Case Study: List Builder vs Conversion Champ

Today we're going to talk about a case study that we just produced. It took a year to get here. We have two publishers, two news publishers that have very, very similar markets. We're not going to reveal who they are. We're going to call them Publisher A and Publisher B, as kind of we did last podcast. But what we found when we dug into the data was there were some really striking differences in the performance of building their email list and converting paid subscribers. One publisher was building is building their email list like crazy, but not really converting paid subscribers, as well as the other publisher who is converting subscribers like crazy and is not building their email list. And it was like, it was a real head scratcher. So today, what we're going to learn, what you're going to learn, if you're listening, is how to build your email list, how this Publisher B, we're going to call this the list builder Publisher, how to do that and then how to convert more paying subscribers. That's Publisher A we're calling the Conversion Champ. So welcome to the Paywall Podcast. All right, Tyler, let's dig in. All right.

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All right, so I'm going to share my screen and then we're going to. And I know everyone just absolutely loves spreadsheets, but I'm sorry, this is what we have to do today in order to get the data, because we've, we've, we've marked the data and I'm going to, if you're listening to this, I'm going to go through this as best as I can. It's a deep dive, but I promise you it's going to be worth it if you get to the end. All right, so we have. This is one year of data, roughly a little more than a year. Two news publishers, very similar markets. I'm calling Publisher A the conversion Champ. Okay. This is the publisher that's outperforming paid conversions by quite a lot. 4x versus publisher B. I'm calling the List Builder. And this publisher is building their email list at about two times the list growth. All right, so here's some, here's some basic stats. Both publishers started a little over a year ago with about 23,000 email subscribers on their list. Both publishers somehow magically had about 1500 paid subscribers each about a year ago. Now, the traffic to each publisher is a little different. Publisher A, the conversion champ has a bit more traffic, 436,000 visitors per month, versus 256,000 visitors per month for publisher B, which is the list builder. But what's funny is that as our list builder publisher here, even with less traffic, is signing up two times more email list subscribers through their free registration, which is pretty wild. Okay, so what happened a year later? A year later, the conversion Champ has about 8500 paid subscribers. So they went from 1500 to 8500 in about a year. Not bad, right? Publisher B, our list builder, went from 1500 starting paid subscribers to about 2100 paid subscribers. So it's not horrible growth, but it's quite a bit less than our conversion chip. Okay, and then as far as free registrations, our conversion champ brought on board about 27,000 free registrations over the year, and our list builder brought about. Brought in about 62,000 emails through free registrations in the last year. So pretty interesting numbers. Our conversion champ kicking butt with paid conversions or list builder kicking butt with free registrations, just couldn't. Same news publisher couldn't have more different outputs. All right, so why is this happening? Right? Why is this happening? All right, let's take a look at the free registration performance first. So we have our list builder outperforming in the free registrations. Well, why are they doing this? Okay, a couple of reasons. One, and probably the big one, is that their paywall setting is different. So they're very restrictive when it comes to their paywall. It's set at what we call one and one, which means you get one free article on the meter. You don't have to do anything. You just get inbound reader comes in, reads the article, but on the second article, that reader has to register with their email and a password, right? And then they get access to that second article. So. And that's it. They get one article in front of the registration wall, they register, they get one article after the registration wall. So that's driving two times more free registrations than our conversion champ, who has the wall set to two and two, which means two free articles register, get two more. This is on a per monthly basis, right? So that's a huge difference. And if you're listening to this and you're looking at your Google Analytics and you look at average article views or page views per visit, you'll probably see a number like 1.7 somewhere in that range. That means that for each inbound visitor that hits your site, they're going to look at about 1.7 articles per visit, which means that at 2 and 2 on average. That average visitor never sees your registration. Right?

Yeah.

They don't get a chance to sign up.

Yeah, yeah. And it might look like super restrictive, but it's really not based on everyone's habits in terms of, you know, landing on your site and looking at the content. So try to see it in that. In that view, most of us are not super fans where we're going through 15 pages of content and if we were, we'd already be paying anyway.

So. So that's right. That's right. And these. Yes. And so I mean, your point is it, it does sound restrictive. And yeah, I mean you, you, your superpower as a publisher is your content and your audience. So you got to leverage your content to build that list. And you're basically saying, hey, you can, you can get our, you can get a little more content and get our newsletter, by the way. Don't forget that. Right. Because once you register, you get sent to the newsletter. And that's how, that's how the. And then the newsletter is value to that free registered reader. But at the end of the day, you have much less, much lower performing free registration signups because that average visitor just isn't seeing the free registration that much. Okay. So that's the main thing. So moral of the story here is tighten up your meter to 1 and 1. Now I say that knowing that every publisher's in a bit of a different journey with their subscriptions, if you're early to mid in the journey, then one on one is really a good way to be. If you have a strong brand and you really need to lock stuff down, that's great, you know, go even further restrictive. Okay, now second thing. Article views per visit, our list builder gets about 2.1 article views per visit. Looking at their Google Analytics versus our conversion champ is getting that average of 1.7 article views per visit on the nose. And so why is that happening? Why does our list builder have more article views per visitor than our conversion champ? Well, let me show you. I'm gonna pull up an image here of a typical article and what it looks like. So you have related articles. Don't forget the power of teasing your reader that's on an article into reading other articles on your site. And I see this across. I don't know what you see, Tyler, but I see a lot of publishers really Just put the article out there and there's nothing else. So once you hit the end of the article, you're done, and then now you're kind of left scratching your head. Well, don't let your readers scratch their heads. Give them a place to go. Right. In this case, they have one to three links that says read more right in the middle of their content. If you look at some of the larger publishers, they're doing this. This works well. You don't need to get fancy when you're in the middle of content. Just read more. Offer some other related articles by category. And at the bottom, they have three related article thumbnails. So every single article keeps that reader on the site longer, which makes that reader hit the registration more frequently. And that's. And that. That's. That's the game. Okay, back to the spreadsheet. All right, so hopefully you're hanging with. We've talked about the free registration setup. Why our list builder is really outperforming. Okay, now let's go to the second big topic. Why are paid subscriptions converting more for our conversion champ versus our list builder? And it's pretty significant. So publisher A, the conversion Champ is getting 5, on average, 5.9 paid subscribers per day. That's their cadence. And our list builder right now is running about 2.6 paid subscribers per day. That's. That's a. You know, that's a hundred. You know, Our conversion champ is doing 100% better than our. Our list builder revenue right now per month is running $44,000 for our conversion champ and about $12,000 for our list builder. That's a pretty significant difference. Yeah, I would say. Okay, so why is this happening? All right. Biggest thing that's happening is that the newsletter is not being fired enough to the free list our conversion champ is sending. And fairly recently in the last few months, they upped their game to send two newsletters per day. One in the morning, one in the afternoon. They're splitting up their content to about 10 articles per send, so about 20 articles per day. And it's working incredibly well. It's driving all these clicks back to the website to see upgrade messaging, and that's what's making the conversions happen. So our list builder has been sending one newsletter per week to the free list once per week. I just learned this, by the way, recently. I had a conversation with them this week. I thought they were actually sending one a day, but they're sending one a week, so double ouch. They are sending their newsletter every day to Their paid list. So that is going out and their view on it was it's kind of a paid benefit. You're a paid subscriber, so you get access to our, in our newsletter every single day. But is that the right way to look at it?

Yeah, I don't, I don't think so.

I mean, you.

The reason I can, I can understand their point. I totally get that you, you definitely want to keep your paid subscribers engaged. It's, you know, consider the, the email they're getting as a churn reduction tool as well. You want your content to be in front of them to, so they know that they're, they're paying for something and getting it in their inbox. But if you're building a massive list and then it's just sort of sitting there for a week and you're not pinging that audience with anything, then it's sort of going to waste a little bit.

Right.

It's like, what's the point of that free list building if you're not gonna send them some content?

Exactly. The free readers need to see the upgrade messaging in order to convert to paid subscribers. That's the difference. So at two messages, at two emails per day with links, basically titles and excerpts, it's sending folks back to the website to see, hey, upgrade your account so much more often. And today we're busy, we're distracted and we need to see messaging, you know, 10, 20, whatever times to act on something because it's not going to take one message to get that done. I mean, it can, but it's rare. Yeah.

And we have hard data on this with the article views per visit. Like most people aren't getting past that two page count so they're never getting to that third article which would trigger that upgrade message. So the only way to do that, to get them back without relying on social and Google and other outlets, is to send them an email. You've got their email address. That's your fort. That's your protection around the social and the search engines. Send out to your free list and generate some traffic and hopefully generate some upgrades.

It's amazing. You are building a fort. You're building your own list that you control. 100% email is the common denominator that we all have as AI kicks in and social and search, of course it's going to matter less and less if you build your list and then of course send those newsletters to the list. So not only do they get to see the upgrade messaging on the website over and over again as they try to gain access, but they need to see the upgrade messaging in the email as well. So one of the other things that, when we took a look at the layouts of the two newsletters is that our conversion champ here had on average about four upgrade messages in there in each newsletter that went out. So, hey, you know, upgrade and become a paid subscriber. Get full access, get all the benefits. Four messages per email. Our list builder had about half a message per email. Not every email had an upgrade message in it. So that was, that was a miss right there. One of the other things that's important to remember is that when you're sending out your free. When you're sending out, you know, you have a big list and you're sending those free newsletters out is you're, you're, you're driving your own traffic. Like you're, you're increasing the traffic to your site significantly. So this week we had a conversation about sponsored advertising. Advertising in general. They're running network ads. This was our list builder publisher B. They're running network ads on their site and they're complaining that their ad revenue has really dropped significant, significantly $8,000 a month to $1,000 a month, like complete crash in ad revenue. And not only that, but ads were popping up all over the site when you landed on it, sliding in and sliding up. And so they're going to get rid of all that nonsense and that's going to help their conversions as well. But we talked a lot about, I know this is a little off topic, but we talked about sponsored. Working on sponsorships rather than leaning on network ads. And they have sort of the typical news categories, right? They got, they got sports, they have, they have travel, they have real estate, they have, they have all those things. And they're working on coming up with a game plan on finding a sponsor for each of their major categories. And they also happen to have a newsletter that matches their categories as well, which is very smart. So they have the list. Like, they really did a good job building their list. They, like you said, they just haven't been using it. So that's going to make a big difference.

Yeah, for sure. And newsletter advertising generally goes a lot further for the advertiser just given how targeted those lists are and how engaged they are compared to just a random sidebar image ad. So, yeah, definitely lean on those sponsorships inside of your newsletter because you've built a list. There's, there's more than one, more than one way to monetize your, your newsletter list. Beyond just paid subscribers.

Yeah, it is, it is your direct sales engine. I mean, it is the one thing you can count on that you send out and lands in people's mailboxes that want it to land in their mailbox. And they do look at it, they might scan it, but sometimes they, they engage with it and they click and they, they dig in. It's your direct marketing tool. And one thing that I notice amongst publishers is confidence, right? Like your superpower is your content. You know your content, you know what you're publishing, you know what your readers want, and you're building an audience. You have, have an audience. And so sponsors want that. Like, they're drooling for that. They want to cut through the noise, you know? Yeah, they can, they can go and do social and Google Ads and things like that. But when you have a, when you're serving an area, especially as a news publisher, if you serve a city or a region or a town, like you're, you may have a monopoly situation on your hands and that's what your, your advertisers want. And you, you know, if it were me, I would make it limited. You know, just, just figure out what works for you. In this case, you might have one. One sponsor for travel, one for sports, one for real estate. And as I was talking to them this week, they were like, yeah, and they were coming up with ideas. Oh, this would be the perfect match for real estate, like this real estate company that they're worked with. Or this would be a match for, for, for the last resort section. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And you can command a lot more money for sure.

It's so targeted, like, it's like so much more targeted.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so as far as the paid conversions, back to the topic at hand we're actually talking about is make sure your newsletter is doing its job. This is a place where you might want to consider redesigning it. If it's not doing the job, you want to make sure you have upgrade messaging on your free newsletter. The purpose of your free newsletter is. Is to promote paid subscriptions, full stop. That's the purpose. Yeah, you might have some sponsors in there. Great. But the main purpose of this free newsletter is to get people to pay you for a subscription, which. And subscription revenue outperforms ad revenue by a long shot, especially network ad revenue. Okay. One thing I completely spaced out on, which I just want to show it's going to go take us back a little bit, is that free registration. So our list builder publisher here, this is what Their this is what their free registration looks like. This story is free for you. Email password this converts very well. The psychology of free really, really works. Keep it simple. Tell them you're going to get the newsletter and you're done. Our conversion champ, the one that is converting paid subscribers but not as many free readers, has a different approach to their free registration. They have a wall of text. If you're listening to this, there's a lot to read through and it's too much and it doesn't have that word free popping out at you in the header text and it's just underperforming. So this needs to be cleaned up. Yep. Okay. All right. If you're on YouTube then you're seeing what I'm seeing. All right. So I think that covers what we wanted to cover. The takeaways here are if you're a news publisher, target sending twice a day your newsletter twice a day. I know it sounds like a lot maybe, but if, if what we see is people want to opt into newsletters, especially when it comes to local regional news, news you're interested in. And twice a day is great. It's. It delivers fresh news. People want fresh news. If something's ready to go, send it. Right. It also might clean up your list a little bit. You might not be sending 20 articles in one go. You'll send 10 and we only have it. Readers only have a 20 minute attention span anyway when they're reading through, when they engage with an email. So keep it short and yeah. So twice a day and then make sure you have plenty of upgrade messages in your email. So in your free emails. And then you have a paid email list as well which offers other opportunities. We can talk about it another time. But your free email, send it to everybody. Make sure there's maybe a slim upgrade message at the top and at the bottom have a beefy upgrade message with benefits, features and benefits. Or you'll. If somebody gets to the bottom of your email, they're highly engaged. Tell them all about, you know, this is a chance to tell, tell them all about what the subscription paid subscription benefits are and tighten up your restrictions. That's the last one. If you're, if you're sort of in the beginning or middle of your journey, yes, you have options with how restrictive you want your, your paywall settings to be. But generally speaking, if you're in that sort of list building mode, you, you got some. You're building confidence with your content. 1 and 1 is your number one free article. Great. Register email and password for the second article. Third article, you have to pay. All right, I think that covers it. Any other last words of wisdom? Tyler.

I was just going to ask briefly, are these, are these both of these publishers in similar, like target audiences? Are they, are they targeting the same groups of people?

Yes, yes, they're. The demographics are almost identical. So we looked at what markets each one serves and other than the amount of traffic they get, publisher A Getting more traffic, 400,000 plus versus 250,000, everything else is identical. So this is a very fair comparison. And as far as I look at this, this data is pretty clean, pretty clear as to what to do next. So any case. Yeah, get in touch if you want to talk about building the list and converting paid subscribers. Hope this was helpful and we'll catch you next time. See ya.

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