, recurring subscriptions.

Tyler (09:47)
Probably the recurrent re-

Pete (10:10)
You know everyone into their they're absolutely just super happy to run everything So you call stripe you say hey unauthorized net or whatever? I'd like to move all my subscriptions over to you guys you want to do that and they'll be like yes, please and they'll just move everybody in for you ⁓ It's they're amazing that way. Okay enough about stripe second question or the second sentiment ⁓

from the coaches was login issues. Okay, well, now I'm dealing with paid subscriptions, now I have to deal with login issues. That's a big hassle. And I'm gonna get all these emails to me that are saying, hey, I can't log in, please help me, and I gotta deal with that. And yes, there is some friction there, but you can get rid of most of that friction if you set it up right. And ⁓ so let me jump in. So first of all, at least on our end with Leaky Paywall, we just use the WordPress login system.

So if somebody's logging in, WordPress has it down. ⁓ You can use ⁓ single sign-on, you can use social sign-on, plugins, and make it easy for folks to log in. It's just ⁓ anything that WordPress supports, ⁓ you can use to make things easier for your subscribers. ⁓ Okay. So the other thing that... ⁓

We talk about a lot, it's this free registration, right? And that sort of pours the fuel on login, right? ⁓ So the other problem that we might hear is, well, okay, we're recommending a free registration. Let me just flip over to Salem Reporter here and show the free registration. And the way we've been setting it up traditionally is you get one free article.

on the second article, you have to put in your email and password. You'll get that second article. You'll get, the email gets passed to MailChimp or, or the newsletter provider. ⁓ so now you're, yes, you're dealing with logins. You have a paid checkout. There's a login, right? Email and password. You absolutely are dealing with this. Do people mess that up? Yep, they do. It's like, I can't log in. It's systems working absolutely a hundred percent. They just can't figure out how to log in. Right.

And this, have a new feature here for the quick login where you can simply use an email only. Right. And the way this works, if you're looking on YouTube, ⁓ it's the same free registration. The story is free for you. Sign up, get the article, get the newsletter. And it's literally just a single login or single email field. Now what happens.

is the ⁓ email gets passed ⁓ into MailChimp or whatever. And this person is registered as a free registered reader and Leaky Paywall generates a password automatically, like a random password automatically. traditionally with this, would set up a welcome email that says, hey, here's how to log in. thanks for registering. Here's how to log in. Either here's your password or ⁓ reset your password.

And off you go. But that's a little bit of a hassle for the reader. I mean, this sort of plays into the the like login issues, right?

Tyler (13:36)
Yeah. Yeah, nobody reads those by the way. They see those instructions

on how to reset their passwords. They miss that. They're not going through that. It shouldn't be that complicated. You shouldn't need an instruction guide on how to get into your account. So, continue. Yeah.

Pete (13:44)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Right, exactly. Okay.

So, so what's the solution? Well, the solution is to not have the readers log in at all, to have an automatically log in. so with, with a flow letter and newsletter glue, we have a, a solution for, publishers so that when somebody clicks any, any article link in the newsletter that shows up in the subscriber's inbox, whether it's a free registered reader or a paid subscriber, they click that link.

then we automatically log them in to the site. So 99 % of the time, there is no reason to log in, right? It's just completely seamless. I mean, what we find, I see, I don't know about you, but I find that the publishers help desk login issues pretty much disappear.

Tyler (14:43)
for sure Yeah. And most of your traffic to your site, once you start to build your, your free registration will come from that newsletter that you're producing and people are receiving it. They're clicking it. They're going back to your site and they're always logged in. doesn't matter which browser they land in. If they're on a mobile device, what have you, they're going to be logged in every single time.

Pete (15:08)
Yep. Yep. And I want to, I just want to show what happens with this. If you decide to lower the friction of registration, right? To get that email address in here and have essentially this kind of a, a setup where it's just email only. First of all, set up flow letter. So that the auto login happens, but here's a chart.

This is a real chart from a real publisher and well, I disappeared. Okay, here we go. And what it shows is it shows the number of free registrations in red and paid signups in blue. And if you look at when the field was, and you know, over time, the free registrations, you know, were coming in, paid subscriptions were coming in. But as soon as the field was changed and the password field was removed, so it was just email only.

which was like right around October 8 or something like that. What happened to free registrations? I mean, they're typically growing around 20 % month over month with the free registration. With a single email field, the registrations, I think it's safe to say they kind of doubled. Yeah.

Tyler (16:26)
⁓ definitely. And I've

seen this on multiple publishers where this sort of percentage increase is maintained over the course of two months, three months. Like it doesn't, it's not just this quick up and down that you get by removing the password field from the quick registration. So I would, I would definitely ⁓ be implementing this as soon as possible on your, on your site if you haven't already.

Pete (16:53)
Yeah. Yeah. We talk about blowing up email lists. Well, this really blows it up. It is, it is amazing. And you know, my, my, was a little cautious, as you know, upfront about going with the single email because of the login issues, but with flow letter and the, automatic login, ⁓ set up, ⁓ this now makes total sense and, really relieves that worry about, okay, how do I deal with, with logins for both free and paid?

Tyler (16:57)
Yeah.

Pete (17:23)
subscribers. So it's amazing. Okay, Tyler, anything else we should talk about as far as our subscriptions worth the customer service hassle?

Tyler (17:34)
The short

answer is, yes they are. Publishers wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't worth it. Even the local news publishers, it's worth it. ⁓ So don't be afraid of that. ⁓ Certainly there's going to be more admin, but it's not going to outpace ⁓ the value of what you're generating from your readers. So ⁓ yes, do it.

Pete (17:37)
You ⁓

for sure. Okay. So bottom line, get with Stripe, you know, I mean, you get Apple pay, you get Google pay built in, like it's, it's, it's amazing. Um, and then, uh, with the, uh, uh, free registrations and paid subscriptions set up, you know, talk to us about setting up an auto login system and being able to, to manage your newsletter much quicker, much, much easier. We're always happy to talk about that. That'll really set you up for success. So thanks, Tyler.

Tyler (18:32)
Thank you.

Pete (18:33)
Catch you next time.