Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete Ericson (00:00)
Today we're going talk about setting up your subscribe page for better conversions. We're going to have a focus on a news publisher. We're going to talk about Mexico News Daily doing a lot of things right, doing a few things wrong on their subscribe page, and we're gonna we're gonna dive into that.

Now, if you're taking a look at this site, what you'll notice quickly is that Mexico News promotes get unlimited access to Mexico's number one source of English.

language news. Nobody wants to buy unlimited access. That doesn't help them in any way. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tear down features versus benefits. We're going to talk about subscription pay page layout. And we're going to talk about I'm going to show you exactly how to create better benefits content with a a simple use of of AI. Now what do readers actually want here?

Readers really want to buy the result of your reporting. They have real problems that they want solutions for. And their real problems are internal. They're they're out of the loop on certain things. So like where to eat, how to vote, things to do, how to feel like a local. These are things, these are the things that your readers, especially in local news, want solved.

Now I spent some time talking with Travis here at Mexico News, and he wanted me to review his sort of general subscription setup. And the the subscription page is something that really jumped out at me as something that that was low-hanging fruit and could easily be updated. And their situation is is quite good. They started a couple of years ago with about half a million monthly readers. They're now up to two million, over two million.

readers, which has been in the last two years been amazing growth. And they have a great flywheel setup. So if you've been tracking us for a bit, you'll know that I'm going to show you here, you'll know that we recommend getting registration walls in front of your readers. Ours is called List Builder. And when you run out of free articles as a reader, you'll get a message here like this that in this case it says create a free account or log in.

Gain access to read this article, plus limited free content. And if somebody fills this out with their email, they'll get registered. Mexico will be able to track their behavior and target engaged, registered readers with promotions. That email, of course, goes to their newsletter system, and they have one more engaged reader on board. And that's how they've grown to their over 200 million visitor views.

I won't labor this, but if you're not, if you don't have a registration wall set up, you need to set one up today. Okay. now let's go back a little bit. And before I jump to the subscribe page, I just want to mention a couple things on here. the subscribe menu link is highlighted in red here. That's good. You should have a button that's always visible that pops out of your your menu. Maybe there's a background highlight on it.

And ideally you want your login button to be next to your subscribe button. So if I if if it were me, I would have subscribe and log in at in the top right of the site. And then if once I get logged in, it changes to my account. And the subscribe button may disappear depending on what you're how you're set up. okay. So let's talk about the subscribe page now. Let's jump straight into that.

So I'll go ahead the subscribe link. And there's kind of a 10 second test here. You know, as a if you put yourself in the shoes of your reader, do you see a better life here? Like, do how do how is my life improved if I pay for access to all the content? Right. And what I'm seeing here are things that are, you know, like an individual plan, a family plan, some links that would would take me away from the subscription page.

and what you really want to do is focus on the benefit. I'm gonna give you a very simple example by The Atlantic. They don't do a lot, but they have very strong benefits title here: Journalism that explains America and the World. So they know their reader wants to stay informed. And I happen to be a subscriber, and they do a really good job of breaking down, you know, the sort of complexities of

Of living in in this world today. And so that that headline really does hit home as a benefit because yes, I I want to be informed. I want to know. I want to understand what's happening. And they they know that's their audience. So, and the other thing I will say before I jump down a little further is you don't want distractions on this page. This is the this is the e-commerce page, this is the payment page, the money page, right? So what you really want to do is pull pull off.

all distractions. So essentially you have your benefits up top. you have your pricing carts down below and that's it. That's really it. Everything else is is a distraction. You shouldn't have a menu, you shouldn't have advertising, you have your logo and it's your subscribe page and that's it. Now let's talk a little bit about like how do I get that language going on the site.

If you're selling unlimited access and you want to switch to benefits, I'm gonna give you a really a quick and really powerful way to do this with AI. So what you do is you go to your about page. Most of you guys have like mission pages or about pages, and so if I go down to the bottom here,

Story admission. I'll pull this page up and I'll show you exactly what I did in Claude. And you can use Chat GPT in order to pull this off, but I'm going to show you go back here and show you exactly how I did this. So let me pull this over here, and this is my this is my Claude account. So all I did

So I started a new chat. I said, okay, write up short benefit copy to motivate readers to subscribe. Here's the about. Here's the link to the about page. Use the story brand framework. And what is the story brand framework? So Doug Miller wrote a great book called Story Brand. If you haven't read it, this is one of the best marketing books I've ever written. It helps you, will help you position your publication as the guide.

To your your the hero in the story, which is your reader. So your reader, free or paid, they are the hero in this journey. And you, your business, your publication becomes the guide and helps provides benefits for the hero, the reader that you have. And I'll I'll kind of skip to the end here. but you can see I I put in the the mission information and what Claude did is it kicked out a bunch of benefit.

language that you can pepper throughout your website. So, as an example, make smarter money moves in Mexico. Never get blindsided by a rule change. So voting information. feel like a local wherever you are in Mexico, see past the scary headlines, know where to go before everyone else does, understand where Mexico is headed, share it with your whole household. That's the family plan.

And then keep independent English language news in Mexico alive. So you can see how that language is targeted towards the reader, how the readers have gonna have a better life by subscribing. Okay. So let's go back to the subscribe page. And once you have that, the layout is you have your benefits title, sort of the big, big benefit, overarching benefit.

And then you can have a little bit of copy underneath. And if we go back to the Atlantic, you'll see they use they have one line here. but a little bit of benefit copy, and then you want to get right to the subscription cards. The reason folks are on this page is they're thinking about paying for a subscription, they want to know what it costs. and they're they have a question mark in their head. So don't get in their way, don't send them off to other sites. Tell them how their life is going to be better, and then give them the plans.

Okay, so let's let's dive into the three cards that are on here and and how this needs to be updated. So currently there's an individual plan, which is monthly or annual. So there's a toggle for monthly access and annual access on this card. This is a great setup. I would copy this. so you want digital access, you subscribe through this card. The middle card says upgrade me. I don't know what that means. Probably get probably should remove that. And then the family plan is the third card.

This is another good card for local news. this is a pretty easy way to upsell your individual subscriber into providing access for his or her family. And I think they give away three seats instead of just one seat for $15.99 versus $8.99. It is working, it's converting. I might go to four seats. You can be as generous as as you like. And then this is our group's extension that's that's running this.

Now, three cards is is a good number. And what I would do with the third card. So start with the individual plan. That's digital access, monthly or annual. The middle card would be the family plan. That's sort of the next easy upgrade message. And then the third card, I would make gift subscriptions. So gifts can be a very important part of your revenue stream. back in the print days.

print and and still today print magazines proved that us if you were successful with paid subscriptions you're probably getting about 20% of your revenue through gift subscriptions. Now print is a little bit of a different animal because yeah you get a book a paper it makes for a nice gift for sure but you could probably achieve five or ten percent of digital gift subscriptions

if you really put some time into it. So think about promoting to your existing paid readers the ability to gift subscriptions, especially during the holidays, to to others. Okay, so those are our three cards. Now,

Talk a little bit about the fourth card. I can't count today. All right. And I just did a quick little sketch here. nope. That's not it. anyway, the the the fourth card should be underneath, and that's group or business organizational access. So I would add a sort of full width little card here that says, you know, does your organization

need access, get in touch and then you can have that conversation for bulk access and and sell access to government orgs, schools, libraries. we know I know local news publishers that are working with coffee shops. So anybody who's physically sitting in a coffee shop can gain access without having to log in and in exchange you probably have a QR code and your brand sitting on every table in there. it's a nice way to to get exposure.

in a in a town and you know get get those get those yearly contracts for bulk access. Okay. all right so that's sort of the critical parts of the subscribe page. If you really want to dig into it, I'm gonna keep going a little bit. Civil War Monitor has a real good one. You can see they have their title and then the benefits copy and then pricing cards. But underneath that they have a list of

frequently asked questions. And this is you know, if someone's scrolling down, they might have questions like, how do I cancel? And what is the Civil War monitor? What what do I get if I subscribe? How do I access the website? You can head over and take a look at those FAQs. But it's a it's a good thing to have on any kind of an e-commerce page. And then at the very bottom they have a couple options for for contacting. So if somebody gets to the bottom,

They may have some questions that are unresolved. So give them give them an email, right? Okay.

All right, a couple other contact points as far as converting paid subscriptions. One is the login page. Now we just published an article on this about North Shore magazine. Pulled it up on the screen here. And it's amazing to this is amazing to me, but what they found out is that if they put a subscription message on the login page.

That actually became one of the leading sources of paid conversions for them. So they're tracking the clicks off of this page in their funnel to see who subscribes. And this was one of the this was one of the top, this is I think it was top one or top two. I can't remember which one, but it was pretty amazing. So the language is pretty simple. It just says you know, it's got the login text, welcome back, login.

And then underneath that it says not a subscriber yet. Join us here for full access to North Shore's curated content across all channels. That's it. It's just a simple text line that fits into the login screen. And that is a very high converting line of text. The last thing is probably not a surprise to you, but absolutely put your upgrade messaging in your free newsletter. So with that registration wall, you're building a free email list.

Every single email that goes out should have generally it's a small subscription promo at the top and then a bigger subscription promo at the very bottom with with all the benefits listed. And you you have an upgrade message for paid subscriptions. Make sure that upgrade message also reflects the benefits that you came up with as well. So that's it. That's that's a little bit on converting more paid subscribers.

focus on your benefits, copy. That's a mistake I see across hundreds and hundreds of publishers that I look at, work with. so it's not you're not selling features, you're not selling all access, you're selling the the benefits to help your reader, the hero in the story, make their life better. And make sure that these the benefits copies across all your touch points, and then simplify your subscribe page.

us make sure that there are no distractions or links that are taking people away from the page. That's it for now. Reach out. info@leakypaywall.com.