On Tuesday, we held our latest ‘top tips’ webinar.
‘Seven Proven Subscription Strategies for Publishers’ was presented by AdvantageCS’s John Sheehy, who gave us loads of top tips, underpinned with some useful industry benchmarks stats.
Here, paraphrasing John, were just a few of my takeaways from the webinar:
- Retry declined payments. Payment recovery technology and strategies have evolved to the point where publishers have a good chance of successfully recovering 50% of declined digital payments.
- Bundle, but don’t over-bundle. Pick your strongest publishing asset then add one or two complementary assets to create a bundle. The bundle items all need to be closely aligned and the bundle needs to make sense to the subscriber! In terms of pricing, you should limit the bundle price to 1.5 times the rate card price of the main asset.
- Everyone should have a paywall. The type depends on your level of subs sophistication and the amount of data you have available. If you’re relatively new to paywalls, then start with a hard / soft / metred / freemium (delete as appropriate for your brand) approach but best to stay away from dynamics ones, which require more set-up resource and data, until you’ve had a bit more experience. Crawl before you walk…
- If you’re offering free trials, ask for payment details too. The best converting free trials are those that capture payment method and then auto-renew at the end of the trial period. Better still, replace ‘free’ with a small payment for a limited period of time, which then auto-renews to a higher rate.
- Prioritise the ‘auto-renew’ payment method. Auto-renew outperforms classic renew, 80% vs 60%. Just look at your non-work life and you will see everything now is on auto-renew. Ideally, you should explore using a dynamic auto-renew approach that incorporates price jumps.
- Communicate, but don’t overwhelm. Event-based emails (ie. those relating to the subscription order) get much higher open rates than marketing related ones (90% vs 25%). Chose your comms carefully.
If you would like to watch a recording of John’s presentation and the Q&A that followed, then please register here. You will then be automatically redirected to the recording.
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