Last week, we held our ‘Subscriber Acquisition Special – Q&A’ webinar, in which the eight contributors to the subscriber acquisition special we ran in the March / April issue of InPublishing magazine answered questions.
There were lots of insights and good advice – I have paraphrased one from each of the panelists below:
- Remove any points of friction from your check-out process: anything that causes your would-be subscriber to hesitate increases the likelihood of checkout abandonment. (Jamie Nunn, head of products, CDS Global)
- Use retention analysis to guide your acquisition pricing strategy: overly generous discounting will deliver short term gain but long term pain as they fail to step up to standard pricing in sufficient numbers. (Susanne Kinnaird, head of digital reader revenue, Newsquest)
- AI functionality is set to transform current broad-brush segmentation by factoring in considerations like ‘propensity to subscribe’. (Sally Longstaff, senior acquisition marketing strategy lead, Immediate Media)
- Ensure your messaging is consistent across the customer journey. From first contact right through to the checkout page, all your comms should be consistent, in their wording and visuals. (Damir Lutvic, VP, onboarding, Darwin CX)
- Hard pay / reg walls are a thing of the past; everything should be dynamic now. First, segment your audience and then tailor the ‘wall’ messaging and experience to each segment. (Vicky Macey, product and strategy specialist, Full Fat Things)
- When designing your newsletters, work on optimising each headline. Newsletter recipients tend to skim-read. You need to say enough to grab their attention but not to give everything away, thereby increasing click-throughs. (Simon Gates, global marketing director, Infopro Digital)
- When segmenting your audience, start with your brand objectives. For subscription based brands, a good segment to start with is ‘engaged readers who are not paying you any money yet’. Tailored messaging to this group is likely to be productive and once you’ve mastered that, then consider breaking the segment down into sub-groups and refining the messaging further. (Will Woodrow, head of marketing, Mark Allen Group)
- Make your calls-to-action clear and test each CTA process by completing the desired action yourself to identify and optimise any friction points (Mike Halstead, managing director, HH&S)
In seventy minutes of in-depth Q&A, there was loads more advice and insight, which you can catch by watching the recording here. (You will need to fill out the registration form and then you’ll be directed to the recording.)
(Finally, we’re putting together the mailing list for the May / June issue of InPublishing magazine, which features a ‘content creation’ special. To join our free mailing list, please register now.)
You can catch James Evelegh’s regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
