Our subs retention strategy: Our Media

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

A: Like many other publishers, we are mitigating challenges in rising costs and tighter margins, and need to ensure we are driving sustainable revenue, not just volume. Profitability as an important pillar means a strong renewal rate also needs to deliver strong revenue. We’ve started to move away from price-led campaigns and heavily discounted offers to campaigns and messaging that highlight and reinforce the value proposition of our specialist brands.

The vision for our renewal campaigns is brand-led; we have 20 brilliant titles, with world-class photography, trusted quality content, and expert-led teams. We need to bring this to life through journeys and creative. Previous emails were heavily templated and lacked brand differentiation. The CRM journey should feel like you’re opening a direct conversation with your favourite publication that you love receiving every month, not a transactional send that feels cold and uninspiring.

We’ve seen some of our strongest renewal rates and record term 1 yields since shifting to a strategy that highlights product value and drives profitability. Attracting the right customers at the right price helps to drive loyalty vs high volume and churn.

Our second pillar of efficiency means streamlining, scaling and using automation. But you cannot improve a process until you have documented it, and you cannot achieve an objective until you have a process and system to support it. At the start of this role, I tried to gain full visibility of our renewal strategy and operations quickly, but this was a challenge. Documents lived in multiple places, with different people and processes were not captured; I struggled to visually see the journey, results and campaigns end-to-end. Through a detailed audit, everything we’ve done and continue to do is now documented. We’ve got change controls in place, rolling out playbooks and how-to videos, so changes don’t create bottlenecks. It also means the team have fully owned this, questioning and suggesting as we go and it’s something we’ve built together. Full automation is the ambition, and although this isn’t our current state, we’ve got the foundational frameworks in place to progress towards this, with a view to reduce manual time and effort, so teams can focus on more creative and strategic campaigns.

Finally, relevance with smart targeting and personalisation. We don’t need to throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. One message to the right customer is better than ten irrelevant messages to ten customers. Connecting to our second pillar of automation and efficiency, we know enabling this can ensure our campaigns are smarter and more strategic. We’ve started to reduce the number of efforts and emails we are sending, ensuring we are measuring the sweet spot of engagement and frequency, and hitting the right conversions. We don’t need to make assumptions; we can learn from trends in data, and once we’ve got efficiency frameworks in place, we can be reactive to deliver more meaningful messaging to our customers.

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

A: AI will be one of the biggest disruptors in our industry. As technology advances and content becomes increasingly accessible, the pace of change will only accelerate. But operating within specialist interest markets, I can see our strategies leaning into the concept of ‘slowing down’. Our brands are passion focused, whether readers are avid cyclists, knitters or garden designers, our brands connect people to what they love. Retention strategies expand beyond messaging and are creating community-led environments that support a loyalty ecosystem.

In recent years, we’ve seen notable online only brands now opening bricks and mortar stores, or pop-ups to bring their communities together in real life.

Our brands will need to become much more than just a print product to compete in the evolving media landscape and that’s where our strategies will shift into membership models and experiences to create a sense of belonging which has more power.

Three top tips

1. Always be curious. Create a creative and collaborative test and learn culture where teams feel confident to ask questions. Curiosity is one of our values here at Our Media, and across the teams, it really shows. We always encourage curiosity, which can lead to trying something new, challenging a piece of data, using a different approach, or taking a risk. If you aren’t being curious, you won’t move forward, and this is critical to ensure a retention strategy that evolves with your customers.

2. Remember, you are a consumer too! It’s easy to get absorbed in dashboards, reporting and complex journeys. I try to always take a step back and think like a customer: how did that email after a purchase make me feel? What did a brand do when my order went wrong? Which brand did I recommend to a friend, and why? When working across many brands, we’re not always going to be experts in every market, but we can be experts in how we make customers feel, and that’s something that we can all relate to.

3. Treat your data as an asset. Data is real-life customers, not just numbers. It can be a common strategy within media companies to collect as much data as possible, but I’d suggest asking ‘why’ first. Be strict and set governance for your data practices; less can be more, with quality over quantity.