CityBiz news - 1 simple way to improve your subscription sign-up page

Hi, I'm Pete from Leaky Paywall, and Edwin at Citi Biz has asked me to review his subscription cards. He'd like to improve the performance of these cards. Now, Citibiz is a kind of a tech crunch for local. It covers most of the major cities in the United States, and they do a lot of cool interviews covering tech and startups. So let's take a look at what's going on here with these three subscription cards. The big problem here is that this is not helping the subscriber experience or the subscriber flow on this website. And this is a clean site. It's well designed, it's well implemented, but the core flow of the visitor experience is not working. So in order to fix these cards, let's go back a step to the beginning and pretend we are a visitor from LinkedIn or Google search. We land on the site, we land on an article, we use our 2 free articles, which is what City Biz is providing. And then on the third article, and I'll click here, there's a stop and the subscription nag comes up. Keep reading this article. Subscribe or login. Okay, I can keep reading this article by subscribing, but what does that really mean? Let's click subscribe. If I click subscribe, it takes me to these three cards and now I have these options. I have to make a decision. But Citybiz has a free registration set up on their site. And so step one in the relationship that you want to build with your future paid subscriber is to collect their email address by a free registration. So what City Biz needs to do is take the visitor, the casual visitor, directly to the free registration form. So there's no thinking about what to do next. So here I have an example of what might be a better setup. And I bring over this mock up here. This is a different article, but the nag is the same. So a better approach would be read this article now for free with one action, one click here. Now, there are two buttons here. These are nice buttons, but you want to keep your funnel very clean so that the visitor doesn't have to do any thinking. They can just click where they need to click. So you have one sign up here button and then yes, you can certainly have some subscription options below if someone's ready to pay. But 90 plus percent of the time, this casual visitor, you have a good chance, if they're serious, to get them to register for free articles. But getting them to pay right off the bat, that's like Getting married on the first date, it's tough. That's a tough sell. So the login button should just be a sign in link a little more subtle. People can find login links very quickly, so don't worry about that. I'm going to show you what a great looking subscription nag looks like. I would take this Small Boats magazine. It's smallboats monthly.com and Mirror what Small Boats is doing. It's a great setup. Okay, so let's go back to the cards themselves. All right, now the free registration is motivated in the article and it skips you straight to the free registration page. So the link goes from the subscription nag in the article straight to this page and then boom. It's just a simple registration form. I would recommend to have a little more benefits copy up top. Anytime you have someone in a place where they're going to fill out a form, they're going to give you money, whatever it is, you want to reinforce the benefits that they're going to get by joining. So up here, I would say your order limited, total free. This is very little. What am I actually getting here Now? I believe that City Biz is offering two extra free articles per month. So spell that out and also mention what the benefits of getting these articles are and assuming that as soon as I fill out this form, I'm going to be added to your newsletter. Note that too, that one of the benefits of signing up here is that you're going to be added to our newsletter. So you're not going to miss an article. You're going to get all the news in your email box. You're not going to get full articles, but you're going to get a good coverage of what's going on. Okay, now let's go back to the subscription cards. Subscribe. The other thing they've implemented is Incognito browser blocking. We have an incognito blocker so that if I decide to try to get around the paywall and I click incognito, I still get the nag. The subscription nag that says, hey, please register for more access or pay to subscribe. Okay, let's go to the actual subscription card. Now that we have the free registration promoted within the article content, we don't need this limited subscription card. This declutters your subscription card page. I'm going to bring over a mockup of what this should look like. The first free card is removed. It's unnecessary. The focus now can be on the individual subscription and a sub focus can be on the enterprise subscription. One of the things I would recommend is instead of having folks subscribe to a 25 seed plan, generally when it comes to enterprise level or group or corporate subscriptions is you're going to have a conversation with that customer because it's a bigger ticket item, you're going to charge more. The customer is going to want to know what they're getting and how it works. So there's a little bit of education involved. It's going to require a conversation. So what I would do is I would change the button to let's talk and that. And when you click that takes you to a form page. Somebody is interested in getting in touch with you to have a conversation and learn more about it. And again, on that form page you want the benefits of what a subscription will give you. What that does is it focuses your individual subscription card. And so that really there's one paid funnel. It's the individual subscription. If I'm a visitor, I'm ready to pay. I don't, I don't have to do any math. I don't have to make any decisions. It's super simple. I click subscribe, I go off and pay, and that's it. The other thing I would do to the subscription cards page is I would introduce a short benefits section here. Remember, they're going to get full access to your content. They're going to get great reporting. It's going to help their business in certain ways. They're going to be on, on your newsletter and these are things to remind people of what they're getting. Okay, so let's click subscribe on the individual subscription. Again, we're on the registration page. This is great. You can keep this way. But again, this is very short copy here. I would add some benefits copy in terms of what you're getting. In fact, above this registration might be great to have a benefits section. I'm going to show you what another great landing page looks like here. Back to small boats. So when I hit the subscribe button at the top, I get a introduction from the editor and then if I scroll down, I get the benefits of subscribing and I have the single subscribe button. This works very well. It's clean. There's really nothing to make decisions on. And that subscription card page could look like this. Instead of give a gift, since this is B2C, you could have a enterprise button here. So anyway, just some ideas as far as how to introduce benefits copy into a page. So that's it for City Bizarre. This is how you get your subscriber flow down your casual visitor that lands on your site. You funnel them into the free registration right in the content of your articles, and then the subscription card page gets cleaned up with more benefits and a real focus on that singular paid option, which helps boost conversions.