Our subs retention strategy: New Scientist

Q: What are the key pillars of your retention strategy?

A: Everyone at New Scientist, from teams including product, tech, marketing and CRM, finance and editorial, is aware of the business objectives for retention, and they are reinforced regularly ensuring we all play our role in achieving these objectives:

• Digital first growth and product innovation to reduce churn: Moving a print product to digital is not the answer; this is about thinking digital first and foremost and adapting content to suit various digital platforms targeting new younger audiences as well as our existing demographic. We identified the value proposition wasn’t quite right to sustain this shift and are working towards creating an improved product on different platforms inserting New Scientist into daily life, to drive habit formation.
• Lifecycle engagement and churn prevention: Showcasing the breadth of content New Scientist offers across the entire customer lifecycle – helping subscribers build habits, discover features and realise the depth of what’s available to create an engaged customer in the first weeks of subscribing. Alongside this, working towards identifying churn predictors and running churn prevention initiatives that strike the balance between offering an easy exit whilst clearly demonstrating the benefits and features subscribers would miss.
• Monetise loyalty through yield growth from longer tenure subscribers: Offsetting the lower yield bought in by digital first subscribers with increases in yield from legacy print subscribers. Achieved through a trusted and valued print product, alongside additional value added products such as subscriber events and newsletters.

Q: How do you see this evolving over the next few years?

A: We are investing in experienced analytical brains to be able to provide robust insights into product engagement and churn. This will continue to inform the retention strategy creating a targeted, personalised approach, and allowing us to focus on areas within the product that are over indexing on subscriber use. In addition to this, advances in technology and, of course, AI will allow us to better target users with messaging relevant to them and their needs across a variety of channels, communicating to them wherever they are.

Pricing strategies will continue to evolve, as we balance deeply discounted acquisition offers to encourage adoption with retention pricing strategies to ensure a sustainable business model. Analysis and testing is key to understanding price elasticity and the optimum price by audience segment.

Ultimately, the goal remains to deliver a variety of products via a diverse range of platforms to continue to attract new younger audiences whilst retaining existing subscribers.

Three top tips

1. Engagement isn’t just an email onboarding series sent in the first few weeks of a subscription. That’s a start but there’s so much more. Firstly, it’s not all about CRM. Email has been increasingly saturated; other channels that can be used for retention include onsite messaging – be it overlay, exit banners, native ads etc – push notifications, in app messaging, utilising existing products such as newsletters natively or through ad placements, the print magazine to expose readers to digital content and so on. Secondly, engagement should be always on, with interventions if a subscriber’s engagement declines or changes. The first 30 days are important to build habit but so is every day after.

2. Use your customers to galvanise change. They are the ones using the product so listen to them and ask them for feedback, then use this data to make pivotal changes. There are two ways New Scientist has been doing this.

Firstly, we have regular contact with the external customer service teams; we listen to calls and read customer emails, using customer satisfaction scoring which highlights any potential problems. As a result of this, we have rewritten scripts and email templates resulting in significant improvements in quality scoring.

Secondly, we run regular surveys at key touchpoints, including during onboarding and again at exit. Our subscribers are consistently candid with their feedback – the good, the bad and the occasionally ugly! Insights from exit surveys revealed that our digital activation process wasn’t delivering the experience customers expected. This prompted a full system migration to simplify and streamline the journey. The feedback around reasons for cancellation also reinforced the need to refresh our product offering to better attract new audiences and re‑engage lapsed users, with a strong emphasis on accessible pricing and more tailored content. Focus groups have been equally invaluable in shaping upcoming product enhancements and new launches. These are currently in pilot, so watch this space – there’s more to come.

3. Be brave, take risks, use intuition and don’t sweat the small stuff. In order to move at pace in a digital first world, we have had to make quick decisions and plough ahead without necessarily having all the data insights. This is a culture shift across the business but is being enforced from the top down. For example, our data didn’t tell us the key to engagement is app engagement, newsletter sign ups and puzzles, but intuitively that makes sense, and other publishers have proven it with their brands so our onboarding and in-life journeys focus on those actions. Similarly, in order to make change in a digital landscape, we’ve had to forgo small tests we used to run for small incremental change, or nice to have initiatives, instead spending the time developing big bold ideas that will significantly move the dial. It’s also ok for some of those big bold ideas to fail. That’s how we learn.