Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
Today we're going to talk about how one word, one simple word, boosted a publisher's registrations by over 50%. This is banana's data. We're going to show you the chart. We're also going to talk about how your touch points, your marketing touch points on your website are incredibly important and how you need to keep them simple in order to boost your conversion.

Hey Tyler, welcome. Tyler from Newsletter Glue here in the house. We're gonna touch all points of your readership experience. And first I wanna say is that you're a publisher. ⁓ You're here probably because you are excellent at writing content and it's super engaging for your readers.

Tyler (00:55)
Hello, hello.

Pete (01:16)
and that's probably gonna be your biggest Achilles heel when it comes to writing marketing copy. So why am I saying that? Well, when you get into digital marketing, you're dealing with audiences that are scanning your content, right? And that means you have to be blunt, simple, blunt, and just hit people over the head with a hammer to get your message across. You guys are great at nuance.

with your content, but nuance is not great for digital marketing. There's too much happening. I'm say that what I see with publishers is publishers love to give lots of options to their readers, and that actually hurts you. Less options to readers are better than more options. So I just need to get that off my chest. This is a mindset shift. You wanna really simplify

everything that you're doing to convert a paid subscriber. Okay, now I'm going to fulfill my promise here and talk about this one word that led to 50 % growth. You guys are probably looking at a chart. If you're on YouTube, you're looking at a chart. This chart is a comparison of paid subscriptions and free registrations on the Olive Press, which is the Spain's largest English speaking newspaper. They've quite a lot of traffic to the site. They have free registrations installed.

and paid subscriptions installed. And so what happened? All right. So this red line here back on May 14th, and I'm talking about free registrations here. If I go and look at the subscription NAG, the free registration NAG that pops up after one article view, and they get, they got this message. This story is free for you.

So the free registration, if you don't know what this is, this is the sort of the linchpin of growing your email list much faster than you have before in order to drive all this free registered traffic back to your site, which means you take control of all of the growth of traffic to your site. You're not so dependent on Google search.

and social media sharing because you're building your own email list. It's your first party data What do you think Tyler? Is that a good thing? Should we be doing that? Okay.

Tyler (03:37)
Absolutely. Absolutely

should be doing that, regardless of what kind of content you produce, whether it's news or magazine content or what have you.

Pete (03:48)
Yes. So we're going to, we take every podcast and try to sneak in the story about the free registration. ⁓ If you're doing it, it's time to look at it. If you're not doing it, it's time to do it. Does that make sense? More coffee. Okay. So what happened here? So I'm going to go back. This is the, this is the free registration that showed up on May 14th. It says this story is free for you. Create a free account to access this article. Get more of the all of press news, Spain's top stories sent to you by newsletter.

two promises here. ⁓ It's free, you'll get more content and you'll get our newsletter. And this happened on, if you look at the red arrow here ⁓ on ⁓ May 14th and that, or up to May 14th. And then on May 14th, it was changed. So the idea was let's test. I think testing is great. Yeah. I think you should always be testing. So

This is the new test. The new test, the title says, instead of the story is free for you, the title says continue reading. Create a free account to access this article and get more of the Olive Press News, Spain's top stories sent to you by newsletter. So it's just a simple change. One from the story is free for you to continue reading. continue reading is a reasonable change. It tells you what you can do, right? If you create a free account.

But if we go back to the chart, we'll see what happened. So on May 14th, continue reading came into play. What happened to the free registrations? They went from, I'm not gonna reveal numbers here, ⁓ but they went from a peak and they cut that peak in half. And then over a period of two weeks through May 30th, the free registrations fell dramatically. Two weeks, lot of traffic. You know, a week I'd say is a fair,

if your website gets a lot of traffic. In fact, a day could be a good trial. But in this case, it was two weeks, and then two weeks later, ⁓ what did they do? They actually switched back. They went back to the story is free for you on May 30th. So on May 30th, what happened? Free registration jumped again, over 50%. And if you look at the last, let's see, May 30th through...

June 9, you can see that those free registrations started skyrocketing again. This is crazy. This is one simple test, one word. And so why, why does this happen? Tyler, you want to take a guess as to why this happened?

Tyler (06:13)
My guess is that people see free and it's more clear to them that they're gonna be able to access that content without having to pay, whereas if they see continue reading, it's not as clear to them that do I get to see the whole thing, do I have to pay at some point? It's a bit more blurry in terms of the offering, is my guess anyway. Yeah.

Pete (06:35)
Yeah,

that's exactly right. Free is the key word. Free compels. It's simple, it sticks in your brain. ⁓ Again, if somebody is scanning and they're scanning through continue reading, it's kind of boring. like continue reading. I don't know what that means. I'm getting an idea. But if they scan and it's like, ⁓ something's free. okay, what is free? ⁓ this is free. Okay, I'm gonna do it. It's as simple as that. Free works.

Tyler (06:59)
Yeah, for sure.

We like free stuff. ⁓

Pete (07:03)
We like free stuff. Now, just a couple of points here. And we're gonna cover subscription, the messaging here, the subscription options landing page, the welcome emails, and the newsletter format. Those are the things we're gonna cover. And we're gonna talk about how to keep them simple. So we're gonna help you kind of dial back options, keep things simple. Now these numbers I think are insane. And the other thing that you have to keep in mind is when we are scanning your...

your content, your text, ⁓ and try to make a decision, you not only have to use the word free, but in all the language that you use on the site is you have to keep it simple. have to keep it at an eighth grade level. If you do any kind of research on the web and say, what sort of digital marketing grade level I should be writing at, eighth grade is a really good place to be. It's a highly converting.

That sounds like, okay, well, are people stupid? No, it's not people are stupid. It's people are busy, right? People are in a hurry. We're cranking through stuff. So when we're scanning, we can absorb eighth grade language, simple words. We can absorb that very easily. You start injecting nuance into your language and what happens? Our filter just wipes stuff out. We don't see it, right? So eighth grade. ⁓

Tyler (08:23)
Yeah,

and everyone who's, anyone who's ever been to journalism school will attest to that as journalists are often trained to write at a lower level by default because it needs to be understandable. Things need to be, you know. ⁓

Pete (08:33)
Mmm.

Tyler (08:41)
brought to a certain level for the masses to easily digest and understand it, whereas if you're constantly adding big words, highly scientific things, people aren't going to quite get it. yeah, that's like kind of by default journalists have that instinct of bringing things to a universal level. Yeah.

Pete (09:02)
That's amazing. ⁓

If you guys didn't know this, Tyler actually taught journalism ⁓ at the local university. So he knows what he's talking about. That's interesting to hear. actually never heard you say that. That's cool. All right. Thanks. All right. So let's just take a look at a couple of other examples. We're going to start looking at touch points. ⁓ And now that we've covered the free registration touch point, I'm going to jump into a couple of other things.

Tyler (09:08)
You

Yeah.

Pete (09:31)
Now after free registration, which captures that email, registers the person on the site, sends it to the newsletter and the newsletter sending that person back, they'll see the next message, right? And this next message here is on Salem Reporter. And I wanna talk a little bit about keeping things simple. One of the things that you can do with your message is use bullet points. That is a super effective way of delivering a scannable message. And as a bonus,

Salem Reporter's pretty good at writing about benefits versus features as well here. And benefit is all about how do you make your customer, in this case, reader's life or your audience's life better. What are you doing for them? Features are like get 24-7 access to breaking news. That's a feature. It doesn't really make your life better. It's a good feature, and you should say it. But staying informed with our award-winning coverage, right? That's more of a benefit.

Cause I wanna stay informed. Like that makes me smarter at the dinner table, right? And I know what's going on. Help us hold officials accountable. I can help. I can help you. Yes. So my payment will help that. That benefits me. We humans like to help, right? Supporting transparent journalism, right? Yes. I wanna support. Enjoy our clutter free digital experience. Let's say an ad free plan. So

An ad-free plan is the feature, but enjoying a clutter-free experience is the benefit to me. So just think about that. Anyway, bullet points, simple. All right, let's go on to the next one. Let's jump into email a little bit. Your wheelhouse, ⁓ The welcome email, we're looking at Salem Reporter, this is the welcome email for the free registration.

So don't know anything about Salem Reporter, maybe, maybe I know a lot about it, but you have to assume that people don't really know who you are and what your mission is. The welcome email, if you look at it here, this is really about the mission of the publication. It's sort of a high level, hey, thanks for joining us, we have this great mission, this is what we do, and then of course there's always a call out like, know, please consider subscribing. But the simple thing I wanna point out here is,

Tyler, you want to venture a guess why this email is simple and powerful.

Tyler (11:54)
because there's a yes, count me in button on the email at the bottom. Yeah.

Pete (11:58)
Yeah, one button. That's a good one. The second

one is that it's written in plain text. This is what we call a transactional email. And if you, again, go online, do the data, do the search. What's happening today is we are getting so used to receiving so many fancy emails, call them HTML emails that are super designed, that when we see something simple that comes in, that looks like it got kicked off a listserv,

Tyler (12:04)
All

Pete (12:25)
or some very basic system, we actually flag that as more important now, right? So the simple email that comes from your website welcoming you or maybe like a password reset, these are transactional emails. These are actually registering stronger with readers than the fancy ⁓ designed HTML emails. So keep it simple.

Just write the copy for your welcome email. Don't anything. And also let's talk about ⁓ paid email. So let's say I'm a free reader. I registered a pay. I get a welcome email from, ⁓ for my paid subscription. Same thing, just keep it simple. Use a transactional, but here's an opportunity to simply upsell one thing.

Right, so think about it, your reader decided to pay you. They're kind of in that honeymoon period. You have an opportunity to upsell something else. Now, I've seen a lot of, I've seen publishers send people to landing pages after a payment, and the landing page had like four offers on it. Right, don't do that. That's a lot. Pick one thing, right?

So you're a nonprofit. ⁓ Maybe you're doing subscriptions and donations. Somebody subscribes, asks for a donation. ⁓ You're a news publisher or a magazine publisher. Ask to give a gift, right? Somebody pays, maybe they have a friend who wants a gift. Or give a coupon away. Coupon can be a free three month, this is unadvertised, unpublished subscription, three month.

full access for free to a friend. Right? Pick one thing. Keep it simple. Make an upsell. What do think, Tyler?

Tyler (14:17)
love it. Anytime you can keep it simple, whether it's with the email, whether it's with the offering, you're going to have higher conversions.

Pete (14:27)
Yep,

group subscriptions, that's the other one. If you're V2B, I don't want to forget that. Think about upselling a group subscription to a corporate, to a school, ⁓ chain of ⁓ lunch places, whatever it is. Okay, let's see, where are we now? Let's keep going here. All right, let's talk about simple subscribe pages. I'd say Salem Reporter is probably one of the highest performing simple

subscriptions that we've seen. This has been running for a long time. We haven't talked about Sun Reporter in a little while, but how many years would you say this particular offer has been running?

Tyler (15:05)
⁓ almost two years probably.

Pete (15:07)
Through years. And it has changed a lot.

Tyler (15:10)
No, the price has changed a tiny bit, but the messaging and offering, the time frame, everything is virtually unchanged.

Pete (15:19)
So this is a digital only news publication. ⁓ First three months for the price of one, that means $12 for three months and then $12 per month thereafter. There's one subscribe now button for the monthly plan. There's a text linked underneath that says choose a yearly plan and there's a gift subscription link essentially. And this performs incredibly well. It's all on a single card and it absolutely works. Now, if you're in the digital only space,

then you can pull something like this off. If you're in a print and digital space, it gets a little more challenging because you have a print product and a digital product, but that's okay, we're gonna show you that. So I'm just gonna pop over to Small Boats. We haven't talked about Small Boats in a while. They have a great landing page if you wanna take a look at it. It's a digital magazine. They happen to do a pop-up promotion. What magic word did they use in that pop-up promotion?

Tyler (16:12)
Free!

Pete (16:13)
Seven day

free trial giving away time. Let's click past that. That's a nice simple promo. ⁓ Wally's been working on that one. I've seen that promo pop up now a few times over the last month or two. So that means it's working for them, but they have a single landing page that has an editor's welcome, has bullet points of benefits, has a single subscribe for me button, and then there's a give a gift button. So you're only

decision point on this page is do I subscribe for me or do I subscribe for someone else? Simple, right? Not a lot of choices here. Works. Okay, let's jump into print. This is where it gets, you know, this is where I see, you know, nine subscription cards on a subscribe page. And that's, that's trouble. ⁓

Tyler (17:02)
Hmm.

Pete (17:06)
If you take a quick look at Civil War Monitor, you have a nice, simple, ⁓ know, nicely designed intro. You have three cards, there's print, there's digital, there's all access. Now, ⁓ I was talking to a print publisher we're onboarding ⁓ last week, and they had a lot of options, ⁓ including a two year recurring plan. And what they had six, ⁓ you know, they had

six geographic areas. They're running on WordPress multisite and they have a lot of complexity in their print and now soon to be digital subscriptions. But what we settled on as a solution was simply two cards on a subscription page. Sorry, three cards on a subscription page. Digital only access for one region, one city basically. ⁓ Print digital access.

for that one city. And those are really the two main offerings. And they want to offer an all access pass for all six cities. So it's three cards. Not bad. ⁓ They like their two year plan. They do get some uptake on the two year plan. Not a lot, but they get some. And so what do you do when you have additional plans? Create another card? Not really.

You want your cards to be your main offerings. If you have other offerings like a two-year plan or let's say a corporate or group access, just add a text link underneath those cards. And that's it, people will find it.

Yeah, one of the things we found, Tyler, you were the one who pointed this out, is that when readers are looking at subscription cards, they read all the text. So like back on Salem Reporter, this big button here, subscribe now, this is the monthly plan button. the choose a yearly plan and save 17 % text link underneath, you might, if you were scanning this,

Tyler (18:45)
Yeah.

Pete (18:58)
like I mentioned earlier, you'd miss it. You'd just be looking at the bold text and the big button. But when it comes to subscription cards, now you're going from people that are scanning to make decisions to pull out my credit card. So now it's time to read every word on the subscription card.

Tyler (19:10)
Right.

Yeah, and in some cases, depending on the offering in that text link, sometimes the text link can outperform the promo depending on that offer. So by simplifying everything into one card and keeping it simple, it makes it a bit easier to get people to level up to, you know, in this case from a trial basically for three months on a monthly plan to a yearly plan.

Pete (19:44)
Yeah,

and this is the way this is set up is genius because your first offer, there's two offers on here. One is better than the next, which supports this theory. The first three months for the price of one, that sounds good. I pay 12 bucks, I get three months. That's good. I can do that. But then the next offer is choose a yearly plan and save 17 % more.

Ooh, that's even better. So psychologically you step people into, ooh, this is a good offer to, this is an even better offer. And magically the better offer outperforms the good offer. All done on one card. One simple card. Good for mobile. Really good for mobile.

Tyler (20:19)
Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

Yeah, and it just shows how much people really want to read their content too. it's like they're going, they're bypassing the promo, which is intended to give you an additional taste of the content for a small amount of money to let's just buy the whole thing for the whole year and be done with all the nagging of upgrade messaging. Yeah.

Pete (20:42)
Yes.

Exactly, yeah.

Strong content, of course, is the key. And that's where you can be nuanced, and that's where your readers want to spend their time with. But to get them there, to convert them there, requires simplicity, eighth grade language, and taking a very simple approach to your setup. Makes your life easier too. Okay, let's jump to newsletters. We'll finish up on that. That's the...

⁓ Last, and I would argue the most important touch point of this whole process. ⁓ So when somebody registers for free on your site, they ⁓ get the free newsletter. And by definition, if you have a free registration running and a paid subscription, you have two newsletters. You may only have one newsletter because that's what you're used to and that seems to be working okay. But really you have two newsletters now.

If you don't, this is the time to say, okay, let's focus on our free newsletter and let's make sure when people pay, we're segmenting them into the paid newsletter. So ⁓ the free newsletter, the purpose of your free newsletter when you're getting into paid subscriptions is to sell the paid subscription. It's the upgrade message that is the only reason for its existence. Yeah, I know you guys are gonna tell me I'm full of it, but the truth is,

is when you're getting into subscriptions, your free newsletter is all about, yeah, building that list. Sure, that's great for sponsors. Sure, that's great for traffic. But your end goal here is to build paid subscriptions. That's a whole new revenue stream for you and a really important one. And so you need the upgrade messaging on that. Okay. So ⁓ how do you, how do you do this? Okay. Back to small boats. Haven't looked at this in a while, but ⁓ essentially

Keep it simple. You have two spots on your newsletter that you want your upgrade messaging. One is up top. Hey, subscribe today. Like really simple, small block, text, keep it simple. You don't want to overwhelm folks. Then your content comes, great. That's what they're here for. Texts, pictures, excerpts. ⁓ But then at the bottom, this is where you have a nice big block where your benefits.

of subscribing come into play. We have a nice big button. This one says join small boats today. This is a nice bulleted list of features and benefits. And since it's underneath the content, you're not annoying people. It's not in the way. You have a small message up top, you have a big message on the bottom. That's your free newsletter. What do you think? Does that sound about right?

Tyler (23:25)
Yeah.

for sure and it's totally okay if they don't see this button at the bottom and all these features and benefits that are listed again at the bottom because the idea is to get them to click into your content, go back to your site, trigger that upgrade message and then eventually they're gonna see this again anyway so don't think you need to put sign up buttons all over this free newsletter. You could honestly go without it and still get people to

to convert.

Pete (23:57)
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, you are driving traffic back to your website. And as long as your website's set up right, you're getting subscription messaging on your site. ⁓ But we as humans need to see the same message 10 times, 20 times, 100 times, whatever it is before we decide, because we're just inundated with messaging. But if I'm seeing the upgrade message,

In the newsletter, if I've made it down this far, that means I've scanned through all the content in the newsletter. I'm interested in it. And then if I get sent back to your website and I get the upgrade messaging, that means I want to read that particular article I clicked on in the newsletter, because I want to read it, right? I see it, I click it, I get there, I get the upgrade messaging. I can't read it. So if I see an upgrade message on the site 20 times, that means that's 20 articles I actually wanted to actually read. That motivates me to pay.

to get access, big time.

Okay, one last thing about the newsletter. Don't forget the 20 minute rule. ⁓ I've seen newsletters come in with 20, 30 articles in them. That's a mistake. It's too many articles. ⁓ Tyler might talk about email clipping and Gmail. I'll just talk about attention span. ⁓ You have 20 minutes. It's proven. You get the newsletter. I'm interested in this newsletter. I'm gonna scan the newsletter. I might click on an article to read or to.

20 minutes, that's all you got. So keep it simple. you're, and keep your cadence up, right? If you do a monthly newsletter, which I know a lot of you publishers do, go to weekly, find a way to go to weekly. Publish, send one article, maybe a plus an article, archive articles, use your archives. Get that cadence up. If you're a weekly newsletter, go to twice a week. If you're twice a week, go to three. If you're a news site, I mean, it's daily, absolutely.

and automate too. That's another simple way of really cutting your workflow off is automation. ⁓ You can literally turn on a newsletter sending automation that gets your content out to your readers, that list that's building with the free registration. And you don't have to lift a finger to get those newsletters set. All right, Tyler, I think I queued you up on this one.

Tyler (26:11)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I want to

mention...

At Paywall Project, we work with a number of publishers, small publishers. Not all of them are sending newsletters ⁓ consistently. Some of them are not sending newsletters at all. so one of the ways to sort of mitigate that is to set up an automated newsletter so that their content goes out every week, every day, whatever the cadence is. ⁓ And then again, you benefit from the traffic that comes back to the site.

publisher in particular, it's been a couple, two or three weeks ago, we set up an automation for them. They weren't sending a newsletter at all, had never sent a newsletter ever to my knowledge. ⁓ And they had a sizable list of free registrations, I believe around 1,500 people or so over the course of however long they've been collecting emails, but never sending any any newsletters to that list. And their first newsletter, I think like five people signed up for a paid plan right away just because they received

this

automated newsletter that contained five articles from that week or whatever and people went straight to the site, they hit the upgrade messaging, they signed up, they paid, and there was virtually no effort from the publisher side other than just continuing to publish their content on their site. So even with minimal effort, people will subscribe, but you gotta get that email to their inbox on a regular, consistent cadence. There you go.

Pete (27:40)
It's amazing to

me, I see it too. I've talked to publishers who have not sent a newsletter and they do have a list and it's just haven't thought about it and yet it is your number one sales tool in your toolbox.

Tyler (27:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, with multiple use cases for sure. It's not just for sending traffic to your site, but as you mentioned earlier, for sponsorships and upsells and all kinds of other use cases. So it's a multi-faceted thing to have in your war chest of items.

Pete (28:17)
Newsletter's powerful. Alright, that's it for the pod. Keep it simple. Look at all your touch points. Whittle them down. Get your newsletter in shape. Thanks Tyler. Catch you later.

Tyler (28:26)
Thank you.