Pete Ericson from Leaky Paywall audits Baylor Line's membership site and finds a broken signup link. He recommends a free-registration tier to capture emails, integrate with Mailchimp for alumni targeting, push annual subscriptions over monthly, and use in-article messages to convert free readers to paid members.
Hi Jonathan, this is Pete from Leaky Paywall. I'd like to take a look at some leaky paywall setups and see if I can help publishers grow their audience and paid subscriptions, in your case memberships. And so I took a look through Baylor line and I think what you have here is really a great looking website. Super clean, very friendly. I like what you've done here. I've been poking around, I have a couple of thoughts for you. But before I jump in, I just want to let you know that this Become a member today link here goes to a page not found. There is a link on your foundation website as well that is also going to this. So I would add a redirect for this URL to go to the Join now page. Okay, so the big thought I've had here is I understand you're an alumni association and you're looks like you're giving all of your content away for free. You're not really metering or you don't have any real, real paywall up, which is understandable and makes sense. The thing that I thought would be helpful to help you grow your audience and revenues is to capture email addresses to, from really from everyone that visits the site, from alumni as well as folks that are just interested in what you're publishing. And you would accomplish that by setting up a free registration which is easy to do. And the way that would work would be you would allow let's say one or two free articles per month on the site. And then when I hit my third article I would get a, I would get a, a stop here that essentially says hey, register now and get, and get full access. So that would be our subscription message and you'd have a full access. And then when somebody clicks the button and goes to the free registration level, you could ask them are you an alumni? And to provide their details with custom fields extension so that you'll get a mix of casually and interested readers as well as alumni and you'd be able to distinguish who's who. As far as access goes, the free registration captures the email and then you can send that email off to mailchimp or you can zap it to whatever email provider you use and that will grow your list substantially. And email lists are gold today. They're really big value because it's direct marketing for let's say donors or sponsors or whoever is interested in supporting the organization. You have grows your reach and you're driving of course your readers back to your website to stay connected, which is really what you want to do so set up a free registration. That free registration allows full access. There's no real restrictions. Except what you're really doing is, is you're grabbing that email address. And the other thing too is if the second point I wanted to make is here on your subscription page where you have some decisions to make and this looks really great and clean, but you're. What you're doing is you're asking somebody to do a little bit of math to and to pick and choose if you have a free registration set up where somebody's already in the system and they're ready to pay. What we find is that annual subscriptions are the way to go. You can get away with not having a monthly. This causes a little confusion. And if you were to focus your efforts on your annual subscription, you'll find that your conversions will go up. Donations are great. I know you're looking for donations and that's worth promoting. You could possibly not even have this or have the donation message down below to make the annual subscription really a very clean and one way path for somebody who's ready to contribute. What you can do instead is when you have a free someone who's logged in that's free or you have somebody who's logged in as an annual member is you can use our targeting tools. We have a conditional display which would let you as an example create a little notice open in the footer or in the header that says hey, become a member. And this would only show up to free registered readers. And it would encourage people in a very elegant and nice way to become a member and click over and sign up here. You can also set up the display to target logged in members so that you could have a sort of a. Let's say you run a donation campaign for 30 days and then you can have just a. A donate message at the top or at the bottom of each article page. And that would in a nice way encourage folks that are currently members and logged in to donate. We have an ad dropper extension as well which lets you drop in messaging really anywhere you want on the site. And again you can, if it's somebody who's already a member and you're doing a become a member promotion, you can hide this because they're already a member and they're logged in. If they're not a member or they're free registered, they would see the join. And these can be inserted anywhere around the website. It can be insert inserted in the article content and that would help you target your, your readership a little bit more depending on where they're at in your pipeline. So you're casually visiting. Step 1 Get their email address okay they registered they're logged in as free. Now target them to upgrade to a member. Okay great let's say they have members now you put the members you can target them on the website to donate and of course your email list is the same thing. You'll have free registered readers that you can target via email and hopefully you're tagging your different subscription levels so that your email service knows what level they're on so you can send out emails appropriately and that should help you grow your audience with the free registrations and then convert the to paid revenues with targeting and simplifying your subscription offering. So I hope that's helpful and if you want to talk about it, love to chat, always love to dive in and help publishers get to the next step. Just shoot me an email.
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