10 reasons why your subscription revenue is underperforming (and how to fix them)

Super important thing to do with your publication. Maybe the most important thing you can do to build up your email list and drive more traffic. But what I see happen is these free registrations show up on the. On the paid subscribe page.

Yep, that's.

That's not good. Your subscribe page should be paid.

Welcome to the Paywall podcast where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com and now for today's episode.

All right, today we're going to talk about 10 reasons why your subscription revenue is underperforming. You always have to pick a number, right? Like 10 reasons, seven ways, this and that. But we are going to cover, I'd say, at least 10 reasons why your subscription revenue is not doing what it needs to do and may be doing okay. But there's always opportunities to improve things. And essentially we scour the publisher websites that we work with and we look for red flags that are easy to fix. So we're going to talk a lot about kind of the low hanging fruit of improving things to improve conversions. And one of the things that we absolutely find in the digital marketing world is when you make an improvement to your website, it affects the behavior of the visitor and that certainly translates to paid subscriptions. So welcome. Tyler, how are you?

Hello. Hello. Good, good.

Awesome. Awesome. I know you've seen some underperforming subscription sites in your time and I have a list here as well and we're going to dive into it. So first thing I want to just jump on is this wasn't even going to be on the list, but I happen to browse by artnet. Now this is an art based subscription site and I'll just say right off the bat, I bet you could even tell me what's wrong with this site. Just looking, just looking at the homepage. How do you subscribe?

Yeah, right, I see. Very difficult, difficult to find the button for that. If there's no.

There's no button. So look at your homepage. If there's no button that says subscribe on it, then please add that quickly. Make sure it's a button and the.

Best is the link. Yeah, yeah.

Not just a link, make sure it's actual visual button. Because visual buttons convert higher than text links. Typically what we help publishers do is let's say you're subscribed is a link in Your menu is you can actually just, with little css, fill in the color behind the. Behind that link and make it look like a button so it pops up and it gives you a little branding opportunity to use one of your colors in that button. So that's how you do it. Okay, so there's. There's.

There's one.

We just knocked one right off. Okay. You know, pull up my list here. Okay. The next one we're looking at. We talk a lot about the free registration that is essentially getting folks to register, register with an email and a password in exchange for getting access to the next article and getting on the newsletter. Super important thing to do with your publication. Maybe the most important thing you can do to build up your email list and drive more traffic. But what I see happen is these free registrations show up on the paid subscribe page.

Yep, that's.

That's not good. Your subscribe page should be paid options. That is when the person is ready to subscribe, ready to pull out their credit card or whatever and pay you for access to your content, to your stuff. The one we're looking at has a free trial of $0. That's a little better because ultimately that does convert to a paid subscription. But it's still a little confusing when it's tied in with the annual card and the monthly card. Probably should be maybe just the single card with the free trial and make it an annual and test that. But yeah, free. Free registration on the. Because you go to the subscribe page, right? And it's like, okay, I'm going to subscribe. And then you see this free option.

It gives you an out, right? You're like, ah, I was gonna pay 60 bucks a year, but, oh, you've got this free plan. Sure, I'll forget about your site in 14 days.

Exactly, exactly. The iron is hot. And then you gotta strike. So if somebody registers for free and then all of a sudden they get the next article, they may even. May not even get to the. To the. To more articles and get prompted. So. Okay, so that's another one. All right, next, let's hop over to the next one. Okay. Tyler, what's the problem with Charleston magazine? What do you see here?

Well, I see multiple plan options. I see a lot of stuff. I have to enter a lot of information, which is typically a. Not a great thing in terms of friction.

Let's. Let's talk about that, because that is. That's one on the list. Too many checkout fields.

Yeah, yeah. So oftentimes publishers, especially print publishers, will treat their, their digital plans as though they are their print plans. And what I mean by that is they'll have like a shipping field, they'll have all the billing fields. Like just a way too many things that you have to go through to check out. So think Netflix, think Hulu credit card email. Boom. Just get through the checkout quick.

Right.

And so yeah, more friction equals less conversions on, on that side.

Yeah. Yeah. Every single additional field that you make somebody fill out is a reason to abandon the process. It's like you people run out of time, they get frustrated is we just don't have the patience for anything anymore. So you're on this particular checkout field, you're getting asked to fill out your title.

Yeah.

And your company.

Yeah. It's too much.

And you know why, right?

Yeah, I don't. Doesn't make a lot of, I mean I, I can understand from a marketing perspective maybe they're going to target, I don't know, different companies, but honestly, you should reduce this down to a name, email address, credit card, you know, and be done. But I guess in their case they are. Is this a print publication?

Yeah, this is, they have both digital and print. This happens to be a print checkout. So you definitely need a bunch of fields on here. But you certainly don't need title and you certainly don't need company.

Right? Yeah. It could be reduced.

Mm. Phone number.

Sure.

If it's print, you're probably gonna need to be able to reach the person. But look at your checkout and make sure you don't have too many fields because it will, it will absolutely impact your conversion. I, I've seen this same checkout page for digital only subscriptions for sure all the time, you know, which is not great. All you just said is why do I need like, like all the physical address stuff when it's just a digital subscription. I will also suggest make sure you have Apple Pay available and Google Pay on checkout. If you're using Stripe, those are built in, you can just literally turn them on and people can pay you via Apple and Google Pay and any other payment methods.

Yeah, Link and others like are great because they'll auto populate those credit card numbers from, you know, customers that use Stripe for other services. So it's the same with Google and Apple Pay. So yeah, you definitely want to turn those on to bump up those conversions. Even if it's 2 or 3 or 5%, it'll, it'll help.

Now Link is Stripe's new way to essentially save your credit card Is that right?

That's right. Yeah.

So. Yep. Turn on, turn on Link. You know, you may think, oh, it's just another thing to, you know, to, to register for. But Stripe has gotten so popular and Link is now getting so popular and, and we're all seeing it more and more that it's becoming normalized. And then of course, we finally say, oh, I might as well just save my credit card information here and, and, and you know, make the, the checkout quicker next time.

Yep, yep. Because it does apply to virtually every vendor on planet Earth that's using Stripe. So you'll be able to, you know, possibly use it at, you know, Target and other major retailers that use Stripe as their online checkout.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Okay. So that's the checkout fields. Okay. There's one more thing on here that's driving me totally insane which will kill your conversions and can do it fairly dramatically.

Is it the redirect off of the site?

Exactly, exactly. So if you look up here, you see that there is a subdomain. So you're essentially not on the publisher's website anymore. You are now on a subdomain checking out. And especially the younger generations are, are aware of things shifting like that. So if I'm on the site and all of a sudden I end up on a different payment site, that throws up a little bit of a flag as far as, is this secure? Is this really, am I getting hijacked? Is this really where I'm going? So make sure your checkout is on your own domain. Most systems we work with today can let you do that. And you, and you need to do that. I think there, there are few systems that have options where you can just send folks off to a different subdomain and pay. And I mean, at the, at the very least make sure that, that it's a, instead of being like a whole new, brand new domain, that you're going to make it a subdomain off of your main website URL so that, at least that would be better. Okay. All right. Cooking on. I. No idea. I haven't numbered these, but I. We're. We'll get to 10, I promise. Okay, back to the free registration thing. How about not having a free registration?

Yep.

We gotta just throw that in there. We already talked about it, but it's on my list. I just want to make sure if you don't have a way to capture an email address via a registration wall, which is sometimes called, you're absolutely losing out on paid conversions. Just a repeat because it's so super important, your registration wall should trigger quickly. So like after one article, maybe one article's free, then there's your registration wall. You capture an email and a password and then that allows that reader to register and view the next article that sends your email to your email service provider, mailchimp or whatnot. And now you have a free registered reader. It's a higher quality email address because they've chosen a password, they're on your newsletter, and your newsletter is doing its job of sending them back to your website to get upgrade messaging. If you don't capture that email early and you never put them on your newsletter, there's no way to, there's no way to communicate with that person maybe ever again. Right?

Yeah, yeah. And even if you do have their email address and you do send out a newsletter to, you know, people and you know, they're less likely to open that if they know that you've got this hard paywall up and you know, they're expired, they're like, well, I can't see this anyway, so why bother? So that free registration is key. I was just talking to a publisher about this yesterday, just they don't have a free registration and no one is opening the email. I wonder why. So getting, getting that pre registration up and running and giving some, giving some, some access to your site is, is important not only just for growing your newsletter list but for actually getting people to open your newsletter to begin with.

Right? Yeah. And the newsletter itself has value as well. So you, you, you want to, you want a message in the free registration portion that you'll get access that the store, the next story is free and you'll get the newsletter and those two value points will, will get folks to register. Works like crazy. Speaking of newsletter, let's go on to the next one. So I don't know if you run into this, but I run into this pretty regularly. I'll ask a publisher how frequently they send their newsletter and if it's a magazine publisher or maybe kind of a specialty niche publisher, issue based publisher, a lot of times I'll get, oh, you know, I think last week I talked to somebody who was sending a newsletter once every two weeks. I've talked to publishers who send a news newsletter like once a week. Some publishers especially Issue Base will pack all, you know, 15 or 20 of their articles into a single newsletter and send it out in one shot, which completely overwhelms the reader. There's no way that they can get through that all, all those articles. And we usually end up In a discussion about cadence, like, how frequently should you send out your newsletter? And what I usually say is, send it out every minute of the day if you can. I mean, tongue in cheek, send it out as frequently as you can stand, really. So we see publishers go from once a week to twice a week and breaking up their content. And if you send one or two articles in a newsletter, great, so be it. When an article's ready to go, send it. There's no reason to hold it back. People want content right away. They're hungry for your content. That's why they subscribe to your newsletter.

Yeah, yeah. And we, we work with some really small, like solopreneur publishers and, you know, a small town will have maybe one piece of content or two pieces of content, you know, a week. And so as soon as they have a new article, it shoots out as a, as a newsletter. Like, that's. And that's value for the reader. That's, that's fresh content. It's local and it's fine. It doesn't have to be 16 pieces of content. Like, less is better in the newsletter, you know. Yeah, sending.

That's right. Less is better. Keep in mind, you only have, on average, and this has been studied, about 20 minutes of attention span. So when, when you land in someone's inbox, which means if you have a few articles land and one of the articles looks interesting, which is, you know, many times it's like you just scan it and say, okay, that's interesting, but you're not going to click on anything. But sometimes you'll see something like, oh, I got to read that. And you click it and you go to the site and you, you may or may not get access to that article. You may then while you're in the groove, like, read another article. Because you're just in the groove of reading and, but you get about 20 minutes max. So if you're sending, you know, 10, 15, 20 articles out, forget it, you're not going to. That 20 minutes gets eaten up really quickly. And the more frequently you send the newsletter out, the more, the more traffic back to your site, the more times the upgrade message pops up and that increases your conversion rate. So go look at your newsletter cadence. In fact, the whole newsletter strategy portion of this is the most critical part of your subscription funnel, I would say, because it is your. Typically, it's your only direct sales channel for subscriptions because the email you're sending, you're pushing email into someone's mailbox. You're not, you're not Counting and waiting for them to maybe, you know, have a thought about something and search for it in Google or go to your website. It's, it's direct marketing and it works. So. All right. Newsletter cadence. All right, what's next? Let me just hit the. Oh, I bet you know what this one's about.

Oh boy. Yeah. So if you're watching this on, on YouTube, you'll, you'll notice we're on a subscribe page of a publisher and we're about to subscribe and a pop up occurs asking for an email address.

Right.

Big red flag. Yeah.

If someone actually clicks your subscribe to your subscribe page and are, is and they're thinking about subscribing, last thing you want to do is annoy them with a pop up.

Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, keep, keep the, on all your critical pages. You know, just, just remove the pop ups and we see it all the time. I mean, I don't know if you see it all the time. I still see it all the time. You can interrupt it.

Yeah, I see pop ups, I see publishers that have ads. I see just all kinds of content that should not be on the subscribe page. So if anything you want to reduce, you know, your headers or your footers, like kind of everything fades into the background and we're focused on subscribing. Like here, here are my options and off you go. And the same goes for when they click that subscribe button. You don't want ads, you don't want pop ups, you don't want special offers, coupon codes. You don't need, don't need any of that. Just let this be a stripped down version of your, of your site.

That's very important. So let me get rid of this pop up here. So when you say stripped down version, I concur, really you should just remove your navigation, just have your brand logo, have your subscription options and that's it. No pop ups, no nothing. You really need to tighten the, the choices, the funnel and not interrupt them with anything. And that does convert better. And sometimes I don't know if you look at other websites that sell subscriptions, when you get to a subscription page, you may notice that the menu disappears, that any sidebar that's on the site disappears. Everything gets very focused, laser focused. And that's the same for like registration pages where you're asking for, you know, to start typing in your, your data to subscribe. I would even argue that when you're, when you have like the free registration set up, be really careful about Pop ups on article pages. What you want is that email address because the email address is good for increasing your traffic to the site. It's good for search sponsors for advertising sponsors want. They like big email lists. So if you really focus on building that email address your. Your advertising revenue kind of takes care of itself. They're more interested in your email list than they are on your to be on your website because it's direct marketing. Okay. All right, I'm gonna start. I'm gonna pick on this website just a little bit more. What's another thing you might see might say is cool of funky.

Yeah. So you certainly don't want a buffet at your subscribe page. So we don't need six options. Nine options. More. More options is not good for. For the consumer in this. In this regard. So if, if possible make it just one or two. You know, three is okay but fewer is. Is better in the conversion arena for. For your subscribers.

Yeah yeah. You get analysis paralysis. So we're looking at six subscription cards here. A mix of digital and print and then a totally different track coach array of content. And I'm looking at this and if I want to subscribe I really gotta do some math here. Figure out what is going on. What do I really want to subscribe to. In this case I'd say if you're a print publisher, things do get complicated. But I say shoot for two cards. Digital and print and digital as your two options. And then. And make them annual. You know, draw the line. Make them. Make them annual.

Recurring.

The free registration kind of takes care of the let's. Let's try you out and get your newsletter and limited access and then when folks are ready to commit, they'll try you for a year. Track coach. This is a third one that would probably be the third card here because it's a completely different audience and a different publication. So going from six cards to three cards I think would be super helpful here. Yeah. Okay. All right, so let's see what else we got here. All right. Another one. Too many free views. This one happens a lot.

Yep.

Still go to a site and you know we're always looking at how paywalls are set up because that's what we do. Right. So you go to a site, you're clicking around and you're clicking around. It's like where's the subscription prompt? 5 articles and then they say pay. Oh boy. Too many free articles. You're going to lose the person the average. Look at your Google Analytics or your analytics and see what the Average visitor see how many pages of content the average visitor consumes and you will see the number 1.5 to 1.8 pages of content on average. Which means that most visitors will look at two articles. Like that's. Some will look at just one, most will look at two. That means on that second article you need to trigger that register that free registration. You go to five articles, it's like I read an article, I maybe I'll read two. Okay, now I'm reading two. I'm gone, that's it. And they're gone forever maybe. So you have no way to engage that, that reader.

Yeah, yeah. And I'd say the same advice on the other side of this. So on the front end, yes, five's too many, tens too many. But when they sign up for free, you certainly don't want to make the same mistake and give them 5 to 10 free articles per month on that side of the equation either. So you're just, you're really, really slowing down the funnel for folks to get into that paid part of the system. And so they may never get there with that large of a buffet. Another buffet, that's the title on this podcast. They may never get there. And so you've got to tighten it down and look at those analytics and know that they're not going to get to two pieces of content. It's just how people consume. So yeah, don't be afraid of tightening the paywall down or the view restriction down to one free view and then one free view on the free registration.

Yeah, that's actually a good point. And if you are afraid, that's okay too. We work with publishers that don't have paywalls that are coming in and it's the first time setting up a paywall. It's super nerve wracking. And that's okay. You can start generous giving away a few too many articles on either side of the free registration. But just keep in mind that what you're going to learn is what's really important in that people are not converting. And then you can just go in and change it and really tighten it up to say one free article. Then you have to register, you get one more and that's it. And then you have to upgrade and pay to get full access. That's a pretty successful setup for most paywalls and you don't have to have that from the start, but I'd say within 30 days, you know, you're going to learn a lot and you're going to realize that, yeah, we need to capture more, more free registered readers and just tighten things up.

Yeah. With each reduction of views, you're going to see conversion rates increase. So if you're doing it on an incremental basis, you'll notice that right away. Yeah.

So look at how many free views you're actually giving. In fact, go through your own subscription system and subscribe and just write down all the hurdles you had to jump through to get there and fix those hurdles. Okay, this one's really important. Slow website. See it a lot. You come to a site, you click on an article, takes a little bit to load, you click on the next one, it's a little laggy. And a lot of things can impact site speed. Certainly traffic, just the whatever rogue plugins or software, whatever advertising networks you're feeding in a million advertising networks, especially if you're a food blogger. And what does that do to Google? Tyler, what does Google think about slow website?

They're not too, not too pleased with slow websites. Not that we should be here to please Google, we talk about that quite often because that's what your free registration will become. Your newsletter list, that's a whole different conversation. But yes, you need a fast site. You need a good host, a good WordPress host. You need a lean setup. Don't litter your site with advertising to make a hundred dollars in Google Ads when they're just completely wrecking your site and slowing things down. Think about where the focus is here. The focus is growing your newsletter list, growing your paid subscribers. And to do that you need a fast, you know, optimized site.

So it's ironic that I just thought of this. It's ironic that Google promotes a service that slows down your website and yet they consider it important that you have a fast website in order to rank in search.

Yeah, yeah, we see it all the time with publishers that run Google Ads. Like they're a big culprit on site speed. Like your site loads fast and then there's like this hang up on other external third party systems that are waiting to load.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

But the, probably the most important thing, I mean the other important thing is conversions. So people just, you know, you get, we get frustrated easily. We're like, we're super impatient. Right. So if you have to wait for things to load, why would I want to pay, you know, a website money for something that's frustrating me? Right. So, so conversion. So if your site is super snappy and it's a nice experience and I like the content on the site, everything loads quick, looks good on Mobile, all that good stuff. Yeah. Now my chances of paying for access go up for sure. Next one is we did pop ups, bulk subscriptions. This one is something that I would say is maybe a phase two for newer publishers, but for veteran publishers, if you're in the local news space, that means like a family plan. Maybe for a little bit more money I have to sell five seats for most publishers, not all, but most publishers will serve groups of subscribers. And just putting your sort of group subscription hat on and thinking what groups of readers would like access. Maybe it's a business, maybe it's government, maybe it's a school library, maybe it's Panera Bread. You know, for a news site that wants to provide access on location. So things, things like that, there are lots of opportunities for bulk sales. Again, that's a little more in the advanced department, but if you haven't thought about it, it's something to just. I'm just planting the seed for you. Okay. Anything else you can think about that. I think we've, we've, I think we've hit 10.

Yeah, there's at least 110 that we can probably go through.

Yeah. All right, cool. Well, we'll, we'll get out of your way then. Get on with your day. Oh, we're done. Yeah, these are. There's some low hanging fruit there. Take a look at your site, you'll be happy you did and you'll see your subscriptions go. Please get in touch pete101.com if you have any questions. Happy to chat strategy anytime. Thanks, Tyler. Catch you later.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription strategy, go to leakypaywall. Com. See you next time.