Our subs acquisition strategy: Immediate Media

Q: What is your subscriber acquisition strategy?

A: We have big stretch targets that involve scaling our digital subscription growth, while keeping a stable print subscription acquisition strategy that continues to drive strong revenue.

Part of this strategy is the growth of the new Radio Times app, ‘What to watch’. The app combines the authority of Radio Times’ trusted guidance with the utility of user-defined watchlists. The app launched in July 2024 and the paywall was introduced in December — ahead of schedule.

Our overall customer subscriptions and marketing team objectives work towards the common purpose of making our approach more customer-centric; and providing compelling customer-centric products that will be useful and valuable for our readers. For subscription acquisition in particular, our goal is to re-look at how we spend our marketing budget so that we can constantly iterate, to scale top of funnel / brand awareness activity, to reach new audiences, while improving direct conversions for our known audiences.

Q: Where are you enjoying most success?

A: Overall, as a business, we’ve been building on our traditionally strong / market-leading position in print subs. We’ve also seen our digital subscriber volume overtake print for the first time ever (last year) — bringing exciting successes like Good Food having more subscribers than it has ever had in its history (across print and digital).

Following adaptations to how we work, we now have a much closer alignment between our paid and organic social teams and subscriptions acquisitions. We’ve seen great successes in maximising our reach and conversions (particularly with Advantage+) through our paid social activity on Meta and Instagram. We’ve tested new approaches such as taking our audience directly to our eCommerce site vs. taking audiences to our brand websites, such as GardenersWorld.com — to ascertain whether assumed improvements in engagement will balance out assumed reduction in conversion rates.

We’ve had successes with the setup of automated email journeys (led by our great CRM team) which target cohorts of website registrants, enabling us to promote subscriptions to more selected audiences based upon their engagement level. The introduction of a new data management platform also means we can more easily identify different audience cohorts and personalise our approach — something we are only at the start of utilising.

With the Good Food app, we’ve seen great successes collaborating closely with editorial to create talent takeovers with well-known chefs and bakers such as Nadiya Hussain, Brin Pirathapan and Dr Chintal Patel. When we align these takeovers with a focus on seasonal, useful content (such as a healthy meal plan) we see improvements in traffic, installs and conversions to our app. We’ve also worked with our social teams to expand our takeover successes from the short timeframes that they run — for instance, we’ll promote a Dr Chintal Patel takeover primarily for just a few weeks, but the collection remains in the app for all customers, allowing us to keep promoting it to a selection of our audience through social channels.

Successful campaigns we’ve run recently include our subscribe and get the Radio Times Christmas issue campaign — a great example of a successful campaign approach for us which centres around urgency and a specific benefit (related to just one print issue). The nature of our print products means that there will always be an end date where the time to subscribe and get a specific issue (before it is on newsstand) passes — we can use this as a way to showcase the benefit of subscribing. For this, we utilise many changes in our marketing such as countdown timers (on email and search) and clear offer end dates.

Three top tips

1. Always bring it back to the customer — constantly reflecting on ‘how does my product and marketing message’ bring them value and fulfil a need and want. (Marketing 101 really, but often this is easy to lose sight of.) Be clear on the value proposition of your brands.
2. Clarify what success looks like before you start. Whether your end goal is subscriptions, engagement, reach, feedback or maybe just to test a new direction or channel, clearly outline how you are going to show that what you did made a difference, didn’t make a difference, or could cause a negative reaction. Clarify it further by using benchmarks, or previous campaigns to inform what a good LTV response looks like, what a strong CAC for this campaign would be. If need be, reverse engineer it using LTV analysis — ie. what is the worst performance we’d need to see to still judge this activity to be profitable? Do we think the ‘worst’ performance is achievable? As we look to grow and test new marketing approaches, particularly those that relate to brand awareness and are less straight-forward to track and showcase value on, this is becomes all the more important.
3. Plan ahead as much as possible. Though probably a hang over from a few years ago when more of our acquisitions were driven through print channels (resulting in the need to confirm plans much earlier to get them into print), the earlier you can look ahead the better. There is a tendency amid the busy-ness of the day-to-day for looking ahead to fall by the wayside but this can ultimately cause problems and a sense of always trying to ‘catch up’. If this happens, actively set aside time to plan campaigns that will run in a month, two months, three months’ time, and set some wheels in motion — so when you get to this point, you already have something to work with.

This article was included in the Subscriber Acquisition Special, published by InPublishing in April 2025. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.