Editor’s note: this story is published in partnership with Poool, which enabled The Fix to implement our own registration wall. The author, Madeleine White, is Editor-in-Chief of The Audiencers, a B2B media for digital publishing professionals, and Head of International at Poool, The Membership & Subscription Suite. This column was adapted from Madeleine’s opening remarks at The Audiencers’ Festival in London held in mid-October.

We recently held our inaugural The Audiencers’ Festival in London, bringing together 150 digital publishing professionals from the UK, Spain, Canada and even Mexico for an afternoon of conversations, both on and off stage, on how to better engage, convert and retain your audiences.

Marion Wyss and myself, Madeleine, co-editors in chief, kicked the day off with our perspective on the context of digital reader revenue models with three audience trends we recommend publishers put into place.

1. Registration

Firstly, registration. A topic we’ve talked a lot about on The Audiencers, and for good reason as this strategy finally becomes a priority for titles looking to maximise the value of their readers online.

Logging users is essential for anything data related – whether that be personalisation, targeted ads or even AI.

Something that I love about AI is how everybody’s so convinced that it will do our job for us and that it can be used to show the right paywall on the right article to the right person with the right pricing at the right moment… But when at most only 1% of your audience is logged, this just isn’t possible!

If you don’t have data, you don’t have workable AI. Period.

And, of course, on top of this, registration is a valuable soft conversion step prior to subscription that increases a reader’s propensity to subscribe by up to 40%.

In France, the CDO of the sports publisher L’Equipe told us that their free members are 13 times more likely to subscribe than anonymous users. Other publishers have found a 10-40 times higher propensity to subscribe.

Blick, a Swiss publisher, has well understood the benefits of registration.

They acquired 647,000 free registered members thanks to a diverse number of acquisition strategies, including direct logins, users wishing to comment or participate in their raffles or events, as well as their registration wall overlay. All this happened even before they’d launched their subscription product, Blick+, this summer.

Thanks to registration, Blick had a reader segment that was highly engaged. A prepared list of leads if you will. Those that already saw the value in the publication, came back to the site fairly regularly and were highly more likely to subscribe.

What’s more, the publisher was able to test conversation strategies through registration, collecting data and learnings to understand exactly what makes readers want to partake in the value exchange.

Importantly, however, registration supports revenue diversification. Whether you have a donation model, are monetising from advertising, premium products, events or other, registration helps you put your reader first, understand them, increase engagement and ensure they see the value in your title.

To round off, here are four essentials for establishing a registration model:

Build registration like you would a premium product, with defined value that your reader will gain in exchange for converting
When collecting data, start small to go big – collect less data & use it well before asking for more
Onboard registered readers like you would subscribers

Integrate registration into the subscription journey, using it to increase engagement & promote subscription – for instance, with what we’ve named, the double-edged wall.

Here, examples from The Washington Post, Bloomberg, & EBRA media.

Each offers two options to access content:

Free registration with the benefit of accessing a limited number of articles.
Or subscribe for unlimited access and even more benefits.

Although some less engaged readers won’t choose to subscribe, you’re placing the subscription option right in front of them, making them aware of your offer and the value you can provide through a subscription compared to registration.

2. Dynamicity

Our second trend is dynamicity.

As anyone with a subscription model will have discovered, driving a reader revenue strategy “just” by blocking our articles behind a hard, “one size fits all” paywall, may well convert your most engaged readers, but it’s likely going to put others off.

Every reader is different, with a different propensity to subscribe, in a different reading context, with different interests and levels of engagement. We all know this. Yet, the majority of publishers still employ a conversion strategy that treats every user the same.

Frustrate some users too much by blocking content too soon, and you’ll turn them away. At the same time, whilst a softer strategy is great for increasing engagement, it won’t prove so effective in pushing your engaged users to register, or subscribe.

It’s all about perfectly balancing frustration and engagement for each individual – i.e. a dynamic model.

We’ve seen this with the big players – for instance, The Atlantic, which announced that their prices will now vary depending on the profile of the user, or The New York Times, which uses machine learning to make the paywall smarter.

But dynamicity is not necessarily out of reach. There are many, very simple strategies to put in place without the need for a machine-learnt model, and it could bring significant benefits to your business.

For example, you could adapt your wordings and strategy based on the content type, targeting readers interested in a specific topic. Paris Match has a whole section of their site dedicated to royal families, with personalised messaging that highlights the “royal” content included in their subscription offer and promotes the subscriber-only newsletter that will appeal to this audience.

Le Journal du Dimanche deploys a paywall dedicated to readers who didn’t finish the conversion process, with the focus being on the speed and simplicity of subscribing in “a single click” and reassuring readers that they can cancel anytime.

3. Lifetime Value

Finally, the ultimate and arguably most important practice to get on board with is prioritising Lifetime Value.

As I discussed in my presentation to French publishers at our Paris Festival, many people come to us asking about which paywall model is most effective in converting readers to subscribers – freemium, metered or hard.

There are actually many challenges with this question – such as cultural differences or the publisher’s maturity when it comes to digital conversion models. But one of the biggest issues is that it focuses on acquisition.

One model may well be optimal for acquiring subscribers, but what about acquiring subscribers who will remain subscribed, who will continue to engage in your product, potentially upgrade their subscription and retain in the long-term?

And, as we all know, retention costs less and monetises more than acquisition. Specifically, increasing retention by 5% can increase profits by anything from 25-95% as Pugpigs recent retention report showed.

What we recommend therefore is to change the angle of the question. Instead of considering which paywall model is best for conversion, the best in class publishers look at their most loyal, engaged and highest value readers to discover what leads to a high Lifetime Value (LTV).

In practice, this means asking yourself what “type” of engagement correlates with high LTV. If you can link engagement to retention, then you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how you can increase engagement at all steps in the user journey to secure a high LTV from the moment the reader first arrives on your site.

For example, The Lenfest Institute found that the likelihood of readers becoming paid subscribers increases the most when they read at least 5 articles per month or provide an email address, amongst other engagement actions.

It may seem obvious, but at El Pais, they found that

Subscribers who subscribe to newsletters have 24% less churn.
Those that subscribe to premium newsletters have 29% less churn.
And those that use their loyalty schemes with additional benefits have 30% less churn.

Knowing this will allow El Pais to prioritise how they want to engage readers both before and after subscription – i.e. which types of engagement to include in the onboarding journey, via pop-ups, in email marketing campaigns etc.

Of course, the strategies to put in place depend on what engagement actions lead to high LTV amongst your unique readers, but there’s plenty of inspiration to be found across the world.

To increase the number of articles read, Schibsted media group in Norway tested personalised home screens so each user only saw content that they hadn’t already read, leading to a 10-12% increase in CTR, and therefore an increase in the number of articles read per month and likely the LTV of these readers who clicked-through more.

And we all know that onboarding is essential for new subscribers to maximise on their first few hours of subscribing for increasing engagement, but what about onboarding newly registered members?

At NYT, they not only noticed that registration increases propensity to subscribe by 40%, thus integrating it into the subscription funnel, but also that it could positively impact lifetime value.

So, to increase the value of this soft conversion, registration step even further, they’ve set up an onboarding journey for newly registered members with engagement actions that are likely known by the publisher as essential for increasing lifetime value –

Their daily newsletter for habit-forming;
Their more niche newsletters for building loyalty and targeting various audience interests;
App download, to ensure NYT is always available to their reader and can benefit from features such as push notifications;
And of course a step to increase the visibility of the premium offer.

As for your existing subscribers – this is where you should consider the loyalty flywheel framework.

The idea is that you consider how you can build on the relationship that you already have with existing customers, asking yourself “what else can I sell them?” and “what other problems & pain points can I help them solve?”

In the case of Zeit, they started by adding books to their offering of a weekly newspaper, gradually increasing their range of products, developing the customer loyalty to the brand. Today’s offer has developed considerably, to the point that the publisher now makes about 30% of its sales from additional business.

And of course, use bundles to increase LTV.

The Schibsted group has developed three “bundle” subscription products –

The first bundle comes from one title, Tilgang, and gives access to all of the group’s titles (6 daily newspapers, 44 magazines and their podcast app) for a price of around €30 per month – compared to €25 for a simple subscription to one of its strongest brands, the national daily Aftenposten.
The second bundle is a similar offering for its titles in Sweden.
And the third bundle, an “entertainment” offer.

As a result, 10% of subscriber revenues now come from bundles, churn has fallen sharply, and Schibsted is – obviously – considering the launch of more such offerings.

To sum up:

Prioritise anonymous-to-known strategies, of course to increase subscriptions but also revenue diversification, AI, personalisation and targeted ads.

Adapt to the reader’s profile or context, such as their level of engagement, the content type or the source of traffic. But remember, this doesn’t have to be anything complicated.
Ultimately, it’s not about how many readers you convert, but the Lifetime Value of your readers – the focus across the industry is increasingly being turned to how publishers can increase the value of their existing subscribers by adding new products, engaging through new formats, upselling and bundling.

Source of the cover photo: courtesy of Madeleine White

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