29 | How your paywall helps you build relationships with your readers

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 where you can download Leaky Paywall for free. And now for today's episode.

All right, welcome to the Paywall podcast, everyone. This is episode 29. Today's episode is all about how your paywall helps you build relationships with your readers. And yes, I know that sounds a little bit like the opposite of what you might think is true, but in today's world with the pop ups galore experience that everyone is experiencing, you can actually set up and should set up your paywall to steer people through readers that come to your site through a sort of gentle, seamless experience to bring them through the. Through the funnel to the end of paying for a subscription. So I'm here with Tyler Channel again from Paywall Project, and we're going to talk relationships.

Let's do it.

All right. Awesome. I was thinking about naming this episode, are you being a jerk to your readers?

Yep.

Which might be a better title. But I thought about it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of websites that are being a jerk to their readers, to their detriment. And I had an experience not that long ago where I counted four pop ups on a news site. And it was, it was like, close one, pop up, close another, close another. And then another one came, you know, and I don't know if, if maybe they're not paying attention, which can happen because, you know, the kitchen sink happens when you add features to your website. But one was browser notification. Like, you know, which, yeah, my least favorite. It's just close, close, close. Everyone wants to do the browser notification, the newsletter signup pop up. Which, you know, if you're going to do a pop up, I'd say that's probably has the most value. But I would recommend to not even do that. There was a. I think an ad popped up after that. I'm not 100% sure.

Jeez.

And then a video slide in. Like, that was the clincher. It was like some little, you know, that you get to get the ad video that slides into. In the bottom right corner of a site.

Yeah.

And I literally lost it. I was just so annoyed.

And yeah, my, my favorite is when you actually do like, they pester you to death and then you, you do, you know, you decide to subscribe and then you get to the subscribe page and then you get another pop up, right?

Yes. Don't do that, don't do that.

Please, please, that.

So I suggest first things, do a pop up audit. See how irritating you're being to your casualty. You know, find it, find a friend, spouse, whatever, and sit down in front of the website, pull up incognito so you can have a fresh experience and just, and just hear their reaction to your, your site. And this is, this is, this is really important. You have to keep in mind that, you know, if you look at your Google Analytics, you are as a publisher, your website's getting, a very large percentage of your visitors are new. Now there are returning visitors but for most sites the majority of visitor traffic are new visitors. And yes, a lot of them are going to be one and done. You'll just never engage with them. But there are fans mixed in there, super casual readers that, that are really going to become fans of your content. And if you irritate them as your first move when they land on your website, irritability, you're going to lose them. Your chance of losing them really skyrockets. So I'm going to, I'm going to challenge everyone listening to have zero pop ups on your website. Do the zero pop up challenge and it does not include a bucket of ice water. Okay, now you're a publisher, you want to sell paid subscriptions. We've talked a lot about the path to getting there involves a free registration. And yes, that's exactly right. And that's where you draw the line. Because in any sort of paid subscription model at some point you have to draw the line and say, hey, it's time to pay. But the mistake of course is drawing that line too early, which I think publishers have figured out now is difficult. Now you can skip the free registration if you're, if your brand and content are strong enough and go straight to paid subscriptions. Or maybe you've done the work of building the free registrations, which some of our publishers have done, and then they're ready to really lock it down. But for most publishers, that free registration is really gold. It allows you to be nice and give something to your readers. I think, I think you might agree with this, Tyler, that we're sort of used to subscribing now for good content. You know, if there's original strong content and you get asked to subscribe, it's not really a shocker anymore.

Yeah, sure.

And so the free registration is a way where you say, hey, you know, we, we need your support. And so we're willing to give you some more content by registering for free. And, and that's sort of the start of that nice relationship. And yeah, and the messaging is important too. Now we're looking at a Iron and Air magazine. And so they've been running leaky paywall for a few months now. And they have this beautiful, it's a magazine, beautiful print magazine. They have a beautiful website. And I'm here in Incognito, so I'm working as a new user. I get a few articles for free. And let's see, I came down here and I clicked let's see, I think this ghost writers article, right? And see how they handle this, this transition. So I've read a few articles, I might suggest that they, if you're listening to this, you skinny that down to one free article and then ask for the registration. But in any case, I get this, this beautiful prompt here. It's a two column prompt. It says sign up for our newsletter and read this article and three more per month for free. That's a pretty good offer. That's not, I would say that's not very irritating. That actually sounds pretty good, right? I could read the article for free. I get three more each month. They have a benefits list here on the side here you get the weekly Throttle newsletter. You get access to 3 digital articles per month. You get complimentary entries to giveaways and you get the exclusive Throttle subscriber offers. And then you have the, the sign up now button which you need, you need a button here, fully integrated. Great on mobile, great on desktop. Now if, if I'm a fan or going to be a fan, this is, seems like a nice trade, right? I'm gonna hit sign up now and I'm gonna offer up my, my email address essentially.

Yeah, it's a low bar to see more content.

It is, it is. And I also just want to make a quick mention here. If you use Leaky paywall on your site. We have a new feature coming out probably in the next week or two which lets you choose what kind of fields you want to display. So we've had publishers asking us for, hey, I want to just an email only field. Great, you can do that. You can, you can choose to have maybe just email and password to make it really slim and lower the friction of capturing it. And either way it's still a registration. The, the that new reader gets, gets the welcome email and the instructions to log in, even if it's just the email address. So you treat it as a free registration. So that, that's, that's pretty neat. And if I go back, you can actually embed that. Embed, embed those fields right into your subscription message here, if you like. Okay, enough about that.

All right?

So we're talking about the relationship. I'm here, I'm forced to register. Okay. I get a lot of benefits. And again, language here, important to let people know those, your, your new fans know what they're going to get. What are the benefits? You know, if you're mission based, then just, just tell them, you know, it's time to tell them that maybe that's in the welcome email that they get, which is another touch point, right. Once, once I register here, I'm going to get a welcome email from Iron and Air, and that's going to carry me forward in the relationship. May I learn a little bit about them? Maybe I'll learn what their. If I remember what they actually sent me when I did this, like their top content, it was a nice email. Top content was there and it really motivated me to go back to their site and look at it. And the goal as, as a publisher, really the goal with your casual readers that hit your site, all that new traffic that comes to your site, the goal is to get the email address that is your number one priority, is the number one way to start building your relationship. And of course, the benefits are your newsletter grows, you can charge more first, you know, sponsorships on your newsletter. And it's your number one direct marketing tool, that newsletter that sends people back to your site, touches them over time to go, you know, to go back to the website, read articles and get the upgrade message for, for the payment, which they're not going to be ready to do typically right off the bat, although some are.

Yeah. But it makes that process that much easier for, for the end user to gently wade into your, your content, your ecosystem, see what they think, get your newsletter, get all the freemium benefits of the free registration. And then when they're ready to go for a paid plan, they don't have to enter their first and last name, their email address, their password. They don't have to go through those steps. They can now just simply pay with their credit card and it's done.

That is correct. I have, I just closed the browser here, I'll show you, show you an example of that. So in this browser, I'm logged in as a free registered member. And if I were to become a member, I'll just kick over here.

And I have to say, they have. This design is absolutely stellar.

Yeah, it is, it is, it is absolutely, absolutely impressive. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna choose here. Let's say I go to premium. See, I'm, I'm here, I'm already in here. So all I have to do, like you said, Tyler, is just pay.

For those of you listening via a podcast store or whatever this website is, ironandair.com Go check it out. It's a great model for free registrations and, and paid. Becoming a paid user.

Yeah, they've really, they've really integrated the whole subscription system in here beautifully. So a couple other notes as far as touch points and relationships go. So I'm logged in here as a free registered reader. So the next message, which is the upgrade message, obviously you're going to customize, customize the message to target the free registered reader like myself. You can also use our conditional display notice, which I call the header bar notice or footer bar, where you just have a subtle upgrade message. And we talk about this on small boats. You can go see it there if you register. It's just a little bar that says upgrade. And if when I'm getting the newsletter and I get sent back to the website and I'm reading the article, that little bar just sits there. It's good on mobile, it's good on desktop. It's not a pop up. It's just part of the content. And it works. It does, it does because it's always there. And you, as the publisher, you want, you want to imply that you have premium content that it's worth paying for without actually saying it.

Yeah. Well, you can do it without nagging people to death with pop ups. You can do this in a subtle, sleeker, more minimal way, I guess is the way to put it.

That's right. Another trick is to, for the casual not logged in experience, make sure you have a subscribe button in your menu and then. Or a login link. So the subscribe button is always there. It's just, it's a subtle, you know, announcement that you are a paid publication. And then when I log in, that button changes and it changes to my account. And I believe the plugin, there's a WordPress plugin you can use called User Menus.

I think that's the one. One of my favorites.

Yeah, User menus. To pull that off. Super simple. And that, that gives the, just, it just polishes the experience on the website. Nice. Yeah.

And I know, I know Jeremy's working on something too, um, where it would be at some point, leaky paywall, Might have its own user menu.

Yep.

Addition. So yeah.

Future things because of different subscription levels you want to talk about. Right, right.

So if you're a free person, maybe you know, they see a different link because. Right. Their status and leaky paywall. Yep.

Yeah, I think he's working on it. Yeah. If you, if you get. If that's something that one of you listeners want, please let us know and we can poke Jeremy a little bit for you. He's got a lot on his plate.

He sure does.

Holy cow. But anyway, so we're here, we're logged in, we're getting this nice message. I'm going to read it for your listeners. We hate to break it to you, but you're out of free articles. Your journey doesn't have to end here though. Become a member now for just 299 and unlock this story. Full access to all our content and receive member only benefits. Join, join our tribe of nearly a million people and celebrate the things that move us.

There you go.

Got a couple of nice signatures from co founders. It's got a big button. Become a member. And then in the right hand column we have imagery of their print magazine and we have some what's included bullet benefits, full access to digital content and back issues of Iron and Air magazine, the weekly Throttle newsletter, member only discounts to the Iron and Air shop and complimentary entry to giveaways and sweepstakes. Really nice.

Yeah, yeah. We have a lot of publishers that do a nice job with the pre registration but this is on a whole different level of just letting people know what they get and why, why you need them. And it's just a fantastic design.

It is, it is. Yeah. Iron and air.com I would absolutely check it out and see what, what a next level subscription experience is like. It's.

And this is all with leaky paywall. This, they're using leaky paywall. So this, this is something that you can do within, within the system. So. Right.

Because it's WordPress and we're fully, fully integrated with WordPress so we can, we can. Leaky paywall is really easy to integrate and create this, this elegant experience.

Yeah. We certainly welcome publishers to customize messaging, customize the design to fit what, you know, what you offer.

Another targeting tool I'm logged in as a free registered reader is delivering messaging in content and you can use our ad Dropper extension to do this which lets you hide ads for certain subscription levels. So if you wanted to be a little more aggressive with your promotions for upgrading to a paid Subscription you could add right in the middle of your content a promo that, that says hey, please upgrade. And then if I'm actually paid on any level, that promo is hidden. Same with the conditional display notice that only shows up for a certain level. So like the free registration is a good place to, to, to use that. But you know, if you're, let's say I've gone through the process of actually paying you can, you can actually target paid those paid levels with the next messaging which might be donate, right? Maybe, maybe you run a campaign for, for about a month and it's all about, you know, supporting your publication and you want to, you want to have a donation campaign and you can target and use messaging specifically for the existing paid subscriber, which are more likely to, you know, to pay you more. To wrap this up, building a relationship really hasn't been easier than today. And using a paywall to do it lets you give away things for free up front. And you, you can use different levers to decide how much free content to provide. Right. To be the, to be the nice guy. Right. And then once somebody's registered and they're on your newsletter and they're coming back to your website, you have them logged in, you can, you can target very easily with the conditional display notice with Ad dropper and of course your newsletter because you know who's tagged free on your list, you can send them messaging that's appropriate to that. And, and then when they run out, your messaging is custom crafted for hey, sorry, you've run out. And I love the Iron Air. We hate to break it to you, but you're out of free articles. That's, that's just, this is perfect. And, and then yes, you're the free registration your that that reader's information is already in the system.

Right.

They, when it's time to check out, it's, it's just next and credit card and boom, it's done. And then that paid welcome email gets sent. And then if they're on an article, we, we actually hand the welcome the reader back when they register from the form back to the article they were reading and we unlock the article and that's the login redirect and registration redirect that you must have.

Super simple. So such a nice experience for the user.

Yep, exactly. So the point of this podcast is think about how you can provide a nicer experience, a really seamless, friendly experience with the goal of zero pop ups, which I know is going to be challenging for some of you, but if you Kind of switch your thinking from geez, we need paid subscriptions to we want better relationships. We with our casual fans as well as paid subscribers. I think that will help you implement the, you know, leaky paywall or your subscription paywall in a way that will, will engage. Well, we know it will engage your, your casual audience, your free registered audience better and they will have a better experience and you will have more of them, which means your newsletter will grow. And really that newsletter, you know, that's your gold, that's your direct marketing vehicle. And so think about, you know, get rid of the pop ups, their band aids on a, on a problem. The real problem is building that relationship and capturing, engaging, building that relationship. And you have all the tools to make that happen in a beautiful way. So go look at iron and air.com go to, go back and look at smallboats monthly.com and Tyler, I don't know if you have any other, other news or newspaper specific examples, but yeah, welchnews.com.

They do a decent job at doing this, collecting free users and getting them to pay. And I often see people go like I, I've said before, they sign up and go directly to the paid quite quickly. So you know, people, people certainly recognize the value, which is good. And one other thing just to think about when you're thinking about building a relationship. This is, think about it like in real life, right? We go on a date, but you don't typically get married on the first date and so don't make your paywall like that either. Give people a chance to, to understand what you're about, what you offer, just like you would on a, on a typical date. So that's just some advice on that.

Yeah, well, relationships. Yeah, relationships take time.

They do.

That's just the way the payment, that payment, you know, your hardcore readers, they'll pay pretty quickly. But those casual, you know, those fans, super casual fans, they'll just take time. You know, they'll get there down the road if you take care of them. Yep, you can get there. You know, the value for, for you for having that, that email address is huge. And you can get that email early in the, in the journey, one free article, then give away whatever you need to give away per month down the road.

Yeah. And it's okay if they never become a subscriber. I mean there will be a percentage who will sign up for free and never ever, ever pay for your product or your, your offering. But you do have them on your newsletter. There is value to having them registered on your site. And you can sell sponsorships in that newsletter. You can, you know, there are ways to. Yeah, a benefit of that.

And it's. You're, you're, you're, you're building sharing, you're building viral sharing. So if I register for free on your publication and I'm getting your newsletter, I may not be paying, but I mean, I may find a great article and send it to a friend or post it on social media. So getting that free registration and really taking care of those pre registered subscribers pays off in sharing. And then convert and converting.

Yeah, and then never give up on it. You know, like it might, might take one person one day, but it might take somebody else six months or a year. So just, just keep, kind of keep at it.

Yeah. The data is clear. The longer someone's on your newsletter, the higher chances they have of paying. That's pretty clear. Okay, that's it for today. All right, we'll build those relationships.

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.