Black Friday Without the Profit Burn

Anything else we should talk about about Black Friday? Sell time, not money. If you have to discount, stick with annual less churn. And overall, I'd say is think about your pricing structure as a leveling up plan. Right? You get somebody in the door at a, at a price. What else are you gonna, what are you gonna level them up to?

Welcome to the Paywall podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall 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.

So this morning I got this email from one of our publishers. You're looking at the Olive Press, and they put out the Black Friday, the traditional Black Friday discounting sale. This particular promotion is both good and bad. And we're going to jump into why and what you should do for this Black Friday promotion. Hey, Tyler, welcome back.

Hola. Hola.

All right, well, you ready to talk about discounts? Black Friday specifically?

Let's do it. Or let's don't do it.

Oh, there's the lead right there. Yeah, we're gonna tell you not to do it, but actually we're gonna also suggest ways that you can do it without cutting into your profits. And when I say profit, I really mean churn, because a lot of the promotions that I see, although there's some take up on it, of course, lead to very high subscriber churn. So before I jump into this, I'm going to show a little something for those that are following along on video. And here we go. This is a very simple chart I made. It's really about leveling up your subscription, your, your subscribers into higher level subscriptions so they have more value. Right? So if you have, let's say you have your monthly plan, your annual plan, and then you may have a premium plus plan, which could be like ad free, or maybe it's a donor level. Talk to a lot of publishers that want to go after high, you know, high givers, maybe even just going after paid subscribers to sell more gift subscriptions. There's always a tier up. So the bottom tier and every publisher is different. We know this. But the bottom tier is typically like the monthly recurring subscription, which is for folks that are. I want to try subscribing to this publication. Typically, the monthly subscription level has the highest churn rate then. And if you're doing things right, you want to level your monthly subscribers into annual plans, which is a higher level commitment. Right. So I'm just gonna, I like this stuff. I'm just gonna pay for the year and off you go. And now you have a higher tier subscriber. And from there, depending on your publication, if you're very, if you're very ad heavy, let's say you're a news publisher. Ad Free plan works incredibly well. We've seen it. You can charge 40% more and you'll get 10% of your subscribers to upgrade to the ad Free plan. If you are very mission based and you're looking for donors, give them the ability to pay a higher amount for the same content access and call it a membership or a donor plan gifts. If you have other content, if there's events or monthly webinars, there's all sorts of things you can do to keep upgrading your subscribers to the higher level. Now what I, I don't know what you see see mostly. And oh, and by the way, if you're doing it right, you're, you'll have more annual subscribers than monthly subscribers. If your content is really good and valuable and people want it there, there and you have the free registration framework set up which if you don't, you need to like tomorrow or today even better. Which means capture the email address and a password after the reader views one article, get them on your newsletter, get that newsletter firing them back to your content to trigger upgrade messaging. See all the rest of our podcasts for more information on the free registration. Okay, but what we find with the right setup is the annual plans do tend to outsell the monthlies and the monthlies have higher churn. So what's the answer here?

Yeah, get rid of the monthly and focus on the annual plan. And by default the annual plan reduces churn just because there's a longer Runway for those kinds of plans. So, and I think based on what I'm hearing in all of this, it's once you capture the free registration email and then they become paid, it's, you're never, it's never over. There's always something more that we can offer them as a paid member. As a free member, we can level up that experience. So sort of bringing them even further down into the funnel, into even more goodies that your, your publication offers. More products, you know, more ad free stuff, donor stuff, gift stuff, family plans, all of that down the road.

Absolutely. You know, I just, you just reminded me of something which would be really easy to do and you could call it a Black Friday promotion and it's not a discount at all. What you can do is you could send all your paid subscribers a coupon for, let's say, a three month free subscription plan that they can send off to a friend right now. This could be part of your onboarding process. When somebody pays you the welcome email, has this coupon that you can give away and call it to one friend for unlimited access for three months. That friend uses the coupon, creates an account, gets on your newsletter, gets full access after three months, which is, I think, a good amount of time and a nice benefit. Then they can decide, do I, do I want to pay? And keep going. And you'll get some. At the very least, your newsletter list will grow with highly qualified readers. Right.

And, and I, I think everyone should notice that that particular code is, is for three months and not for.

Right.

70% off or 50% off. It's.

Right.

It sounds like you're giving time over, over a ginormous discount.

Yep, exactly. So that's something you can do for, for Black Friday, I would recommend. Okay, so let's go back to the olive press here, which we were looking at. So what's their promotion? Black Friday deal. This is the subject line, by the way. Get 50% off a year subscription. So what's, what's, what's the, what's the bad news here, Tyler? Why is this?

The bad news is that you're telling your audience that your true subscription price is only worth half of what it normally is, and that the content that you provide, the newsletter that you provide, all of the things that your publication does, is really only worth half of what you say it is. And so when you're in, when you're in the publication business, especially the news business, it's already hard enough to get people to pay for content. And so when Black Friday rolls around and then you just offer a 50% or a 70% or whatever crazy discount offering, you just devalue virtually everything that your publication does for a Black Friday sale that's going to have enormous churn from, from the signups. So.

Right. And the churn is rough because if you're giving a big discount and, and you're used to seeing a small number on your credit card and all of a sudden a big number shows up, then that's a, that's a sticker shock moment where, oh, wait, do I really want this? And then things turn out especially so what I'll say, what's good about this? You did the bad, I'll do the good. The good is it's not $1 for a month. Right. It's not the, the classic, you know, $1 gets you in the door, which is a absolutely awful way to do it because then that creates huge sticker shock when the, when that. And then you have to deal with the admin of, you know, or, or people complaining it's bad taste in their mouth. Just not good. So but the good news on this is that the 50% off is at least on an annual subscription, which generally it has a lower churn rate now the 50% off is, is steep and then in 12 months the next bill is going to be twice as much. So I believe it's this promotion I think is €25 versus €50 when it renews down the road. So I think you have a, they have a better chance of, of keeping that annual subscriber because they're going to have a full year of content access. And if they truly do read the articles and enjoy the articles and then get that next bill, I think there's a higher chance of them sticking around. So if you're absolutely need to do a discount, please don't do it on the monthly, do it on the annual. But better yet, don't discount your. The money. Discount your.

Time.

Time. Thank you.

Yeah.

Okay, so what does that mean? What does discounting your time also mean? Yeah, you can give away three months to a friend. Get the, get the viral email going. We'll head back to the Salem Reporter, which we talk about a lot. This is a great example of discounting time versus money. What does this say? First three months for the price of one. So essentially it's a dollar twelve for three months and then it renew for three. $12 for three months and then it renews at $12 per month. This is brilliant. It works. We see the numbers. You have full price, you pay the $12, you get extra time. It's not a, it's not really a money discount. It's a time discount. So the value of the content is 12amonth. We're just going to give you some extra time so you can kind of really. And then it's going to renew at the same price you just paid. So mentally there's no change here. There's just a delay, you're enjoying the content and then the $12 comes again which you, which you paid the first time. Less of a shock, less of a, of a pricing shock. So this is how if you're going to do a monthly promotion for Black Friday or, or just have a, have it standing like the Sale reporter does this is how you do it. Now there's a single subscribe button and that's very compelling. But then there's a text link underneath that says choose a yearly plan and save 17%. So what happens there?

Yeah, well clearly that's a better offer if you're looking at these two options. And for those of you that are listening, this particular yearly plan is not heavily promoted. It's just a text based link with a line underneath the option. Whereas the free 3 month option is a ginormous subscribe button. The take up rate is higher actually on this little yearly option that's not as promoted. So and again, this is a, this is a discount, but it's not 50%, it's not 70%, it's a 17% discount for a whole year. Bypass the free three month option and just go right to it. And we see more people taking that option than at least when I last looked, than the actual first three months for $12 plan.

Yep. And those, those people will likely churn less frequently than the monthlies as well, for sure.

And, and Salem's got sort of a die hard, you know, audience that they're, they're very like if, if they don't get their newsletter, it goes to spam or something, they hear from their audience. Like people want their local news in that community. So that's what you want, you want to call, you want people to, to be upset if they miss your newsletter. That's what you want to cultivate for your publication.

Yeah, no, that's, that's right. On. The other lesson we learned with this is that when you have a subscribe card with information on it, your readers will read every word on that subscribe card. So if you think about it, they're ready to pull out their credit card. Like, okay, I'm here. I clicked on the subscribe page because I'm thinking about paying. Cause I'm tired of seeing the subscription message. You know, I've seen it 26 times and I'm ready to, to give money to get full access. And so when there's money on the line, they read every word. So there's no. So you can keep things simple. You know, you can. This works because you have this, this good promotion. Oh, three months for the price of one. That makes me feel good. I'm about to pay. And there's a promo that, that, that feels good. But then they see the 17% additional savings for the annual and now that's a better promo. So like what you just said, it's like good to better. So you get this two, this like, like. Oh, that's good. Oh, that's even better. And okay, I'm going to take that. Um, yeah, if I were you as a publisher, I would literally copy this approach. The numbers will be different. Maybe the timeframe might be a little different. Maybe you're going to do two months or four months or six months or one month, that's fine. Or two weeks. You can certainly test all of this. There's nothing that says you can't, but we have been running this for a while. Tyler, you, you've been working with Salem directly for quite some time. This works. Yeah. Okay. Anything else we should talk about? About Black Friday? Sell time, not money. If you have to discount, stick with annual less churn. And overall, I'd say is think about your pricing structure as a leveling up plan. Right? You get somebody in the door at a, at a price. What else are you gonna, what are you gonna level them up to? The, the easy one is from monthly to annual, you'll get, you'll get the money front loaded and you'll have less churn. So that's a, that's a, a really good reason to promote. If you're a print publisher, you might wanna level your digital onlys up to print and digital. So they get, they get that and you'll get a, you'll get a percentage of people that will take you up on that and think beyond that. What else are you providing? Ad free experience? Are you doing events? Are you, are you doing any additional premium, you know, special premium newsletters, special podcasts? We just, Tyler, we just. You just showed me today this service that, that will take your, an AI service that will take your articles and put together a podcast, like a weekly podcast to kind of summarize what happened during the week. Right.

And that's coming soon, by the way.

All right, well that's a great premium add on, right? That you could either bake into your subscription or think about it as a way to level up the subscriber and get them to the next step. That's something you can at least give away for free for a little while to paid subs. See how they like it. So. All right, enough on, on Black Friday. Go sell time. Catch you later, Tyler.

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.