Q: What is your subscriber acquisition strategy?
A: Risk Global, part of Infopro Digital, is a market leading B2B information provider covering financial risk management, foreign exchange, financial technology, central banking and UK insurance markets. Our subscription brands are all established in their markets, and beyond the obvious push for additional spend from existing subscribing firms, we have also engaged in specific new activities for subscriber acquisition from new users and new firms.
Two years ago, we identified two core issues that were holding us back in terms of subscriber acquisition. One, our database was shrinking and the engagement levels decreasing. Two, our trial conversion rates were declining — trending at lower than 0.8%. We needed to grow our database (and not just through buying in cold data) via improved conversion of anonymous users. Our traditional strategy of free trials — where new contacts can view content, for free, for a short period of time wasn’t converting enough traffic. Nor were we incentivising lapsed trials to continue their engagement with the brand. They’d feast on our content for free, and then leave.
To address the issues of website traffic conversion and low trial conversion rates, we dispensed with the traditional trials to our product offering. This has been replaced with a metered life-time registration product, allowing users to access two news level articles a month and receive a newsletter which teases in our premium content offering.
Q: Where are you enjoying most success?
A: This strategy was by no means a golden bullet. It didn’t yield instant success. There have been plenty of falls and bumps along the way. We needed to review the meter setting multiple times and tweak the type of content included, the number of articles, the frequency of the newsletter, the style and layout of the newsletter, and the paywall messaging to name just a few!
With a high-priced entry level to our products (our Risk.net subscription starts at over £3k) the purchasing decision making process can take time. Nurturing clients through our product offering has, eventually, seen a marked improvement in both new business (+20% for some product lines) and improved our anonymous traffic data capture by over 200% - 250 trials on average per month to 800 registrations on average per month. The benefit of that additional, warm data, into our database has also been felt outside of our subscriptions business with Learning and Event registrations also being converted from this new source of contacts. (We introduce other products from our portfolio in the onboarding activity and free newsletter).
Whilst we saw a long tail of the time to conversion from registration to paid subscription (some users converted up to 18 months after initial registration), the sweet spot was still, like free trials, within the first 45 days.
We don’t put every registration in as a lead to the sales team. Instead, setting automated behavioural triggers that then feeds those registered users who are displaying subscriber like behaviours as leads into our sales system. We add clear lead context as to why that lead has been pushed through as a lead.
This has reduced lead volume by up to 65% on some brands (it took time to get the right balance here and manage that change with the sales and marketing functions). However, it has improved sales efficiency with lead conversion on some of the lead pots converting at over 6%.
Whilst there are still many users that visit, consume one or two articles in the first day and then do not re-engage, the registration platform has given us a rich, engaged audience. One we now also tap into on larger enterprise level renewals. A source of replacement user or additional users that reduces renewal churn and has increased spend from additional users.
Three top tips
- Ensure all teams buy into the strategy and plan. The registration product offering was a huge step change. There was push back from sales who liked the traditional trial-based approach — which clients often requested. Editorial were concerned that we weren’t surfacing our best content to our prospects. We worked with sales to surface the commercial opportunities available to them. Enlisting our data team to convert complex data into user friendly, digestible dashboards helped with this!
- Analyse, test and adapt. We reviewed and tweaked the metering offering, keeping an eye on usage patterns, time to convert etc. The newsletter offering was also constantly under the microscope as we endeavoured to push users into paid subscriber behaviours.
- Regularly review and refresh your paywall messaging. We experienced surges in registrations (and even online orders) when we refreshed the creative and messaging on our barrier pages. Offers helped. But, sometimes, just small refreshes can capture attention and interest. Just like banner-blindness, paywalls can become stale, familiar to the users and subsequently ignored.
Simon and the other contributors took part in a ‘Subscriber Acquisition Special – Q&A’ webinar on Thursday, 22nd May 2025. You can watch a recording of the webinar by registering here.
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.
