Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
Tyler, greetings. Welcome.

Tyler (00:02)
Hello, hello.

Pete (00:04)
Tyler from Newsletter Glue. If you don't know and you're running newsletters, he's your man. Newsletter Glue. I'm

Tyler (00:10)
Thank you.

Pete (00:11)
Pete Erickson, Leaky Paywall, subscription software. If you're listening to this, you might or might not know that. But today, we're actually going to talk about churn mitigation. Subscriber churn loss. And it combines what Tyler?

Is doing with newsletters with your subscription system.

did you know, Tyler, that a publisher with a 10% monthly churn loses how many percent of subscribers in a year? Quick guess. Ten percent of churn per month, how many subscribers are gone in a year?

Tyler (01:15)
my god. Probably a lot.

Pete (01:19)
Correct. Pick a number.

Tyler (01:24)
I don't know, ten percent?

Pete (01:25)
How about 70%?

Tyler (01:27)
my gosh.

Pete (01:28)
Yes. So if you if it runs 10%, 10% per 10% over 12 times, you've lost 70% of your subscriber base. Which is nuts, right?

Tyler (01:36)
dear. That's a lot.

Pete (01:40)
Yeah. At 3%, a third of your subscribers are gone. Right. Yeah. Claude did the math on this. I didn't I didn't do the math. So, but anyway, I thought it was I thought

Tyler (01:49)
God's very certain.

Pete (01:51)
it was crazy. Yeah. No, it's it's correct. It's it's correct.

So and you may know that retaining a subscriber costs a fraction of acquiring one, but publishers spend a lot of time on acquisition and kind of forget about churn reduction. and then the other data point I came across in my research was about 20 to 40 percent of all churn happens what they call involuntarily. That's failed payments, right? Decline credit cards, expired credit cards, whatever it is. It's like I didn't want to cancel the subscription, but it just failed. The card failed.

So you got to deal with that. Okay. So here's here's where we cross paths. Newsletter engagement is one of the strongest predictors of retention. Subscribers who regularly open newsletters are about twice more likely to be subscribed in 12 months. About two times more likely. That was came from a retention check benchmark. So newsletter engagement being

So incredibly important for let's just focus on retention, right? I know you and I talked a little bit about something that maybe one or two of publishers you you have worked with have has not been doing. I'd love to for you to talk a little bit about what happened to that publisher that has not been doing something.

Tyler (03:14)
Yeah, so I'm not gonna disclose the publisher, but let's just say that

the publisher grew for many years.

Pete (03:29)
Okay.

Tyler (03:30)
compounded growth, low churn for the most part.

Pete (03:34)
Okay. Okay.

How many years of of that would you say, roughly?

Tyler (03:38)
I would say

at least six to six years

Pete (03:43)
Okay.

Tyler (03:44)
overall growth. Maybe a little bit less.

Pete (03:48)
Okay.

Tyler (03:50)
but then things plateaued. and

Pete (03:52)
Yeah.

Tyler (03:53)
there was sort of a there's a number of factors that that could have been. It could have been raising prices way too high or not enough local coverage.

Pete (04:08)
Mm.

Tyler (04:08)
Or

or

Pete (04:11)
Mm.

Tyler (04:13)
never ever having ever sent a newsletter before. Right.

Pete (04:18)
What ever? Wait,

so in almost six years, what you're saying is this publisher never sent a newsletter.

Tyler (04:27)
Never. Never ne

Pete (04:28)
Not one time.

Tyler (04:30)
never sent a newsletter to their audience, to my knowledge. Ever. Yeah. And I don't even think

Pete (04:34)
Okay. I feel like there's

Tyler (04:37)
they've ever sent one as like we're making this change or to my knowledge, they've never sent a a mass email to their audience. yeah.

Pete (04:46)
That's wild. Okay.

Tyler (04:48)
And this audience is pretty pretty large. You know, it's a pretty large subscription base. At least it was.

Pete (04:54)
Okay.

Tyler (05:00)
And yeah,

Pete (04:57)
Okay. Okay. All right. Sounds like there's a cliff coming after the plateau.

Tyler (05:03)
so that's where things start to slide. it's not overnight, but there is attrition in subscription, you know, holding holding subscribers and so

Pete (05:17)
Mm. Mm.

Tyler (05:19)
churn starts to creep in,

And and it just continues down this slippery slope. And it it's like in fr it's like starts to free fall a bit. and you know again you can look at many factors. You can look at whether it's the the local content, are they not covering enough local content that people want?

I is the price

Pete (05:44)
Right.

Tyler (05:45)
not right? Is like what's the do they not have enough staff? What I don't know what the well you can pinpoint a number of things, but one thing that really sticks out in all of that is not sending a single newsletter going out to the audience ever. Ever. And

Pete (06:02)
Mm. Mm.

Tyler (06:04)
never even trying to get the free people who have signed up to become. That's a different story. That's you know, on on acquiring.

Pete (06:11)
Right.

Wow.

Tyler (06:12)
But not even

trying to keep the ones that have been customers for years, who are starting to turn.

Pete (06:21)
That's a little insane. I mean, w

Tyler (06:22)
Yeah.

Pete (06:23)
I've s I've run into publishers that I can remember one publisher, a smaller publisher that was not sending anything. I've run into quite a bit of like more in the sort of the legacy magazine or or like deep niche. And they'll send out one a month, something like that. and there's

Like that's an emergency in my eyes, right there. So not having sending not not not sending out a newsletter for six years for a a public a publication that has a a l let's call it a larger subscriber base. that doesn't seem like a big surprise, that their subscriptions are dropping. and I I have some data points too. If you want to hear I was doing doing some looking around.

Tyler (07:10)
Let's do it. Yeah.

Pete (07:11)
So

Subscribers who open newsletters three or more times a week, they're they they get retained at at much higher rates. And essentially the the data, what I was reading is like email really is the pri the primary retention channel. And that's it. So there was a research gate study, they studied about sixteen thousand new subscribers. And the the

onboarding that they had to email onboarding was improved their engagement and their subscription duration so they found those two things were correlated there's a there if you look there's portugal has a publisher called publico I think it's pronounced that and they what they do is they look at their their insights and they look at lower engaged subscribers

And they have an automation where they send out a basically like a drip campaign to anybody who's on the sort of lower engaged, lower they call it lower activity side and to pull them back before they churn. And that's worked for them. and so it's it's I mean, do you know, I'm not like I'm not a super expert in churn, but you know, I've learned a fair amount, I've seen a fair amount, and I mean

Essentially what's happening with this publisher that that you're talking about is they're they're like invisible essentially between the the website visits. So, you know, and like today with brand being so important and you know, you're you you want to get your brand in front of people as much as possible, they're only the brand only shows up when their reader decides, I should go check on something or I happen to do a search on something and land it on the article or whatever.

Tyler (09:09)
Yeah.

Pete (09:10)
And maybe that's

a few times a month instead of, you know, fifty times a month or whatever, right?

Tyler (09:15)
Yeah. Yeah, it just makes

it makes things extremely difficult for the publisher to generate traffic. and and I should also say traffic has also, you know, I think during that time period has declined as well. So I mean all of these things sort of start happening together. and

Pete (09:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler (09:39)
you know, it's difficult to recover from that if

you don't have emails going out ever. I mean even just having emails go out to people automatically. Anything, any smoke signal, something to keep

Pete (09:56)
Hm. Right.

Tyler (09:58)
engagement would would be an improvement here. But but yeah, so it's it's it's ever more important too with with AI and and other, you know, new technologies that are

Pete (10:09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler (10:11)
making it difficult to be seen. So

Pete (10:13)
Yeah, you mentioned traffic and that's a big one and that's not part of this podcast, but what we see with the proper email newsletter set up is traffic goes up. Like the the you know, as a publisher, you're you're sending the email out. People are clicking on the links, they're going back to the website. They may even read a second article while they're there. And if it's a if it's news, then it's probably daily. That's a lot of traffic back. If it's, you know, mi magazine or niche, that's probably two or three times a week sending traffic back.

And it's it's sort of the cornerstone of success today. And I'll I'll pitch so I I just released a study, it's the AI Publishers Survival Guide. It's on publisherevenue.com. Go there, you can grab it for free. and it's it's a it's there's an executive summary, so you don't have to read the whole thing. It's 65 pages, but we looked at we looked across all hundreds of our publishers and what they were doing.

to build subscriptions. And this one's really focused on growing your your audience and growing your traffic is kind of the primary focus of this study. And so yeah, the email newsletter. Very important.

Tyler (11:26)
Yeah.

Pete (11:27)
okay. So let me so I got I got like six things here you can do to improve churn. So should we go through them? Okay. so

Two of these are both our our publishers and they're for two different publisher types. So one is like the niche publisher, like a magazine, fishing magazine or or or lifestyle or whatever it is, or maybe just a digital niche publisher and some deep evergreen content kind of niche. And then there's the news publishers, so the ones that that I know you spend a lot of time with, and that are sending out you know daily newsletters. But the

The niche publisher, the approach is, and we did a podcast on the Moss Report. you can find you can listen to that. Moss Report deals with cancer survival with holistic medicine and that sort of related topic. And what he what Ben did there is he put together an 18 email drip series. So if you register for free on the site, themoss report dot com, you'll get over 30, 60 days. I forget exactly what it is, you'll get 18.

emails that essentially kind of put together like a like a package, like a s I don't want to call it a survival package, but it's a, you know, it's a it's a package of content to help someone who's struggling with with cancer. And so he's he's what he's essentially doing is he's teaching a series. It's like a course, right?

Tyler (12:54)
Yeah, he he's

he's onboarding you to their publication, their yeah. Yeah.

Pete (12:57)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And it's all free. And it's just, it's just that's the course. So if you're in a niche and you're listening to this, think about that. Think about what can you package together as like a mini course or some series to really get people hooked into your publication. And it's all delivered through email over a drip series. Wall Street Journal, I was looking at what the Wall Street Journal was doing. They target a hundred days of engagement. Yeah. Yeah. So they're not sending you an email.

every day for a hundred days. But you know, you're talking three to four months of emails kind of dripping out and teasing you into reading, reading some of the evergreen stuff that they have and and new stuff they have and all sorts of but it's a hundred days. So it's a very and it works for them. So that's so that's kind of the niche approach. Think about putting a package together. of course put the free registration up, get people into that.

strip series and then of course you can upsell your your paid plan in every single email that you send out.

Tyler (14:01)
Yes.

Pete (14:03)
the second one is the news publisher and this one you probably know more a little bit more about this than I do. but this is really about building a habit and it's it's you know it's not it's not a course but what you're creating is a routine. So the routine is like getting getting the the morning

news, right? So at 7 a.m. you you know like you're gonna get this and you're gonna catch up and whatnot. And what's funny is like I subscribed to a local newsletter that changed from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Yeah. Just I don't know. One day it just could I just didn't find it in my inbox. Seriously. And I was like, what is happening?

Tyler (14:40)
Yeah. Yeah.

Pete (14:42)
And I then I I realized it was 9 a.m. and I was like, wait a second, 9 a.m. Like I'm in like I'm in meetings. Like I am I'm working.

Tyler (14:48)
Right. Work has c yeah, coffee's already been

halfway gone.

Pete (14:51)
Like I'm I'm I'm way past two cups of coffee. Like I

you know. So anyway, so if you're if you're if you're in the news then it's really about you have a little bit easier because you are sending every day, right? So you get to you get to send that newsletter every day. But but you can you you you should look at a drip series that promotes

the kind of content that you have, like the the the columns that you focus on, sports or politics or business or whatever, why they're great and maybe who the reporters are. Mission is an important one, right? I think you talk about that, like like bringing the mission forward for for the the the news. And if you're if you're in a community, you know we talk about it's like sale and reporter like super mission based, you know, absolutely like, hey, we're here, it's important. We're gonna make your life better.

we're covering all the nonsense, shenanigans going on in in business and politics and and and we need need your support and they and right, they get it, right? Like people donate and subscribe and all the all the money things, right?

Tyler (15:58)
Yeah,

yeah, and drip campaigns are a are a part of that, you know, of that

Pete (16:02)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (16:02)
strategy, right? So they're not only are they sending two daily emails, but they're also dripping out a campaign that acclimates you to what their mission is, who they are, and you know, adding photos of their team and things like that. So you know who your local news team is, right? So yeah.

Pete (16:20)
Yep.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. and then the last thing I'll say is personalization. So when you're you like if you cover politics and business and sports and those things, have those as opt-in categories, right? So I can so like Mexico News Daily, they cover they're they're the largest English speaking news site for Mexico. And so they cover I think it's five or seven different regions of Mexico. I should know this, but I don't.

And so you can opt into like the region that you want the news from. And then that gets automated and just gets kicked out once there's a new article for that region. And that has that has the highest engagement rate because it's like, I live here. I want to know everything that's going on in this

Tyler (17:04)
Yeah, yeah.

Pete (17:05)
region. So it's personalized.

Tyler (17:07)
Yeah. And I think publishers often freak out about that. It's like, you know.

I just we don't have enough content to do that kind of thing. And you know, Mexico, for example, I'm sure they're not sending out fifteen articles for this one region. It might be one or two or three things, right? So if if you don't have a lot of content and you're a local news operation, it's okay if the newsletter has one single article. People love that. It they just want

Pete (17:32)
That's right. Yeah.

Tyler (17:35)
to hear from you. And they're they're happy even when it's just a single article and I

I tell publishers all the time, you don't have to have this ginormous newsletter because the truth is they're not people aren't looking through the whole thing anyway. And

Pete (17:48)
That's right.

Tyler (17:49)
so just you know, and if you do have three or four stories, don't be afraid to send stuff over because just because you sent it once doesn't mean your whole list opened it and it doesn't mean they clicked on it. So it's okay to do that. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete (18:00)
Yeah. Yep. That's right. There's the twenty

minute time rule. So on average and and that this this was a few years ago. It might even be less now, but on average you have maximum twenty minutes of attention span if somebody decides to read something in your newsletter. That means an article, browse for a few more and they're done. That's like the you can't you get twenty articles in a newsletter is hard to swallow, you know.

Tyler (18:25)
Yeah, it it turns

into a social media feed and you don't you don't want that. You you want it to be like clear and like what you want them to look at,

Pete (18:30)
Right. Yep. Yep.

Tyler (18:34)
you know.

Pete (18:35)
Yeah. Less are less articles, higher quality articles is is a recurring theme that I s that I hear about now that publishers that are have scaled back the quantity of content. It's cause it before it was a little bit of a SEO race. Like and then S now SEO is falling off a cliff. And so now it's a quality raise. okay. All right. So that's that's the the sort of the onboarding stuff. Okay.

Second thing I want to talk about is is behavior. So so learning what your subscribers are doing, the insights. And there are a lot of publishers do this. and I just mentioned one before, but looking at what your readers are doing and when your paid subscribers are going quiet, you wanna nudge them with a campaign, right?

Guardian does this, Economist, you you name it. The these these big guys are all are all doing this. I'm sure Wall Street Journal's got a million email campaign to try to Yeah. Yep. but like I'm just gonna show our insights real quick. So one of the things that we track is like, hey, we got nine paid subscribers going quiet, right? So we track over a a period of of time where paid subscribers, you know.

are in the system and they're just not looking at content. So and then we are we are we have an offer engine that we've already started building that's coming which will allow publishers to kick off those automated campaigns. But you can you can literally go and grab those now. But this number, you know, and I've looked I look at a lot of data, this number can get high. You know, you get

You get you know, I looked at one earlier today. It was like there were 99 readers that were going quiet and it's not a super huge publisher. So for them,

Tyler (20:33)
Right.

Pete (20:34)
that was like like, hey, you know, this would be good to start kicking off. And this actually happened to be a niche publisher. It's like kick off a nice evergreen series of content that they probably haven't seen. And that's another thing that's important is you have to remember most people haven't seen most of your content. Right.

Tyler (20:53)
Yeah.

Pete (20:54)
So

Tyler (20:54)
Yep. Yeah.

People aren't looking as much as you are. The publisher. Like they're

Pete (20:59)
No way.

Tyler (21:00)
seeing a small fraction of what you've published. And so, yeah.

Pete (21:02)
Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. You you're you're sending stuff out. If they if you're if you're lucky they're looking at they're reading ten percent of it, five percent of it. I don't know. archives are are su are more valuable. Archive content, if it still is valid, you know, evergreen is is more more valuable than fresh content. what we have seen. It's crazy. the engagement.

Tyler (21:28)
Yeah, especially especially

with like enterprise like attorneys and law offices and stuff, they they I I've seen from time to time publishers, you know, get requests and if they have content that goes way back then lock it down, you know. Yeah.

Pete (21:41)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah,

that's another that's a that's a trick. That's a conversion trick. Yeah, for sure.

Tyler (21:47)
Yeah.

Pete (21:49)
okay. next thing, I'm not gonna dwell on insights too much here, but the next thing is fixing the involuntary churn. And that's something Stripe does really, really well. There there's I'm gonna talk about Stripe payments just because it's dominant and it's the best in the business. But there are there are solutions.

That are running what they call it payment intent means that the solute the platform is charging the in Stripe. It's like in charge of charging and it's in charge of churn. So if something fails, that platform has to like figure out how to get that card charged. But Stripe has runs their own subscriptions, payment intents, and which is how we connect. We let Stripe.

run all the payment intents because Stripe is the best at churn reduction. So we've seen firsthand going from a platform that's running payment intents migrating into Stripe with us, and then having churn drop 40% right out of the gate. Like it's just insane how good at Stripe is at managing those failed credit cards. And they got the they got the AI, they're monster like this is what all they do, right? Like they are motivated to

get these charges running. So they get card updates, they get they they retry different t times during the day. I've seen them try nine times on a card, just just for and and and have it work. It's crazy. So the other thing is churn buster or a related, we call it a dunning approach where and churnbuster, another thing good about Stripe, not getting paid by Stripe here, but you can tie

Churnbuster into Stripe subscriptions, just like that. And so when Stripe finally gives up, then Turnbuster like kicks out an email series. I think it's nine, they have like nine pre-written emails. You just edit them for your brand. And then over 30 days, these emails go out. There's a link to update your credit card. It's on your own domain. like, and it works. I mean, it's just, it's just amazing. And it costs a little bit of money.

And if you are interested in this, if you're listening to this, we do have a relationship with these guys if you want to break on the price. Again, we don't make any money on it. They're just great. We actually use them. so that's that's kind of the easy like sort of the easy win is you know, moving into Stripe subscriptions if you're not wouldn't be easy, but setting up something like a churn buster or other service would be would be free money. Is that the right word?

Tyler (24:28)
That's it. Yeah. You said free

money on the podcast, we need a disclaimer, yeah.

Pete (24:33)
Right. Don't take this out of context now. Come on.

Okay. All right. So okay, next one. Next one is when somebody actually tries to cancel. So I don't know if you're an Audible subscriber, but I I subscribe to Audible. Audible's got it down. Like it's an Amazon company. Like they know how to keep your money. Like it's just amazing. Right. And so you go, I can't, I've I've got three books, you know, I'm backlogged. I

I need to I need to cancel. You go to cancel and it's like, do you want to just cut your your your book credit in half each month? Do you wanna, you know, do you wanna pause for three months? Do you want you know, do you want a discount? Like it's they and it works. Like they've totally gotten me. Like pause on I've done that, I've done it all. I've done the three months, I've done the one book a month instead of two books a month. I've like I've done it all. Occasionally I'll cancel and then I'll come back, which is a thing, obviously.

with the whole streaming world today. But but that's that's it's it's a a point in the flow that is actually very important. and as just a quick example on how we do it. So I'm logged in as a subscriber here. I'm just gonna go here to the account page I'm gonna go down and say hey I wanna I wanna cancel. It's like hey you want to are you sure you want to cancel? You know and it's like too expensive, right? And then

yeah, we'll hit continue and it's like, wait a second. I can I can do 30% off, right? Like, like, that's tempting. Hmm. And so guess what happens? So what it works. Like, like we we have seen, you know, we're looking at Tea Journey. We've seen Tea Journey save subscriptions this way. and then we send this data into insights, and so you can kind of see what the effectiveness is, and then you can change your.

You can change your promotion and your messaging and all that. So it's it's cool.

Tyler (26:29)
Yeah. Yeah.

And quick tip if you do this for any of your streaming services that you are are currently subscribed to, you'll you're likely to see a massive discount. So go go to them now, cancel it, attempt to cancel

Pete (26:38)
Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Tyler (26:41)
it, and you're gonna get these like ginormous discounts for, you know, X period of time. So

Pete (26:47)
Right. Right. Yeah. I think I need to start doing that.

Tyler (26:51)
Yeah. Yeah,

and it's like almost every platform does it because they know, like based on what we just talked about throughout this podcast, is that customer acquisition is really, really like difficult. It's expensive. And so they

Pete (27:02)
Yeah. It's all it's hard. Yeah. Right. Right.

Tyler (27:06)
don't want to lose you. And so offering

Pete (27:08)
Right.

Tyler (27:08)
you anything, even if if it's, you know, a major discount, is better than losing you altogether.

Pete (27:15)
The other hack I I I've heard is the VPN thing. So if you like if you like set your your VPN to be like in a lower price level country,

Tyler (27:26)
Interesting.

Pete (27:27)
right? I don't know, what you know, pick a country, and then you come in, you get different pricing coming from Africa, you know, somewhere in there. It's it's anyway, crazy. Okay. and by the way, the other thing too is even like when

I just showed you cancel like even if you if you don't get the retenti retention, you should have a there's a survey. There's a survey that pops up after the actual cancel. I wasn't gonna cancel this, but there's a survey and that survey information people do fill out and it's it's a s it's a wealth of information and that will help you save future cancels by, you know, maybe maybe there's a gold nugget in there. Somebody says, you know, something about I couldn't I I I don't know, I couldn't.

l I had trouble logging in or whatever it is, right? And you'd be like, okay. Well, we should look at that. Which brings me to my next point.

Tyler (28:22)
Ha ha ha.

Pete (28:24)
So number five is newsletter friction. And this is something that we're pretty proud of. Tyler, you and you and I have sort of co co-produced this. and that's the automatic login for for our flow letter product which is tied to your newsletter glue product. And

Essentially what it does is if somebody gets a newsletter, right, from one of our publishers that's using Flowletter and they click a link to the article, is they just get automatically logged in on the website.

Tyler (28:56)
That's right. Yeah.

Pete (28:58)
And it is amazing how like when we we we would hear from publishers like, you know, log in this and login that, and we'd ask, you know, what kind of login.

you know, how many tickets do you get for for login? And some publishers aren't horrible. Some publishers are just, I don't know what it is the the space that they're in. Just have a lot of trouble with with ticketing. And then you turn it on and it's like boom, nobody has a problem. So it

Tyler (29:24)
Silence. Yeah.

Pete (29:26)
it's it's great. It's in and the best part about it is it it will reduce churn because now you have a reader that can actually get to all your content without having to do anything. They just click the link, right?

Tyler (29:37)
Yeah, you talk about

like upset paid subscribers that just can't log in. Like talk about a quick way to churn when they do get logged in. so yeah, and not not to mention the the free people the free subscribers being able

Pete (29:54)
Right, right.

Tyler (29:55)
to click any article in the newsletter,

Pete (29:58)
Right.

Tyler (29:58)
come back to your site and see upgrade messaging for their account.

in whatever meter, whatever part of their journey that they're in. And yeah, which would otherwise not they're likely not gonna log in because they maybe d they don't even remember signing up. So yeah, it's very important, for everything.

Pete (30:15)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler (30:18)
So

Pete (30:19)
And and I mean, I'm glad you mentioned free free registration because if you're if you've been listening to us, you'll hopefully have a registration wall set up. And if you don't have it and you're running WordPress, go get List Builder for free. It's it's it's on our website. In fact, go to the homepage, there's a button right there for it. and just turn on the registration wall and you'll see you'll see your email list grow.

Two to seven X, which is part of the study that we went through last few months. Because you're what you're doing is you're you're trading content for an email and you're requiring it. It's not an opt-in, you can't close it, you have to put in an email address. You get high, highly engaged readers that come in that way. And it builds lists really quickly. Like we look at the the charts in the back of our publications, and as soon as they turn on free registration,

and you know maybe giving away one article which is ideal and then you have to register to get the next one or two or whatever. It's like a hockey stick of email list growth. So it makes logging in for those free people pretty important. You know what I mean? Because it's like if I'm free registered, like that's great, but now I gotta log in. If I'm like if I'm a paid subscriber, I know there's login friction. Like I I paid, I need to log in. It's special. Like, but if I'm free, it's like

well I'm just getting limited access and now I gotta log in. So it's like the friction I think the friction mindset is higher there. If you if you know what I mean. Right. Right,

Tyler (31:50)
Yeah, yeah. It's it's too much effort for little reward.

Pete (31:55)
right. So anyway, that that's been a pretty pretty important move for for our publishers anyway. Okay. Last one is number six here. these are these are kind of like pricing.

levers for for churn. So a lot of publishers will ask me, like, should I do monthly and annual subscriptions, right? Or should I do annual only? And there's no right right or right answer for that. We do have publishers that do annual only. They're just confident. They know that the annual plan is is is worth it. I'd say that's probably the move for most publishers, but monthly plans are good for kind of trying out a subscription.

and and if you if I don't know, Tyler, what would you say across local news? How does it split fifty fifty monthly annual or is it does it was one way more than the other? Do you have any

Tyler (32:52)
I

I think yearly is is more popular.

Pete (32:55)
Okay.

Tyler (32:55)
it might be sixty forty in that way.

Pete (32:58)
Okay. So the the thing about the monthlies is they're renewing every month. So you you're essentially you may be sending them a an a you know receipt every month. Basically you're sending them a piece of friction every month saying,

Tyler (33:13)
Ha ha ha.

Pete (33:14)
Hey, we're charging your card next month. Hey, we're charging your cart, right? Whereas the annual is one friction point, right? It's one pain point. And you

you get that person for the year, you get them hooked in for the for the long ride. They get a chance to experience your publication, all the content for an entire year. A lot of advantages for that. And then the emails that you're sending out is the value, is the it's really your product. And it's it's reminding the reader of all the great stuff that they need to read to you know for you to make their lives better. anyway, so think about actually promoting

discounted annual plans to your monthly readers. So if you have a monthly reader, just send them, send them a send all your monthly as a campaign with a, you know, 10 or 20% discount off the, you know, 10 months for the, you know, price prices 10 months pricing for the year instead of the 12 months for the monthly. And give them a nice break and get people to convert. And they and you'll you'll find your return reduces, goes down. Okay.

okay. The other thing too, and this is kind of has has a little bit to do with with the what we talked about earlier in terms of canceling, is you can give you can give reader a choice of levels. You might not promote all the levels, but you can you can do like good, better, best pricing. So if somebody has is let's say you have an ad-free plan with your subscription or something like that, you could offer them maybe a slightly lower price, but with ads.

Right, as like a downgrade path. Or maybe if you're doing commenting for paid subscriptions or you have events, you know, some sort of event discounts or benefits, you could you can, you know, say, hey, you know, just downgrade to this plan and it's like just digital only access and that's it, right? And it's and it's not advertised, you're not putting it anywhere on your site, but you do have it in your pocket to offer. Okay. All right. I think that covers

covers the six points. I'll I think for me the most important thing, and I maybe you agree with this, is getting that newsletter going, you know, three or more times a week. Like getting

Tyler (35:35)
Yeah.

Pete (35:36)
your product into the mailbox. and I'd say tied in with that, create an create a drip campaign, something that onboards your readers if you're niche, put a package together. If you're

If you're in the news, like local news space or regional news, then you know, s put up put put your your drip campaign is about the mission and the columns, like the departments that you have and sort of the deep dives in each column. And then turn on Turnbuster, turn on something that, you know, automates the the the the chase of the failed credit card. And we are we are adding that to our insights soon. But these are these are the things

There's a lot here you can look at, but the weekly newsletter, I think, I don't know if you agree, or you know, the multi, multi times per week newsletter seems to solve most of the pain, not only for churn, but for growth, traffic growth, et cetera.

Tyler (36:34)
Definitely.

Definitely. And it's something that a lot of publishers are frightened by because they see it as a lot of work. I have to make multiple newsletters and it's I there's just a lot of time there. But the truth is those things can be automated, you know, as you publish content. So you're never really having to think much about the newsletter. Just publish your content, set up the schedule and let it

Let it do its thing automatically for you. Don't feel the pressure to go in and create this big, huge piece. which is how publishers tend to see it. They see

Pete (37:04)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler (37:07)
it as like an extension of, you know, for let's at least for for local news publishers, they see it as like another newspaper they have to make. So don't don't

Pete (37:15)
Right. Right.

Tyler (37:16)
fall into that that idea. You can you can automate this and and let it work for you automatically. So

Pete (37:24)
I I you couldn't have said it better. That was that that the automation is killer. You can forget about it. Yeah.

Tyler (37:30)
Yeah.

Pete (37:31)
Yeah. And with you know, with flow letter and newsletter glue, you can make a beautiful automation. Much better with than like an RSS style automated newsletter. So all right, Tyler. Thanks, man.

Tyler (37:41)
yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yep.

Pete (37:44)
Good stuff. Catch you next time.