Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
So today we are going to talk about a very important thing and that's how to set up your newsletter to convert more paid subscribers. I'm going to say right now, this could be the most important podcast you've listened to all year. If you dig in and, and, implement what we're going to show you, there's three major steps to this process. It's not super complicated, but it will take some effort.

Everything's already built and ready to go. You can do this with our platform. Of course, you can do this probably with a lot of other platforms. This is a super, super important philosophy, maybe to take your newsletter, which is your direct sales engine in today's world that lands in everybody's inbox and nurture your readers into converting more paid subscribers. How does that sound Tyler? Welcome by the way.

Tyler (00:47)
Let's do it. Yeah, thank you.

Pete (01:18)
Okay, so what I'm gonna do here, I'm gonna start with a little bit of philosophy and, this be real quick, but just to get a sense of ⁓ what the strategy is all about.

So when you are setting up a subscription platform and you're going after paid subscriptions, you really have three main buckets of readers that land on your website, right? You have the readers, the loyalists, as I call them, they will give you money right away, really early in the nurturing process. They have the money, they love your stuff. Take my money.

then you have a lot of random traffic that'll never subscribe, you know, for thousands of reasons. And then the big opportunity here is ⁓ readers that ⁓ will jump on your newsletter. They'll want to get your newsletter, but they're not ready to pay right away. Right. And so how do you nurture this incredibly important group of readers that haven't converted yet, but may convert down the road? And the way we do it is through a free registration. And

What this means is that you as the publisher will give away an article or two upfront without any fuss. And then very early on, really on the second article, you pop up something like this. If you're, if you're watching this on YouTube, you're seeing a, ⁓ a really well designed and highly converting free registration. We call it a nag because you're nagging people. If you're listening to this, essentially what it is is in article, you get the message that says this story is free for you.

That's the title, that's the motivator. Free sells, lean into that. Create a free account and get more of the sale and reporter in this case, top stories directly to your inbox. So you're making two promises here. One is that the next article, if you register with your email and password will be free, which is good. And then you'll also get the newsletter. This converts like crazy. We see on average email lists grow 20 % faster.

because of the free registration. So if you are looking at your website and you're, you're, you're suggesting people join your newsletter with a pop-up or a slide in or some other annoying thing, stop doing that because yeah, it works, but it's not as good as a free registration. And when you're in the subscription business, you need to nurture people through this, ⁓ this, this funnel, this path of getting their email address first, before you try to sell them on converting.

paid subscription. Okay.

Now, the framework, and this is my last piece of philosophy before we jump in, the framework just to review is that you have casual readers coming in from Google, social, AI, your newsletter, all sorts of different places. And ⁓ what you do is you set ideally the meter at one free article and then on the second article, and they'll get that free article without any fuss, nothing. Just, just let them have it. ⁓ They can come in from social share or Google search, whatever.

Let them have it. But when they go to the second article, pop that free registration. That's the, that's your engagement point. You'll get their, their email and you will be sending automatically that email into your, your newsletter, email newsletter service, like MailChimp as an example. ⁓ This email, however, is now segmented, right? As into your free segment. So you're building this new list of free registered readers. These are.

A higher quality reader than like a newsletter pop-up, they're more engaged. They want to be there. They've chosen a password. They're actually logged into your site now. So you're tracking what article actually converted them, which is nice. And, and the bottom line is you now have a new newsletter subscriber because you've drawn a line in the sand saying, Hey, if you want to act, if you want more access, you have to register. It's not please join our newsletter. It's we have great content. It's just an email.

and you can be as generous on the backside too. So if you want to give away five articles a month ⁓ to all free registered readers, go for it. Don't recommend it, but you can do it. You have the levers to do it. We'd recommend something more like one more article period. That's it. Okay. Now the newsletter is a super, super important part of your toolbox. I would say that your newsletter really is your product.

It's your main product. Yes, you have a website with all this content, but your newsletter is what shows up magically in somebody's inbox, right? They don't have to do anything. It comes to them. You don't have to wait on somebody deciding to come to you. You're just going to them every day, twice a week, whatever your cadence is. And it has your content, teasers and excerpts on it. And its job, the free newsletter that you should be sending frequently is to drive traffic back.

⁓ your website so that these readers can then see upgrade messaging. That's the whole thing. And that this framework we call it the flywheel ⁓ creates a ⁓ a flywheel that will grow your email list significantly. Because your newsletter is sending traffic back to your website, it will grow the traffic

on your website, which advertisers like, and your readers will be seeing more upgrade messaging and you have to nag people over and over again these days to get them to do something. So they need to see your upgrade to paid message 10 times, 20 times, however many times it takes for them to say, you know what, I'm seeing this message all the time and I want to read these articles. So there are chances of converting and paying.

go up and up and up. And that's a proven statistic. Okay. Tyler how's that sound? Did I miss anything?

Tyler (07:20)
That's the classic framework.

Pete (07:22)
Yep. All right. So, ⁓ the three parts of this, of these tactics is the first part I already talked about, it's the free registration. So you, if you don't have a free registration in place, this is the first critical element, because this will fuel your email list, which will fuel your traffic and conversions. ⁓ and, and, sponsors love to get into big email lists. So.

That's your first thing to do. ⁓ The second thing, very important thing is because of this free registration, you technically now have two newsletters. You have a free newsletter and you have a paid newsletter, right? And so the free newsletter's job, which I already mentioned, is to motivate ⁓ readers to upgrade and should have upgrade messaging in it and should be sent.

to this higher engaged group. That's your free newsletter. Your paid newsletter essentially is a newsletter that does not have upgrade messaging in it, may have other special messaging. If you wanna treat your paid subscribers a little differently, that's your opportunity to do that. You don't have to in the beginning for the sake of simplicity. And you also have some other options such as like early delivery is an easy one to set up. like let's say you wanna...

Send out an afternoon newsletter to your paid subscribers only. Great. And it can be fully automated. ⁓ We do it with our publishers all the time. It works great. ⁓ And I know Tyler, you work with Salem Reporter. I think they do something like that in the afternoon.

Tyler (09:05)
They

do, yep, they have two newsletters, they're very similar, but just different enough for the premium audience to feel like they're getting their money's worth.

Pete (09:16)
Yeah, yeah,

it's another value add. It's another piece, chunk of value that you're adding to that paid subscription. The other thing you could do that's pretty easy to pull off ⁓ is ⁓ full text email newsletter. So iPolitics in Canada, they've been doing this for a while, works really, really well. Essentially at 6 a.m., if you're a paid subscriber and only for paid subscribers, you get the newsletter in your mailbox with full text. Like what happened over the last...

You know, what happened overnight, what happened at the end of the previous day, what's going to happen today. And, um, you know, they're into political commentary. there's especially during election season, there's a ton going on. And what they found is their readers, when they're getting themselves ready in the morning, they just want to open their email and read the email. They don't want to log in. They don't want to go, they don't want to click on anything. They just want to read the newsletter in its entirely. And that's easy to set up that that's another value add that you can.

automate and ⁓ and provide a nice chunk of value as well. Okay so we have the free newsletter and the paid newsletter. I want to show an example of how to set up your free newsletter real quick ⁓ and we we work with another publisher called BYO or Brew Your Own magazine and they are ⁓

actually now digital only publication. But if you're looking ⁓ here on YouTube, you'll see this. If you're listening, I'll just break it down really simply for you. Essentially what they have is they have a little editor's welcome at the top, which is always a nice personal touch on your newsletter. Even if it's fully automated, you can go in and add that and edit that sort of editor's welcome on a daily or every couple days a week basis.

What you want to do with your free newsletter is remember I told you earlier that your free newsletters, ⁓ the purpose of your free newsletter is to promote your upgrade messaging. Well, here it is. Right. So right near the top, this is under the editor's welcome is a promotion to subscribe to BYL to their membership. Right. And this can be just maybe just a simple banner at the top. You don't want it to be too much. I'd say that ⁓

You know, ⁓ a title, a little bit of text and a button is probably as aggressive as you want to go at the very top of the newsletter. ⁓ And then you have the content that falls underneath basically titles and excerpts with some images here. And if I scroll down to the bottom of this particular BYO newsletter, I'm going to get another subscription message. So this one is actually a little bit longer. This is a, know, when you get to the bottom of the content on the newsletter, this is good place to really

really promote your subscription, why someone should upgrade to pay all the benefits that they're gonna get. Nice big button. ⁓ And ⁓ it's not offensive because it's sort of at the bottom of the content, but if folks are getting to the bottom of your content or your newsletter, are they engaged?

Tyler (12:29)
highly engaged.

Pete (12:31)
Yeah, you got somebody on the hook there who might be like, yeah, know, thinking about it. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't. And they just need to see that, you know, 10 times, 20 times. I don't know how many times, depending on the person. So bottom line, have a upgrade message at the top. Hey, premium, subscription or membership, whatever you want to call it. And at the bottom have a nice big call out for access now.

Another just, talked about, I talked about sponsorships a little bit. Good place for sponsorships ⁓ could be certainly inserted in the content ⁓ of the newsletter, but at the bottom, you have quite a number of sponsors, which some of our publishers do, you could have like their logos at the bottom and a nice section sponsored by, ⁓ and you can work those in. Okay. So this was part two. You have a free newsletter and a paid newsletter.

So we have the free registration component, which is going to build that list ⁓ like crazy. Then we have your two newsletters, your free and your paid. ⁓ Again, this is all easy to set up. ⁓ You can automate the whole thing. If you want help in doing that, just reach out. We'll help you set it up. It's with our

platform with Leaky Paywall and Flowletter, Newsletter Glue, all that. It's just a great, easy system. ⁓ Okay, so what's the third thing? The third thing we already ran a podcast on, it's send frequency. How frequently you should send your newsletter. This is the third critical element. ⁓ We talked to lots of publishers and we find that half of them, maybe if I were to just pick a number.

⁓ are not sending their newsletters frequently enough. If you're in the long form space, like a magazine publisher, or you have long form journalism, we hear publishers tell us, yeah, we send, ⁓ you know, twice a month we'll send out our newsletter, or sometimes a magazine publisher that's publishing monthly issues will send out one gigantic newsletter per month. Way too little. You need to send your newsletters out frequently.

⁓ I forget what we call the podcast. was one or two podcasts ago. It's all about newsletter frequency. And we kind of dive into the details of the type of publisher that you might be and how frequently you should send it. The, the, the cliff notes on this is if you're a, a news publisher, like local news, regional news, you should be sending at minimum a newsletter a day as the news is fresh, get it out there. ⁓ ideally twice a day. ⁓ it could be.

paid premium second newsletter, but even if it's free, ⁓ get those newsletters cranking out there. We have a case study on two very similar regional news publishers that ⁓ one was sending more frequently than the other. And that publisher was outperforming the other publisher by like 4X in terms of paid conversions. And it was really boiled down to how often that they were emailing their readers. And you think...

geez, I don't want to annoy my readers. I think that's the big fear, right? But remember, they're opting in. They're not going to opt in with an email and a password unless they're pretty interested in what you're publishing and your content is your superpower. That's what they want. And it's just a newsletter. It's in the inbox. we are, you know, today we we're all scanners, right? We get our we get our email. We're scanning subject lines. Scan, scan, scan, scan. that looks interesting. Boom. So, yeah.

The reader might ignore 80 % of your newsletters or 50%, whatever the number is, but it doesn't matter because it's that 20 % or other 50 % that they look at and say, oh, that's interesting. They click on it, they open it up, they see a story in there. Oh, this is really interesting. Click on it. Boom. Upgrade message. Maybe they'll see it depending on how generous you are with your meter, but that's the flow. You want people to scan, be interested.

click, see the upgrade message. The more times they do that, higher the conversion rate. If they're not interested, great, that's fine. They've scanned it. They've gotten value out of the summaries, the excerpts, just reading the titles. They know what's going on in your space. That's a value. So your newsletter, again, back to it's your product. Design your newsletter to be beautiful, to be simple, clean, easy to scan. That's the real trick here. Okay.

So send frequency. ⁓ That's the whole deal. That's how to set up your newsletter to win. Get the free registration involved on your website. Start building that email list. ⁓ Segment into two newsletters, free newsletter, paid newsletter. Make sure your upgrade messaging is set in your free newsletter and your paid newsletter does not have it and may have other benefits.

It's your product. This newsletter is so important in the world of paid subscriptions and then send frequently. Just be fearless about it. If ⁓ you're a long form magazine publisher, we talked about news being daily. If you're a long form article publisher or magazine publisher, then strive for about twice a week. That's usually a pretty good cadence. mean, every publisher is different and I'm just giving you some general guidelines, but ⁓

Sometimes a magazine publisher will say, well, I don't really have enough content to send two articles a week, or maybe it's four articles per week, you know, because they want two for each newsletter. Well, if you're a long form content, you probably have evergreen content. So bring your archives back, right? Repurpose your archives. Most people don't see your archives. Even if you send a newsletter today, you know, half the people will never see it. So you got to bring these archives back. Small boats takes two related archives.

puts them in a separate newsletter. It's just an archive newsletter. And I'm telling you, what I learned the other day is that archived content has a higher engagement rate than fresh content, which kind of blew me away. But I guess if you think about it, it's like if a publisher, if you're bringing an archive article back, it must be important, right?

Tyler (19:04)
Yeah.

Pete (19:05)
Anyway,

okay, so those are the three things. Free registration, free and paid newsletters, send frequently. If you need help, just get in touch, we're here. Anything else, Tyler?

Tyler (19:20)
That covers it.

Pete (19:21)
All right.

Excellent. Best podcast you've listened to all year. See you guys. See you, Tyler.