10 Subscription Promotions That Actually Work for Publishers

We hate promotions, but some actually work. So we're going to share with you today 10 methods, 10 promotion types that we approve of. Welcome to the Paywall podcast. We are at episode number 50. I'm here again with Tyler from Paywall Project, and we are going to talk promotions. The thing that we actually hate talking about because we're big fans of providing a lot of value and never discounting. But there are ways to promote things where you're not really discounting or have the sort of baggage of discounting that we're going to jump into. So, hey, welcome again, Tyler.

Hello.

Hello. All right, let's go now. You're probably looking at my screen, and I have ArcNet news pulled up. I'm going to jump into this. But we had a little bit of a brainstorm as we were introducing a new feature for our coupons extension, which allows you to put a coupon code, little extension on the. On the subscription level so you can apply coupons directly and send people to the payment and registration and payment page without having to type in a coupon code, which is really neat for you guys.

And we'll.

We'll jump into that a little later. Okay, so to get to it, we're going to look at a couple of things you should not be doing first, and then we'll jump into the things you're doing. So artnet has, by the way, a beautiful subscription landing page. And I do recommend that you steal from this if it makes sense for you. But there's a real sense of quality here as far as the imagery that they have, their intelligence report, all the benefits that they have at the bottom. There's a lot going on here. And then they hamstring the whole thing by selling it for a dollar. Ouch. Ouch. There are better ways, and I'm going to show you in a. In a little bit how to discount without looking like the value of your content is a dollar. And that's the problem. When you have a dollar for your first month or for the week or whatever, you're. You're injecting that number into someone's brain. This is worth a dollar. That's essentially what you're doing. Please don't do that. You can charge a little bit more, and we'll show you the trick on how to get that done. Okay, moving on. Second thing that we see the dollar thing all the time. We see this mental math thing all the time. Please don't. Even though there's three subscription cards, and yes, three is the framework that us humans can handle in our brains. I have. And I see this all the time. I'm looking at 1399, 1075, and 2 58. What is going on here? I'm sorry, but I am totally lost. And then I look a little closer and I say that this is 1399 per month and this is 1075 per month. Now I'm really confused. You're making people do work. And what happens when you do work? You don't want to do work. You want to go away, Right? Yeah. Okay, that's it. I just want to touch on those two things. I don't know, Tyler, if you see this, but I see these two mistakes all the time.

Yeah, yeah. Too many options and you're on a sure path to less subscriptions.

All right, so let me. Let's jump into the 10 promotion things you can do. It is the holiday season coming into Thanksgiving here in the States, Christmas, whatever, holidays that you celebrate. And we do get questions from publishers that are like, hey, what, what should we do? Like, how should we promote our publication? So let's jump into it. All right, the first thing I'm going to do is be a little bit of a broken record, because it's an important broken record. And that is if you do not have a preregistration set up on your website, you need to do that away. We are seeing incredible results from publishers that are essentially letting the readers come out and consume one free article. And then on the second article that they click in, they get something like this that says that store is free. And you're. What you're doing is you're drawing the line and you're requiring an email and a password and that populates your newsletter and starts the relationship with your subscriber. Don't get rid of all the newsletter pop ups on your site and just do a free registration. This. Yeah. If you haven't listened to our previous podcast or mastermind on how to nurture and grow your subscriptions, please do go into it in depth. All right, so that's number one. Number two, this is the opposite of the second problem I showed you earlier. Keep things simple. So we have the. We actually have the Salem Reporters free registration nag here. And then when it's time to pay. What's happening? Easy. Easy. Yeah, yeah, absolutely easy. And we look at the data on the back end and it's working. People are signed. Yeah.

And this is actually a promo, but it's not a dollar for a month or a dollar for six months. This is $10 for three months, which you could argue maybe is still a bit too low, but at least it's not a dollar. And it's telling people this is worth 10 bucks, it's going to renew after three months at $10 per month. They see $10, they see $10, they know it's worth 10 bucks. And that's right. We're not, it's not, we're not doing the 99 cent offer, which. Please don't do that.

Yeah, so it's. This is so important because this works so well. So it's one. If you're just listening on the podcast, it's one offer. It says the first three months for the price of one. That's the title on it. It's a $10 promo. And you get three months for $10. And then two to repeat. What Tyler just said is after that, it's $10 per month. So that $10 number is what sticks in someone's brain when they see it. It's not the $1 number, it's the $10.

That's right.

They're not devaluing their content. Yeah. So that's. If you're doing the $1 promo, look at what your recurring monthly is and just make it that.

Yeah, you, you might as well not even do it because when you think about the payment fees and everything that goes into that, I don't even know why you would want a dollar from your customer. You might as well just give it to em for free for a month. That's what I would do instead. If you're like set on getting them to sign up, just give them a month free at that point and let them renew after that. Because at that point they're not seeing it as a 99 cent offer. They're seeing it as a test drive, a trial. This is actually worth 24amonth, but they're gonna let me try it out. Great.

Yeah, I agree with that totally. Don't even bother. Just do it free and then pay it. Right. It's the best drive and you don't. And the free doesn't devalue. Cause there's no dollar assigned to it. It's just a free trial. Yeah, yeah. Just. Just to be sneaky here, if you, if you look below the Remain subscribe now button, there is a second promo on here, but it's for the annual plan and it's just plain text and it's. It. You have to look for it. It says, choose a yearly plan and save 17%. And so there are big pushes for monthly but how is their monthly to annual revenue split?

Yeah, I'd say the majority is actually on that yearly plan that's hiding below that subscribe now massive button.

Amazing. So that lesson is that when people are looking at your subscribe cards, they're really looking at your subscribe cards because it's moment of truth. Right? I gotta pay, so I gotta read all the fine print. And that annual plan that sits at the bottom, that is fine print. Like you can really go looking for that and people go for it. Yeah.

And it helps because in this case there's not three different cards. There's not seven different offerings of the same thing. It's one card, two options. You make the decision.

Yeah. So in, in reality, the data is telling them to flip the promotion and make a plan. And then if you want to go monthly for more, you can do that. All right, next promotion. Okay. This is related to the coupon. So when you check out, really on any system, but certainly in our system, you get the coupon code field and the apply button when you're ready to check out. So what our update does is it lets you bypass this whole step. What you can do is you can create a link or a button or whatever that links to your to this subscription level and then you can append the coupon code to the end of that link and it will automatically apply the discount for that coupon code. And then what you can do is you can hide the coupon code field. Just as css, it's very easy to hide your coupon code fields. And then again what it does is it allows you to create a promotion. Let's say you wanted to do a holiday promotion and just to your pre registered readers this season. Right. That's an easy thing to do. You have a bunch of free registered readers. It's the holidays. Send out, send out a promo. So that button in your email links straight to this page with the discount auto applied. No coupon code. You don't have to. The reader doesn't have to enter anything into the coupon code and you can just hide it off your site so that there's no. You know how you go to every. You're checking out and you do the quick web search for coupon code. You do that because the discount box reminds you to go do the web search for the coupon code. If you don't have the discount code or coupon code box there, then people will just pay and they won't. They. And half the time they won't remember to go search It.

Okay, yeah, one. And one other thing about this coupon code set up. A lot of publishers that I've worked with, they tend to just make a whole separate level with a discount. That's one way to do it. But what's nice about this is that it actually shows the discount in the registration form. So when someone clicks on that link, they see the normal price and then they see like the special offering that they're getting in the registration. So it's a little bit nicer of a flow than when you just create a special level for Black Friday or for Christmas or whatever.

So, yep, yep, it's. It reduces the number of clicks and it's transparent about the pricing. Okay, let's hop on over to the next one. Small boats. This is all about promoting gift subscriptions. Now, one of the advantages of having a very simple offer, in other words, one subscription load. And I know if you're running print, it gets more challenging, then you should maybe have two. That's it. You need to make the mental decisions. Essentially no decision. You're just, here's the offer, right? Even the New York Times does it. You go and you register. And then when it's time to pay, they make you an offer. They don't make you three offers, they make you one offer because they know that one offer is easy to digest. Two offers gets harder. Three offers gets even harder. So if you look at small boats and they again, nice landing page. Steal this landing page. Nice welcome by the editor up top. And then here comes the pricing. It's just annual recurring. It's a great. If you're considering, if you're thinking about, gee, what should I offer? Offer the annual recurring. There's one mental offer. It's subscribe. There's one subscribe button, but then the button next to it is give a gift. So it's a sneaky way to actually promote two things. One is the subscribe for me. The other is subscribe for someone else. But mentally, there's no hard decision here. It's just for me or for someone else, that's it. So it's a great way to promote gift subscriptions. And one thing, one thing to note. If your publication is giftable, your. You should be selling 20% of your subscriptions as gifts. You look at your revenue, 20% should be gift revenue. And that number is taken straight from the magazine publishing industry, the print publishing industry, where it's hugely gifted. Try to aim for that number. Think about your gift subscriptions. Next one. Okay, this is all about. This is About a landing page. When I check out from. So I donated to Wikipedia and they take me to a thank you page. It's a landing page. And what do they do on the landing page? They promote other things. They want me to give my life savings away to them. And that's, that's a fair thing to ask for. Maybe or maybe not. But this is an opportunity to promote different things. Now with publishing, Wikipedia is a little bit of a different publisher, but generally speaking, you're going to have two types of transactions. You can have one where an article that someone lands on causes somebody to pay and you will want to redirect that person to the article. But then there are transactions where somebody goes to the top of your website and hits the subscribe button. Or they just go directly to the subscription level and then they pay. Where, where do you take them afterwards? Now, I think by default, maybe it's the homepage or the my account page or something like that, but you can take them to a landing page that promotes the next thing. So if you're a local news publisher, an idea might be that gift subscription. So I just subscribed. Hey, give a gift. Right? So that landing page should have some nice welcome information, a little bit about your mission and then maybe the gift subscription. How about a family plan? Right. If you're, if you're a publisher, especially local news, and maybe you want to sell five seats, use our group group extension, add on and charge instead of $9 a month, charge $12 a month for five seats. Right? Right. That's an easy upgrade to a family plan. And you, you're, you're capturing people when they're in the mode of purchasing. It's the honeymoon period. They're just, just became a subscriber and they're excited and you have a, you have an opportunity to get them into something else or at least plant the seed. Right. Okay, next. Okay, this one is about pricing. I do see a lot of publishers doing this, but I also see publishers not doing this. And this is essentially selling a, an annual plan, but promoting it as a monthly. So in this case, this publisher has a $90 annual plan, but at the top it says get, get unlimited access for 750amonth. So the promotion is what the monthly fee costs. The transaction's gonna be the annual fee. Right. And that's just positioning. So they could go ahead and say just sign up for $90 a year and that's fine. But what they're saying is sign up for 750amonth and then the payment is $90. So we see this all over the place when it comes to subscriptions. But if you're not doing it, think about doing it, because it does work. By the way, if you're watching this little promo that's in the middle of the content of the article is an excellent way to sell subscriptions. So with our short codes, you can simply create this promo, wrap it in our short codes, and if someone's logged in as a paid subscriber, they won't see this. Just. You just hide this promo. Yep.

You could stick it in Ad Dropper. You can use WP Advanced Ads. You could use a number of different systems to plant this kind of advertising thing inside of a, a story. And then you could take it out.

For people who are subscribed.

You could. There's all kinds of ways to do this.

Yeah, it's simple. I think it, it reminds the reader that this is premium content. Okay. This is another way to promote your promotion. So we have, this is a Swedish publisher, local news publisher or regional. And they have, they have two choices here. One is the regular premium subscription or the ad free plan, which is more money. In fact, it's about 40% more expensive. It's more than 40%, but we'll call it 40%. And, but what they're doing with their, their regular premium plan is they've inserted a small promotion here that in the first month you get a discount. It's, it's a Swedish kroner and it's not 1 kroner, it's 19 kroner. So it's, it doesn't break the rule of selling, selling a super, super cheap, super cheap subscription. And what it does do is it inserts the promotion right in the subscribe card in a, in a very nice and easy way. Two things here is if you're going to do a free, free trial or like a paid trial, you can sneak it right in underneath in your subscribe card. But if you really want to go for it, and this works great for publishers that are heavy on advertising, is sell that ad free plan because it works like crazy. They've been running it for two years and we've been tracking it for two years. And so they.69 kroner for regular monthly plan or 99 kroner for the ad free plan. And they're getting a little over 10% of their subscribers. Take them up on it and they get a better experience. They're just willing to pay you money. So take it. Okay, we are wrapping up here, getting near the end, that is. Oh, last one here. Stone Soup. Okay, this one is a little more. This is. This takes a little more thought, but I thought it'd be good to talk about. Stone Soup is a magazine publisher written by kids for kids. What they're showing off here is how to sell a subscription like you were a SaaS company. Now, what the heck is Pete talking about? What is a SaaS company? What. What is all this? When you go to. When you go to. Really, you go to Netflix or you go to mailchimp or there. These are companies that charge a recurring monthly fee. They have software that they sell as.

A service, which is.

Service, which is what SaaS stands for and what they. What. And you're in the same boat as a publisher. You're selling not software as a service, but you're selling content as a service. So it's a monthly recurring or annual recurring fee. And you want to build value for the. For the potential subscriber. And so what you'll. If you look around and you dive into it, which we do a lot because that's the business we're in as well, is they built a landing page on their homepage. So before you get to the content, you get this nice big promotion on what Stone Soup is, and they're building their brand on what you get. They have a subscribe button right on their. Right in the middle of this nice promotion for. For joining them. This is. They also have a subscribe button up in their menu, which is also very important. So promote your subscribe button in your menu. If you don't have a nice button that's part of your menu that says subscribe and then next to it, login and text. You need to do that because you need to remind your readers that you are a paid publication. I think I still see most publishers without having a properly promoted subscribe button. There might be a subscribe link in the menu, but it's not obvious. Make it a button. It's easy to do. But the benefit of having this nice landing. This nice. I don't know what to call it, a landing area, or like a landing page style approach is that you have your subscribe button here. And on mobile, if you shrink this to mobile, the menu vanishes, right? But this subscribe button persists. So when I'm on a phone, I still get the nice. I get the nice subscribe button. All right? Now, if you're logged in as a paid subscriber, you want to level this up a little bit. You can set this up where this disappears. So you have a content area that just goes away when you're logged in as a paid subscriber because you don't need to sell subscribe. In fact, you could replace it with something else that's targeted towards helping the subscriber. All right, that one was a little more advanced, but I think we got through 10, 10 promotional tips to use for the holidays, ones we don't like and ones we do like. Any parting comments?

I think the big takeaway is just don't go crazy with the discount. You know, don't give away everything for a dollar and fewer options, and keep it simple. So that's what I'm hearing.

I like that. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.