Pete Ericson audits a publisher's subscription setup and recommends cutting the countdown pop-up, requiring registration after one free article instead of two, and collapsing multiple tiers into one paid level. He also flags that benefit cards need clearer styling and the newsletter should drive readers back to the site.
Chapters
Hey guys. I just wanted to give you some feedback on your subscription installation on your site as I took a look at it recently and had some thoughts. So I'm going to jump right into it. No particular order. First thing I notice is the navigation. I know you have a premium article category and then sort of your regular articles category. Working with a lot of publishers, I think it might be time to start thinking about all your content as premium and that would also simplify your subscription options. And typically in the menu you want to have like your subscribe button next to your login link. So those two work together. Anyway, I understand that you have content that you definitely want to lock down, but you can still do that with, with a singular subscription set up. Okay, so I was going through the site here and I like the site. Super clean, looks professional. I see you guys are getting free registrations and paid subscriptions cooking. So that's good. So my job here is to boost that. This is the countdown slide that's coming in. I would just remove this. This is actually just annoying people these days. I would just lean on the free registration that you have set up. So get rid of that. Now I'm going to go look at another article and I believe this one is also free. And I'll get that slide. I'll come in and say I have zero. Now one of the things I would do is I would. I would change this to one free article and then register for free to get one more. And the reason for that is your average session for a visitor is one to two article views. If you look at your analytics, you'll probably see something like each visitor that comes in, look at 1.5, maybe 1.7 articles per session. And so you have to trigger the free registration on that second article view. Otherwise, people, a lot of your traffic is just going to come to your site, read a couple articles and then go away. So that's that. Okay, and let's go back, let's look at a third article. And then you get no content remaining. So when you remove the article slide in, you won't be left sort of, you won't leave the reader kind of hanging with some. These are very sort of discreet. These are a little too small, these subscription options. What you'll get is you'll get your nice upgrade message that's in content that you've developed. So first thing to do is to just remove the article Countdown mag. Slide, slide in. You don't need that. And change your restrictions to. Instead of giving two free articles away before registering, give one article away. Okay. And then one more. All right, now let's talk a little bit about the subscriptions themselves. So if I go to subscribe, I have too many options here. This is pretty confusing. You're making the visitor do a fair amount of math to decide what they really need. Just. I mean, I could be wrong, but I don't think there's enough difference between Pro and Premium. Although I understand that you have some premium articles, the Pro level that I'm paying for doesn't give me access to the premium. It's a little complicated. Now I'm really sort of deciding what do I really need. Ideally, you would have one subscription, call it Pro or call it Premium, and you get access to everything. And it could be a monthly subscription, it could be an annual subscription. That's fine. You can still lock down your premium content so that you have to have a paid level in order to do it, so that. But the bottom line is I got. I got four options here. I'm looking at it. I'm a little lost. Also, these cards should be styled up a little nicer so you have some benefits instead of it just saying unlimited posts. I would have the benefits of joining here so that when I finally do decide to check out, I know what I'm getting. And you can also probably improve the language here with your benefits as well. That is it. One thing that I do want to make sure is that your newsletter is doing its job. It's sending traffic back to the site. And if you want to talk about your newsletter strategy, if you want to talk about these edits that I suggested to your site, let's just have a quick meeting and go over it. Hope that helps.
