Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
All right, greetings Tyler. Happy Monday snowy morning. How's it going? All right, you ready to talk Valentine's Day promotion? Okay, so we had a publisher run a Valentine's Day campaign since it was not too long ago it was Valentine's Day. We got some real numbers on it on what worked and what didn't work. And what we're gonna do today is share with you what it was, how it did.

Tyler (00:03)
Good, good, good.

yeah, let's see.

Pete (00:28)
and how to do it better. I'm thinking at this point a lot better and a lot easier without so much pain, which I'll show you in a second.

So what I'm gonna do here is just gonna share the old screen here. I'm gonna show you what this campaign looks like. ⁓ This is something we are going to keep on the private, so we won't disclose who this publisher is, but we're gonna show you what actually happened. Okay, and then how to...

actually run a promo with all the tools that you have. Okay. So this discount promo, what was it? It was 50 % off their annual plan. So they focused on 50 % off of their annual plan. Their annual plan was 60 bucks. They were sending out a $30 coupon for, to get the plan for 30 bucks. What happened? They got 80.

new paid subscribers. If you do the math, it's about $2,400 in revenue. And that doesn't sound too terrible, right?

Tyler (02:05)
Yeah, it's not bad. How big is their list?

Pete (02:07)
That's okay.

About 40,000. Yeah. So when we start looking at the numbers, things get start skewing south a bit. They also got 379 unsubscribes off of that list. So that's yeah, that's about one almost 1 % of their list unsubscribed. And I'll show you what happened here. Let me see if I can bring up the right chart. Okay. So

Tyler (02:28)
Ooh, ouch.

Pete (02:41)
This is a chart of their free registrations and paid subscriptions. The red line is free registrations. You can see every time the newsletter goes out, what happens, it peaks like crazy. And then the blue line is paid subscriptions. Now, what they did was is they sent out this campaign over a 16 day period.

Tyler (02:53)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (03:07)
and they sent out standalone, 10 standalone promotional emails. So it wasn't part of their existing newsletter. This is 10 in your face emails saying, hey, ⁓ which I just showed you earlier, you know, here's our promo, ta-da. That's 400,000 emails that went out for 80 subscribers, if you think about it, right?

Tyler (03:29)
Wow.

Pete (03:33)
And I made a little box around this time period. And if you have an eagle eye, you'll see that, ⁓ you know, their regular subscriptions were kind of ticking along. And did they actually take a bump? Well, they did, but it took, it was like day, day 11 or something like that, where they were kind of getting to the end of their promo, where the subscribers came in. So. ⁓

We got 80 paid subscribers, 2400 bucks, almost 1 % unsubscribe. The uptake rate is like 0.2%. Almost five unsubscribes for every conversion. So there's a little bit of a loss on their list. Okay. All right. So one of the big problems I see here is that 16 days is way too long. Absolutely way too long. So if you're going to do a promo and the data shows it here is...

I don't know, what do you think? Three day, you know, campaign or something like that. You know, we humans love deadlines. Like we respond to deadlines. If you say, the discount's good for, you know, two weeks. I was like, okay, two weeks. All right, you know, wake me up in a week or two. Tell me when the deadline's coming.

Tyler (04:48)
Ha ⁓

Right.

Pete (04:54)
Man, all right. So ⁓ Okay, so How do we ⁓ How do we how do we you know rate this campaign? How would you rate this as? ⁓ Effective from a scale of one to ten. You think this was I think it was worth it

Tyler (05:17)
Not really. ⁓ At first I thought so based on the high level numbers but then learning that their list is 40,000 deep, you know, it doesn't seem like it was worth it. Maybe, as you suggested, if they compress the timeline and give a deadline then maybe it would be different. ⁓ It's just way too many emails ⁓ for too long and yeah, it's kind of, it's almost like it's having the opposite effect for

for a good number of your free subscribers who would at some point maybe convert anyway.

Pete (05:54)
Yeah, yeah. So maybe a two out of 10. Yeah, I agree. All right. So let's talk about ⁓ how to do this correctly. Because I know we talk to a lot of publishers that they're always like, I need to do this promotion, whether it's Christmas or Valentine's or whatever. There's a lot of ⁓ urgency to

Tyler (05:57)
I was gonna say too, yeah. Yeah.

Pete (06:18)
⁓ generate revenue and certain, you know, okay, we have a holiday period. Let's do it. And I get like, get the motivation and I also get, you know, the reaction to where it's like, get like what you just said, you get 80 new paid subscribers and you think, man, that's great. Like, all right, cash in the bank. Let's go. But, ⁓ there's a better way to, I think, drive that number to double that number easy and to not tick off your readers. Cause if you're sending, you know,

10 campaigns that it's like, you know, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale that, know, you know how we are today with, with promos. It's, it's rough.

Tyler (06:54)
Yeah.

Yeah. And I'll just add one more thing. My biggest concern with those, with the group that signed up for this promo is how long do they hang around? Like what's, what's the attrition over time in terms of churn? Because when you're offering a discount that deep at 50%, you're starting to devalue what you're, what you're offering and the people who signed up. I mean, it's good that it's a yearly plan. At least they're on the hook for, for a year. ⁓ but.

Whether or not they hang on longer than that, who knows?

Pete (07:31)
Right. Yeah. And you know, could also argue that the 1 % of unsubscribes, they were probably pretty weak. Like they probably were just not that interested, but still 1 % man. That's a, that's, that's a little bit of a chunk for a moment in time right there. Okay. So back to what we would actually do. All right. So one of the things, I'd say the main thing other than the three day compression of the campaign,

is to embed the promo into existing newsletters. There's no reason to send out standalone campaigns 10 times. Maybe you send out a standalone campaign like 24 hours before the deadline, like one time, right, where it's urgent. It's like you got 24 hours to react, and maybe that'll sort of wake up some people.

I just pulled this off a newsletter that's, you know, deal of the week. This is obviously a Valentine's themed promo. And if you're, if you're listening to this, it's essentially you have your regular newsletter and you just take a section of it and you put in your Valentine's promo in that newsletter. And if you do that for three days and you're sending out ⁓ your newsletter every day or twice a day or whatever your cadence is,

you're gonna get a lot of exposure for that promotion. mean, if this publisher did this for the 16 days, they probably would have, I didn't do the math on how many eyeballs would have seen this, but this would have been 16 days. I think they're sending once or twice a day. You're talking about maybe 25, you know?

Tyler (09:11)
you

Pete (09:22)
views instead of 10, but you not ticking anybody off because it's just part of your content. It's just part of your regular newsletter. Right. So

Tyler (09:28)
Yeah.

Pete (09:30)
just bake it in. Okay. ⁓ Another thing that I think a lot of, ⁓ at least our publishers forget is use something we call the conditional display notice. Right. So what you want to do here is you really want to target your free registered readers like that. Those are the ones that are

You know, they've engaged, they've committed because they've dropped in their email, chosen a password, and they're a little higher engaged. So that's your target audience. ⁓ Conditional display is something that ⁓ shows up like a little header bar or footer bar that has some text in it that you can promote something. And it's very elegant, very subtle, shows up. ⁓ I don't have one to show right now.

But the key is you can target by subscription level. So you can show this bar only to those who are logged in as free and it can persist. So they could have had this bar persist for 16 days on their website if they wanted to, I wouldn't recommend it. But that would have been probably another jillion eyeballs that would have seen the Valentine's Day promotion without ticking people off.

Tyler (10:36)
Thanks

Pete (10:44)
if you've made it this far, we got a little preview, a little secret preview for a new product that we're coming out with, and it has to do with Insights. And going to show you what this looks like. So this, if you're listening to this, this is a snapshot of our new Insights dashboard.

It's just the home. And what I've done is I've filtered the last seven days, just paid subscribers. And we look at one of the data points that we're tracking is how many, what this, just to give you a little high level, this tracks logged in subscribers. So if someone's logged in as a free registered reader or someone's logged in as a paid subscriber, this tracks every single article they look at, everything they do.

So we're pulling all this data into our new insights dashboard ⁓ If you if you want this set up just get in touch. We'll set it up It's it's free up to a hundred thousand events ⁓ per month, which is for our paid subscribers which is Requires quite a lot of traffic to blow through that in any case if you look down here ⁓ There's a piece of data which is interesting

620 free readers hitting the paywall. So what this data point is, and this is under action items, is these 620 free registered readers, they're logged in, they've seen the upgrade message on the paywall at least three times in the last seven days. So the idea here is that we're going to flag ⁓ who's logged in is free and who's active and who might respond.

a paid subscription. So going forward, I would suggest that publishers, that you as a publisher, look at what your free registered readers are doing and then and target the crew that's seeing the upgrade message more than a certain number of times per week.

And you could do this every week. If there's, you know, I mean, obviously if you have like a Valentine's promotion, this is perfect. Just, just targeting the readers that are more engaged with the right offer. You might beat 80 just with one campaign. If you're hitting the right people at the right time. So.

Okay. I think that kind of covers it. I'd say any, you know, just to kind of rehash it when you're going to do a promotion, bake it into the newsletter, make the time timeframe really, really short. Uh, Tyler, I think what you said is, you know, that sort of devaluing, um, the, promotion, I mean, doing an annual plan, I think was smart. Uh, 50 % off is a lot.

And it does devalue a little bit. ⁓ We always recommend to discount time versus money. So in other words, for like someone who's going to sign up monthly, them, you know, have them pay a full month's give them three months of access. You're giving your discounting time, but the monthly plan price is still there with the annual plan. I guess you could probably do something.

You could do something similar, maybe with free access for a bit, and then the annual plan kicks in at full price. A free trial or something like that might be a...

Tyler (14:12)
Yeah,

yeah, I mean you could you could charge the full price and then just give extra time on the end of it, right so You see that quite often as you buy a year and and then you get maybe three extra months or something so versus a 50 % discount so

Pete (14:19)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Right. Right.

Yep,

discount time, not money. And then use the conditional display to target the free registered readers with the promotion. And then now look at your insights and see who's hitting the upgrade message that's logged in as a free registered reader. And I think you'll beat that 80 number by a mile.

Tyler (14:58)
For sure. Yeah. Target who you're after, right? So you'll have a much better response rate with probably a fraction of the number of emails, you know, as part of that campaign.

Pete (15:10)
Yeah, this should be the how not to piss off your readers with a promo episode. Yeah. Okay. Thanks Tyler. Awesome. Good stuff. Catch you next time.

Tyler (15:16)
Yep.