Subscribers are the publisher’s lifeblood. Retaining them is no longer the sole role of the account manager. The days of an annual telephone call and a cheque in the post are long gone. B2B information buyers are more under budget pressure, more demanding about what content they invest in, more savvy with their budgets!
A successful annual renewal can be the difference between enjoying a good year or suffering a bad one, so how does a publisher turn a critical event into a formality? Using technology to engage your subscribers with your content is now an important part of this process.
Use data as evidence
Stats on how research is used, customer behaviour and content popularity help justify renewal fees. The technology a publisher uses to supply content and interact with business subscribers should provide a wealth of information that enables them to demonstrate the value it provides.
Edify Digital Media, a London-based publisher of leather market information, uses content usage data to understand what their customers like and develop upselling campaigns. Edify’s co-founder Maria Wallace elaborates; “As publishers, user analytics are valuable as they provide information showing what content is of most interest - so we can produce more - and warm sales leads for possible subscription upgrades or new business opportunities.”
Underplay the renewal and build in reliance
The ideal situation is for the renewal process to become a predictable, administrative task. For example, within the SaaS sector where there is baked-in reliance on the service, renewals are often not a problem. Renewals become a problem issue for publishers if the content is no longer deemed to provide a good return on the cost.
If an account manager can make use of dashboards and alerts to quickly stay up-to-speed on how content is being used, they don’t need to wait for the renewal. If a new piece of content is published that has high relevance for a customer but lies outside their licence, a manager has a range of options to deepen the customer relationship. They might provide time-limited free access, offer a discount, or even use this content as a way to cross-sell into a new area.
Whichever approach is taken, proactive help of this kind ensures the client maximises their subscription and is regularly reminded off the value the publisher provides.
Help subscribers use content to perform tasks
In a highly competitive market where often content quality and price are similar, research publishers can use technology to help their users access just the information they need. That means enabling them to buy, search, export and compile bespoke reports in a practical way.
Brett Azuma, Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer, 451 Research, commenting on how technology helps publishing content in a granular way said, “It will allow us to play a more integral role in how our clients work. One of our strategic goals is to become more embedded in their workflows… It will be easier for them to find what they’re looking for and extract this into documents or spreadsheets.”
Content that is quick to access is a great way for an end user to gain the knowledge they need, when they need it. But what if subscribers have to compile a report or presentation? This is where content that’s also quick to reuse can set forward-thinking publishers apart. If a publisher can embrace technology to help a user perform such workflow tasks such as saving snippets and downloading into multiple ‘ready-to-go’ formats the content is more likely to become a favoured resource for the subscriber.
Enable subscribers to find and use relevant content in the quickest and easiest way possible with technology and tools that empower, engage and enhance the efficiency of a user’s workflow.
The point of differentiation to help a publisher drive reliance could include:
- Options that help a user buy an additional chapter or section – rather than a whole report – from outside their licence.
- Search functionality that provides specific returns to help a user quickly access relevant sections of text, tables or graphics.
- Empowering the user to clip a section of content and then compile and export their own bespoke reports containing all the tailored content snippets they have gathered.
Enhance user engagement
Publishers keen to improve user engagement need to work proactively to help clients maximise their subscription. This means regularly suggesting cross and upsell opportunities and implementing a system of saved searches and alerts to notify users of new and relevant content.
TGaS Advisors, a strategic advisory company in life sciences use software functions to drive engagement with their content. Associate Director Tarra Maeshima expands; “Saved searches and alerts are a big deal for customer relationships. Customers only seek information when it’s necessary, so alerts are a useful way for them to stay on top of relevant information and dive into content quickly when answers are needed.”
Engage subscribers with flexible licences
Publishers looking to become market leader can benefit from using technology to offer flexible subscription models that more closely fit the clients’ requirements. Instead of offering them access to everything, what about something more nuanced?
Using sophisticated taxonomy, publishers can tag and categorise content in ways that make it easy to provide access to unique verticals of content and simple to add additional pieces – or whole new categories – to a subscription in a single click.
5 tips to improve subscriber renewal rates
- Use data to support the value subscribers get from content
- Build reliance on content that makes the renewal seem second nature
- Enhance user engagement with task-based workflow tools
- Encourage easy content (re)use
- Offer subscribers flexible licences
Ultimately, it’s all about publishers offering more value to customers than just the content and then being able to demonstrate the value it provides.
About us
Since 2003, Content Catalyst Ltd has developed proprietary software-as-a-service to enable people in business to efficiently discover knowledge and data in documents and allow users to collate, build and share insight.
Publish Interactive is a content management platform with authoring, workflow, licensing and subscriber management tools for B2B information publishers to deliver and manage their content.
Website: publishinteractive.com
