Seven Proven Subscription Strategies for Publishers
In a market where audience habits, privacy rules, and platform economics shift monthly, sustainable growth comes from a disciplined subscription strategy.
In this session, AdvantageCS’s John Sheehy distils seven proven, real-world approaches publishers are using to grow acquisition, reduce involuntary churn, and expand lifetime value.
You’ll walk away with a practical way to diagnose where your subscription business needs adjustments, and a clear set of proven strategies – covering pricing and packaging, trials and onboarding, retention systems, payments hygiene, bundling and partnerships, and the metrics that keep teams focused.
This webinar is designed for busy leaders who want actionable ideas they can put to work this quarter.
What you can expect to learn:
- Simple metrics to pinpoint where your subscription program is underperforming.
- How leading publishers align pricing, packaging, and trials to improve paid conversion.
- The overlooked payments & dunning practices that can quietly add revenue.
- Ways to structure onboarding and early life engagement to reduce avoidable churn.
- Where bundles and partnerships make sense (and where they don’t).
- The handful of operational metrics that keep product, marketing, and finance in unison.
Who should attend:
Chief executives, chief / heads of subscription or audience / consumer revenue, chief digital / product officers, marketing / CRM / retention leaders, growth & data / analytics leads, finance / RevOps, and technology / platform owners (paywall, identity, payments, e‑commerce).
This webinar was broadcast on 2.30-3pm (BST), Tuesday 23 September 2025
Presenter: John Sheehy
With nearly 20 years of experience, John Sheehy serves as chief solutions architect at AdvantageCS, where he advises publishers and membership organisations on subscription strategy, platform selection, and large-scale implementations.
He has authored market analyses on subscription platforms and pricing models and frequently partners with leadership teams to translate subscription business models to scalable, data-driven software platforms.
John bridges commercial aims with technical realities, helping teams optimise platform capabilities to improve conversion, retention, and operational economics.
His perspective blends hands-on systems experience with practical change management, helping organisations modernise their subscription businesses.
Moderator: James Evelegh
James Evelegh has worked in magazine publishing since 1989, and has been the editor and publisher of InPublishing since it launched in 2003. He began his career with Trinity Publishing (now DMG) and was then group circulation manager at Centaur Communications from 1994 to 1996. From 1996 to 2003, he worked as a circulation consultant to a wide range of companies including Guardian Media Group, FT Business, Euromoney, WH Smith News and Wilmington.
Webinar sponsored by: AdvantageCS
AdvantageCS is a privately held software company founded in 1980 and headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a European office in Paris. The company serves publishers and content-driven organisations worldwide.
Its flagship Advantage platform powers end-to-end subscription management across digital and print, with integrated capabilities for customer data, paywalls, eCommerce, customer identity and access management (CIAM), billing, renewals, and analytics.
