E5: How to generate more paid subscriptions with promotions

Welcome to the Paywall Podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies. We will talk with some of the publishers that we work with at Zine 101. The things that work and the things that don't. There's so many amazing things you can do in the digital world as a publisher to not only increase your digital subscriptions, but also engage your audience. Let's get started.

All right, so welcome back to the Paywall Podcast. I'm Pete here with Jeremy and Tyler, and today we're going to talk about how to generate more paid subscriptions using promotions, lots of different promotions. We have at least 10 methods of promoting subscriptions and other sales that you might be able to put together in your publication. I think the motivation for this podcast was something called Black Friday, which I never heard of, but I understand it might be happening next week. Kidding aside, you can use these promotional techniques anytime, but it is the holiday season, and we thought it was a good inspiration to talk about things you can do to generate more subscription income. So let's start off with a little review over the thing that you as a publisher should be doing, and that's the free registration wall method. I'm not going to go into it. If you're not collecting email addresses, or I should say, exploding your list with free registrations, you absolutely should consider doing that. We cover it in episode two. I actually checked what episode number that was, and that will help you set up a free registration wall so that you could give your subscribers a few extra articles or something for free to download in order to really build that email list. And that email list, of course, becomes your engine where you're sending your readers back to your content every day, every week, depending on your publishing schedule for them to consume more content. And then hit the second, we call it subscription nag, where you're asking them to pay for full access or whatever the pitch is for you as a publisher. So assuming you're doing that or something related to that, here are some things that we're going to cover. First, we're going to talk about the mechanisms. The what? Like the actual tools that you can use to start selling things, selling subscriptions and products. And then secondly, we're going to go into the how, which is how do we apply these tools strategically in order to convert subscribers into, you know, free subscribers, into paying, etc. All right, so the first tool, the first. What I want to talk about is coupons. This is probably one of the most popular things that publishers do, is giving out coupon codes. To give a percentage off on a subscription. And the thing that is really, really, really important and we want to really stress through this entire episode is that coupons and really everything else need to have, as Jeremy says, a deadline. And the deadline is what motivates us as humans to act. Now, you could offer a 10% or 20% discount, but if you don't, if you don't say when it goes away, then it's so easy for us humans to be like, oh, that's nice, and then I'll go off and do something else. Maybe I'll do that. But if you. If you say you're gonna get 20%, if you subscribe up, subscribe in a week now you're putting a little pressure on me, right? Oh, jeez, it's a week away. Or if you say, you know, you get 20% off today, you know, you get 24 hours to decide, then I'm probably going to make the decision right now on the spot because I know I'll forget to look back today, you know, in a week, maybe today. So generally speaking, the tighter your deadline, the more action you'll. You'll create.

Yeah. You want to instill that sense of urgency. I know we've all felt it whenever we get a deal in our inbox and, you know, 24 hours only, or 48 hours only, or, you know, this deal only good for this specific amount of time. It just, it does something psychologically to you to take action on it in a way that without a deadline, like you said, you kind of. It's easy to forget about if it's not something that you're actively in the mode of purchasing.

Yeah, yeah. Deadline, deadline, deadline. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen subscription promotions where there's no deadline and the deadline needs to be obvious. It can't be just in the fine text. It has to be part of the promotion. Right. So when you look at the promotion, you know, we're scanners on the web, we're scanning. We're not really reading in depth until we decide to read an article in depth. But that's. That's a conscious decision. So for the most part, we're scanning. And If I see 20% off, great. But if I see 20% off expires tomorrow, that's the magic combo. So you have to make it obvious as well.

Yep. Yeah. There's some email platforms that you can even add a timer to the email, like a countdown timer. And I've seen that in a few emails that I've Received.

Yeah.

A visual reminder.

Yeah. This offer is good for. What is it, 23 hours, 16 minutes and 52, no, 51 seconds.

This is a little off topic, but I used to work in reality TV production and one of the key elements to reality TV is a clock. Putting something on the clock and, you know, that keeps our attention, that keeps us wanting to watch whatever it is that's going on. So it's interesting how that also applies to this.

So that's interesting.

Yeah.

My wife loves like the cooking, baking shows. Right. Everything is based on the clock counting down. Five minutes left. Yeah.

Has she been watching that British baking show on Netflix?

That's. We've watched them all.

Ah, it's wonderful.

Kids like to watch those. I don't know. Yeah, you know, both my boys, they just. The cupcake one. Yeah, I can't remember what the name of that one was.

Yeah, Cupcake Wars.

Cupcake Wars.

Without a clock. Without a clock, though, those shows would be hard to watch, I think.

You know, that's interesting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Time. Right. And it actually makes sense because as, as the Internet has made everything move faster, that time is becoming really our biggest challenge. So.

Right.

Yeah. We need to make decisions quicker and if we put a limit on time, then it forces that decision to happen.

Exactly.

Cool. All right, moving on to our second tool that you can use that would be a free trial, or really even a paid trial, but a free trial where you essentially offer someone to try full access to your publication for free for a limited period of time. Again, limited period of time. So maybe a 30 day free trial would be pretty, pretty common, but you could do, you could do six months if you really wanted to motivate people to pile on. And the key is, of course, that with the trial, you're, you're capturing a credit card right up front. So in order to get the benefit of full access for that time period, you put your credit card in and then, okay, I got 30 days, so great, I'll enjoy the content for 30 days. And then as a publisher, you'll end up with people that will genuinely like the content and stay on. And that's great. You'll have people who simply forget but then decide that they like it anyway. And that's great. And then you'll have some cancellations, but a free trial, you know, if you, if you, if you, if you read around, as we've all been doing here, that is one of the absolute top ways to convert paying subscribers, without a doubt. Like, even if you didn't. If you didn't have a free registration wall, a free trial would be your next step. Right. And that's really easy to set up. So you know, you're, you're setting your meter for, for a few enjoyable articles and then you're saying, hey, pay. Okay, well you say hey, how about free first, you know, and we'll give you 30 days. I've seen, depending on the audience though, I mean I've seen publishers give a one day, you know, free trial, like a 24 hour access for something that's, you know, very high value content. Paid trial is similar, you know, but it's, you're, you're paying a dollar, you're paying, you know, $10 and then you're getting a period of time and then you pay. So in that application you could sell an annual subscription at like a 50% discount, which might be a nice approach where you're saying, hey, why don't you sign up for a year, It'll be a 50% promotion for the year, then it goes to full price and you're giving away a high motivation for somebody to try out your publication. But they're still committing. And that's the part I hear from publishers is they're saying, you know, we still need to apply value to the transaction. So the free trial is not really for us. We want them to pay something. Some say, you know, at least a dollar just, just to, just to have like money transact and get them in the mindset of paying for content. And that's, you know, for some and I think a very, very valid point, you know, pay, pay something. But I like the idea of if I'm going to sell annual subscriptions and we know as a general looking at all the publishers we serve, annual subscriptions tend to outperform monthly recurring. If a publisher is offering both from what we see, if you really want to motivate more annual subscriptions, make them recurring and a percentage off for that first year. That's pretty compelling. You could combine it with a free registration as well if you really wanted to, you know, sort of gently slide people into pay.

Yeah, and you see these free trials across industries. I mean it works for Netflix, it works for Hulu, it works for a lot of different sectors. So if you're going to try any of these, free trial or a paid trial is a really good place to start.

Yeah, yeah, it works. I mean it has worked for a long time. Free cells, I mean free, you know, the Columbia House records, if you're old enough to remember that promotion that was all about, you know, the, the getting. I don't even. I can't. I did it once or twice. You get a whole bunch of records and you don't have to pay for a year, I think, or something like that. But that, that worked for decades for them.

Yep. Yeah. I was a part of one of those CD clubs back in the day that was similar. Records were a little bit before my time.

I just gave up my generation, didn't I? Cool. So the next thing in the, in the tools department we're going to talk about is offering a free download or a premium product. And so you could do this a few different ways. If you're offering free registrations. Yes. You're saying, okay, maybe you have your meter set to one or two free articles per month as an example. And then if you sign up and you register for free, you get five or six, 10, whatever, depending on the volume of your content articles per month. And that's compelling enough. And that really works incredibly well. But, but if you really want to sweeten the pot, you could also give away a free download too, to start that registration. But let's flip over to paid. So giving away a product on a paid subscription is another way to really promote that paid subscription. So as an example, Modern Drummer magazine, they ran a campaign recently where if you paid, and I can't remember what level of access you came in on, I think you had to. Who come in on the full level print and digital all access subscription. And what they did is they had a bunch of extra copies of the Neil Pert Drumming issue printed up and you would. And it was a back issue. And so if you signed up and there was a limited amount of these print editions, you would get a copy of that and they sold out, out of that issue. I can't remember how long it took. It was like maybe just a week or two. You know, it was, the campaign was a smashing success for them. So if you have, if you have something that, that is of value that you think would be, that a paid subscriber could get and you know, it could be, I mean, it could be a cool PDF, it could be a hat or T shirt or something. I mean, it really, it really could be, or maybe access to a live stream or video or something. You know, think about what you could, what you have of value that you could give away to motivate a paid subscription.

Yeah, it's. It's one of those things where sometimes just that little bit extra makes it feel worth the Cost for the, for the user where maybe the subscription by itself, they're kind of on the fence, but you throw in, you know, hey, you get this thing or you get access to this additional thing that you wouldn't get otherwise, can, you know, tip people over to the other side. I know, you know, it's happened with me and things that I've bought where it's like, oh, you know, I'm kind of like on the fence a little bit and then. But hey, they're going to throw this in now. Yeah, let's go ahead and do it.

Right. And especially if there is a, a deadline. I promise I'd be weaving this, this expiration slash deadline thing through this entire program. Yes. So. Right. So in, in Modern Drummer's case, they had a limited quantity. Right. So the deadline was not time based, but quantity based, which works great because it's kind of the same thing. Or if you're, you get tipped over a little harder, as you say, because this ends tomorrow or Friday or whatever.

Yep. Yeah. Quantity, you know, limited quantities is, it can be very motivating.

Mm, absolutely. You know, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm not a drummer. You're a drummer. I mean, I think having a copy of the Neil Purd issue would be pretty cool if I were a drummer.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially if there wasn't another way to get it, so.

Exactly. Yeah. Once they're out, they're out. They're not going to reprint them. I mean, maybe, but probably not. All right, on to the next thing. All right, so the next tool in the toolkit is gift subscriptions. So this, this is a great way to motivate people that have already paid you to share the love with friends or family or whatnot. So you, you know who's going to buy a gift subscription? Well, it's, it's somebody who is maybe already a paid fan, paid subscriber, and they're, and they, and they want to share that with a friend or a family or it could be just a holiday push. Right.

Where.

Okay, so, you know, the, the holidays are coming up and you want to give something. Well, I know that, you know, Jeremy's interested in drumming, so let's, let's give him a gift subscription again. One of the things you can do with gift subscriptions, at least in our case, is you can apply a coupon to the gift subscription. And with the coupon on a gift subscription, you would also want to make sure that you promoted what the deadline. Ah, yes, the deadline on the gift subscription. So you see where we're going with.

All this now we're tracking.

So if, if it were, if it were me and it's Black Friday, whatever that thing is, I've never heard of, I would, I would put out a gift subscription to my paid subscribers today or tomorrow and put a coupon on it and have a Black Friday special or, or whatever holiday promotion on it, have a deadline on it. And then that goes to my list of paid fans, you know, my best subscribers, you know, would I do it to my free list? No, I wouldn't because that, that message isn't really connecting. Yeah, you might. Your free list of subscribers, they definitely have an interest, but they haven't committed. They're not excited and as excited, I should say, as somebody who's actually paid and enjoying, you know, full access to your, to your content and other products that, that you offer. Okay. The last tool we're going to talk about is something that I think if you're an experimental, experimental mindset, you should try and that's the concept of letting the potential subscriber, your reader, decide what to pay you for access to your subscription. Now we have an add on called name your price. You can use it for donations, you can use it in this case where you decide, hey, we're going to run a promotion and let's say it's a digital only promotion, which might make sense. And we're going to let the readers name their price. Now the price, and you set what that price is. Now the price could be zero. In other words, you know, if somebody's willing to register, we'll give them, you know, maybe an annual subscription or 6 month subscription or whatever you decide. Maybe it's a dollar a month, right? Maybe it's two. You pick, you pick the range that you want. But if you let your readers decide what they want to pay you, they're going to assign what they think that their value, that your value of your content is for them rather than you picking a price. Now that's kind of an experiment, right? And I think might be terrifying to hear like, oh, geez, I can't do that. But I tell you, the data backs up the fact that this really works and can generate more income than setting a subscription price. So I'm going to take you back to when Radiohead released their In Rave in Rainbows album digitally. I don't know if you guys remember that, but it was back in 2010, no, 2008. I looked it up and I remember at the time it was really revolutionary. So what they did is they put their In Rainbows album, which is a great album, on the web and they said, okay, pay what you want. And the industry, the music industry blew up. They were like, oh my God, like, what are they doing? They just completely lost it. Right? So when you went to their website and I went, I went there, remember, and you were presented with a name, your price choice, right? And so I, I could, I could Download it for $0 or I could just donate whatever I wanted to. I could pay a dollar, I could pay 5, I could pay 10. And I thought, oh my God, this is, this is unbelievable. What the heck's going to happen? And as it turned out, most people, the majority of listeners downloaded the album for free and listened to it, but a big enough majority paid what they thought they should pay. And they, you know, they reported getting paid off all sorts of ranges of numbers, but they actually made more money on that album than they made in that one promotion. And they ended the promotion. I can't remember how long, how long they ran it. It was like it was up for a couple months, something like that. In that promotional period, they actually made more money than they made on their previous album up to date. The entire length of the time that previous album was for sale made less money than that two month promotion made with the name your price. Right. It was just, it was just amazing. So you know that and, and when you're letting people decide for you what they're going to pay, you know, people are, you know, if they like your stuff, people are pretty generous, you know, in their heart. And it's like, oh, they're letting me pay what I want. That's so nice, right? And they want to reciprocate the niceness. So I have a friend who publishes a local, a daily newsletter where I live called Daybreak. That's Rob, we mentioned him previously. And you know, he started over a year, a little over a year ago and has accumulated a nice big list because his newsletter is free. And he's got a donation, you know, call to action on every newsletter. And so it's not really a name, your price for your subscription, but it's related because you're essentially, and it's not even that aggressive, but, but it's in every newsletter it says, hey, donate. And when you go to donate, you can choose a one time donation, you can choose a recurring donation. And we actually sat down and worked the numbers together and said, well, how are you doing? And I'm not going to give away any numbers. But he was making more per subscriber when you considered the free and people who donate it than what we typically see in local news publishing. As far as taking paid subscriptions, it was amazing. It was like, it wasn't like double or anything, but it was actually more. It was like, wow. Like, people are absolutely. Especially for local news where you feel part of a community and you want to name your own price or donate whatever you want to call works really well. So I said a lot of stuff, but think about what you could do, because with at least with our name your price add on, you could, you could take your like digital subscription level and just apply it to that right, like one digital subscription level and let people check out with the name your price as a promotion for how long? A limited period of time.

Set a deadline on it.

Set a deadline.

I do want to point out too that you can, with the add on, set a minimum. So if you want it to be at least a certain amount, you can do that. So.

Yep, exactly. Yeah, you don't have to completely go down to zero for sure, but yeah, you could start at a dollar, you could start at $2 a month or whatever, but that works. So if you're feeling experimental, you know, pick a holiday, try and name your price on a subscription level and see what happens. And if you do actually do that, please send me an email, let me know what happens. I'd love, love to hear about it.

And where can I email you?

Pete? Pete101.com There, I said it. Send it to me. Yeah, I love it. This is, this is the stuff I enjoy so much. So. All right, now we're going to shift into the how portion of this podcast. We're going to talk about how do we apply. We have the tools, we have gift subscriptions, we have coupons, we have name your price, we have free trials, we have paid trials. So we have ways to capture money. Now, how do we apply these? What's the strategic approach behind using these tools? And before I jump into the how, I have 10 hows here listed, but I want to talk a little bit about messaging because this is something that comes up over and over again. And as publishers, I think it's important to understand that your audience doesn't necessarily get how you make money. And you might think that how I make money is none of the audience's business, but you're wrong. The audience, you know, I talk to publishers, news publishers, who tell me that they, you know, when they talk to their subscribers, their paying subscribers, oftentimes they'll say, oh, I didn't know you counted on paid subscriptions. I thought the government paid you, right? Or I see a lot of advertising on your site. I thought the advertisers paid you. So I didn't really think you needed the subscription income. And of course, today, yes, the subscription income is a big part of monetizing a publication. And there was a sports, local, regional sports publication that I talked to who told me flat out, yeah, people pretty much think the schools pay me because he covers high school sports. And so the point here is that as you're asking for people to pay and support you, make sure you're telling them why, that you need you, you need the support. I'll give you an example. Track and Field News, which is a magazine and news site. They've been around for 100 years or so, something a very long time. They put out an email newsletter to their subscriber base, flat out telling them the story behind, you know, how they really need the support and, and where the money comes from. It was a very heartfelt, really ask for a paid subscription. And so I don't, you know, you should feel, you know, like this is normal, you know, and people need to know, right? Like, because your audience doesn't know. And that heartfelt approach to your audience works really well. So think about how you want to message that. But, but it, but it's, it's an important piece of helping your paid subscribers understand that you need them, you know, and it's, it's a relationship. Okay, I think I've gone on about that enough. All right, so the number one thing strategic approach is email, right? Email. Email, email. We're going to talk about email to death. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it because if you go and listen to episode two, we talk a lot about it. But again, set up a free registration wall. It will build your list like crazy. It's super easy, especially with leaky paywall, to tag people as they come in to say mailchimp. Right? So if I'm a free registration, that tag gets applied when somebody registers. You have a list of people that are tagged free or whatever, you tag them in mailchimp. You know, these are free registrations. Somebody pays for a subscription, you tag them as monthly or you tag them as annual. So let's say in mailchimp, you have a list of people that are tagged as paid, essentially. So now you know how to communicate with those two as just a simple example and a powerful example. And if you're Doing the right job. You're, and most of you are, you're sending email to your audience, to your subscribers every day, every week, every month, depending on your publishing frequency. And you're sending them all the content you produce. And now you have a list to also send promotions to. And you get the right to send them promotions, especially the free list, because now you're sending them all your content, you're giving them some extra stuff, they're registered. And same with your paid list. Over time, you're sending the content, you know, helpful, enjoyable content to your readers and you're building that relationship so that when it's time to promote, email is the first place you look. Right. And so. Yeah, what's, what's, what's the messaging? Well, if it's free. Right. What would be a good message to send to your free list? Well, I'd say a paid, a paid subscription would be an obvious choice. Right. And you could use a coupon to motivate that. And of course, with the coupon comes.

A be a deadline, Pete.

Oh, yes, exactly. A deadline. All right.

It feels like Jeopardy or something. Maybe Wheel of Fortune.

Yeah. And if it's a, if it's a paid list, let's say you want to approach your paid subscribers, what might be a good something to send to your paid subscriber list? Gift subscription. And with a gift subscription promotion, you can, you can now you can include a coupon. Right. So you can give a discount for the gift subscription. So it's the, it's the holidays, it's promotion season, whatever. You send a gift subscription promotion to your paid subscribers. Hey, thanks for supporting us. You know, if you know anybody else who would like this, we're doing a limited time offer for a gift subscription where you, you can save 20% for an annual subscription, let's say. Okay.

And you don't have to go to a store to buy something.

That's right.

Comfort of your own home.

Just do it right there. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I, I don't see a lot of gift subscription promotion going on. I know everybody's busy, but, but I think during the holiday seasons and as you're building your paid subscriber lists, which, you know, these days we're seeing them grow nicely like those, those paid subscribe subscriptions are really, really growing at a good clip. So that list is going to become more and more valuable for other products and promotions as you go. All right, so number, that was number one. So number two, let's hop off of email. Let's Talk about, how about a pop up. Now this isn't my absolute favorite because we all generally hate pop ups, but they work. And boy, you look at mailchimp, you look at constant contact, you look at any email service providers and a lot of websites out publishers, anybody who's selling anything outside publishing. What do you get when you go to their site? 70% of the time, I don't know, 50% of the time, a lot you get a pop up. And the pop up generally is for, you know, signing up for an email newsletter which, which works without a doubt when you get in front of somebody and oh yeah, that's a good idea, I'll subscribe, it's free. I'm signing up for their newsletter and they sign up. Do we hate them? Sure we hate them. But they work. So that's kind of where we're at. I don't know what else to say about that.

One thing you can do with pop ups is exit intent. So you can have it show up only when someone's about to close a window. And you can inside of it. You could put a coupon code for let's say 20% off the subscription, something like that. So I've definitely had cases where I've gone to, to a site that has some products I'm interested in but I'm like, it's a little bit more than I want to spend right now. And then I go to close out the window and they say hey, if you here's a Coupon code for 20% off. I'm like, you know what, that makes it worth it to me. So I've definitely made purchases because of that.

Yeah, you see that, you see, you.

See that a lot with a lot of those Shopify sites that are popping up everywhere they are pop up crazy. And God forbid you hit the back button or try to X out.

Yeah, yeah. But it is the alternative to one thing I don't like. If you're going to use the pop up method, don't do it as soon as someone gets on your site.

Right? Yeah.

Because if they don't know who you are yet, you know, that's, I'm immediately going to close it. So a good rule of thumb is to wait, you know, 5, 10, 20 seconds or until they scroll past a certain point on the page. And another thing you can do if you want to get really clever is you can show different pop ups based on if the user's logged in or not. So you could show a different promotion based on the, based on who's logged in. Or another thing you can do is, and we've done this before is maybe you have a specific article set to free. Then you say if an article is set to free with the leaky paywall settings, then we're going to show a subscribe pop up on that one. So instead of actually blocking the content, you just say, hey, you know, by the way, we do accept subscriptions and you get access to a whole lot more. So sometimes, you know, users might not even know that you have subscriptions or that you have more content. Sometimes you got to let them know, especially if it's their first time visiting the site.

Can you make that pop up happen based on subscription status? So let's say I go to the site for the first time, I get a pop up and maybe the pop up is to just subscribe to the newsletter, maybe the pop up is to register for free registration. But that's essentially it because I'm a first time visitor. But let's say I'm logged in as a free, like I registered for free. And, and, and then I, I get a pop up that says hey, we noticed you're enjoying, you know, your, your registration experience or whatever it is. Don't use those words, but how about paying for full access? In other words, I'm, I'm, I'm registered for free, I'm logged into the site, I'm enjoying my extra content and then I get a pop up that says, hey, why don't you pay? And you could use a coupon. You could do with a deadline or whatever or a trial. You could do that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I think that's the way to go. Yeah. Interesting about the exit intent. Sometimes I feel like I've been locked in on this website's planet. It's like it's got gravity and I'm trying to blast out of the, the stratosphere of this, this planet. And it almost feels like when I finally managed to land on the X, it's like I escaped with my life to close the tab.

That's where a command W is your friend.

Yes. Oh, there's a good tip. Nice command W. We'll have to try that. So window, like close the window, essentially close the tab. That makes sense. Cool. All right, so that's pop ups. Somebody told me that there might be a new pop up product coming down the pipe, but I won't say anything about that.

We might have something coming.

All right, cool. Okay, so number three, I got here. Okay, simple thing to do is to edit your subscription nag with your promo. So what's a subscription nag? Well, when you, let's say somebody like comes casual, comes to the site and starts reading your content, you've set your meter to three free articles. So on the fourth article they go to, they get the promotion to subscribe. They get the box in the content or whatever it is that says, hey, you know, subscribe, register for free, pay to subscribe, whatever the message is. Well, that, that right there is your opportunity to promote your special. So if you're, if you are doing a holiday promotion or something like that, you, that message works on desktop, it works on mobile, it doesn't matter where you are because it's in content messaging and you're getting the reader who wants to read that next article but can't because the meter's been used up and you can't have better timing. Right. They're ready to read that article and they can. And so, oh, there's a promotion and it's limited time. Right. And if I do this Now, I'll save 20% or whatever the, the promotion is so that, you know, it's easy to go into your subscription nag and, and just, just add up, you know, add a, add a line that says, you know, promotion till whatever the deadline date is to get them to convert right on the spot.

Yeah. And you can just put the coupon code right in there.

Yeah, right. Exactly. Yep. The coupon code and the deadline, the expiration date. Are we saying that enough? Because I don't feel like we're saying it enough. Okay.

Make sure you put like pictures of Christmas trees too so they know it's the holidays.

Right, Right. Or whatever your holiday type style promotion. Right, sure. All right, so number four, edit your subscription card page. Okay. So the, your subscription options page, wherever you have your, you know, digital only, your monthly, your annual, your print and digital your flipbook only subscription, which we've seen your super premium member level access promotion. That page where everyone's kind of landing on and deciding, okay, what am I going to do? It's an obvious place to, I'd say in two spots the header should have some, you know, you can create a nice big promotion, holiday promotion or whatever for the header with a deadline and then the actual cards themselves. You can put your promotional information in as well. You know, you could think about maybe just doing a print only subscription. Like if you really want to print, want to motivate more print subscriptions, focus on the like a print only offer like Modern Drummer did with the free, you know, Neil Pert issue. That worked incredibly, incredibly well. Or you could, of course, do the promotions across all your subscription levels easily enough with. With leaky paywall. Anyway, okay, so that's the. The subscription options or the subscription card page number five. Okay. The welcome email. Now your welcome email. This is something, I see that, that gets a little bit of attention from publishers generally. They want to make sure the information is accurate. Hey, welcome. Here's your login. But this is really an opportunity to do so much more right now when somebody, regardless of whether they register for free or whether they pay, they're in the honeymoon period with you as a publication because now they've committed to at least filling out their information and giving you their email address. If they've paid now, they're committed to just going for it with you, taking the next step in the relationship. And the welcome email that comes back at them as soon as they sign up is just loaded with opportunity. Right? And so it's. What I would say is, you know, right after listening to this podcast, go see what your welcome email reads. In fact, go sign up and get your email in your mailbox and see what you want to do with it. There are easy ways to design it up. There are plugins that will let you even do that very easily where you can make it look better. But most importantly, look at the promotional messaging in the email. So, you know, what can you do? Okay, if it's a paid subscription right in the email, why not share a gift subscription promotion with them? You know, hey, thanks for signing up. You know, if you have a friend or family member who would like a gift subscription, you know, you can sign them up here and put the link to your gift subscription sign up. I mean, that alone could convert certainly a decent percentage of paid gift subscriptions. So that's something that I would probably do right off the bat. And it's probably something you could run permanently, right? I mean, what's it going to hurt to tell somebody new who's now stepped up into a relationship with you, who's excited because they just signed up to share a gift subscription with someone else? That works. Yeah, you can tell people to share on social media. That's another opportunity. In the welcome email, I'd be a little bit careful about how much you decide to promote in your welcome email. I'd say if, you know, you welcome them, you remind them of their login information or username, so they have that. And then I would pick one thing to promote. I mean, you could go crazy and do two. But Think about the next thing you really want people to do. So a gift subscription could be the next thing. If you're not doing gift subscriptions, have them at least, you know, share on social media, your publication. And if you have products to sell, if you have other products to sell, think about maybe putting a link to your store. Like Maybe you're running WooCommerce or Shopify or whatever and you have something particularly suited for this, the holiday promotion or whatnot. Put a link to, to that item and promote that. So your welcome email is. It's an important thing to look at because it's, you know, you're right in that sweet honeymoon period with your new subscriber. Okay. It sort of dovetails into the landing page approach. So number six here. When somebody registers or somebody pays, generally speaking, you'll take people back to the article that they were reading as, as a kindness. Right? I was reading this article, I'm blocked, I gotta register or pay. Okay, I've done that. I get taken back to the article I was reading. Thank you very much. That's a good thing to do. Now you can still do some messaging on the. There are two, two areas, two, two types of messaging you could do here. One is when they go back to the article they're reading. We actually have a plugin for this, an add on where in the header you could offer a thank you message or a promotional message right in the header. It's a little bar that shows up at the top. You can even color it to make it stand out and put some text in there with links or whatever you want to promote, you know, gift subscriptions or just a thank you or if it's an email, if it's a digital subscription, promote print subscription. It could be, could be really anything. So you can have some, some small but very important messaging right at the top of your. Of that article page that somebody gets carried back to. If you haven't done that. Absolutely do that. Because you can do it by level of subscription too with, with leaky paywall. So in other words, if I'm a free subscriber, I can. And then I get carried back to the article I was reading after registering, then I can. You can what? You can put a message up top is simply a promotion to subscribe with a coupon. And it's like it's the only place in the world that shows up is then that little bar at the top of the website with a coupon that has a expiration date, ideally. Right. And you have yourself the chance of Converting that paid subscriber right into a. And it doesn't cost you anything, right? I mean this is something you set and forget. So that's one thing you can do now another thing you can do, especially with free registrations because they're, they're free but even with paid registrations is send people to a landing page, right? And it's a thank you page. And on that page and I've seen the Correspondent if you, I don't know if you subscribe, any of you subscribe to the Correspondent, but they're pretty new publication and they, when I, when I subscribed, I went to a thank you page that was really, it was really laid out nicely. It probably had about six quadrants of information. It had really quite a lot in. Was a lot. It was probably too much. It took a lot of effort. But they really focused on it because they want to spread their messaging because they were a new publication. But they had a very warm thank you for supporting them and why they need the support which we talked about earlier. They had a call for gift subscriptions on there, so they instantly asked that you share with someone else the gift subscription link. And they also had. One of the call outs was to share on social media that was on there. They had some product on there I think to sell as well. And then the last thing I remember was a give more money pitch, right? So I just paid and then I get taken to this really beautiful thank you page. And it was the last option on the bottom, right? And it said, hey, you know, it was something like increase your support, right? Like support us even more. That was the messaging and it was a link basically back to a donation page where. Yeah, okay, I can't remember what I paid for the year. 25 bucks or something like that was their promotion price. And then I could have gone back and given them more money, right? So this thank you page was loaded with. You know, realistically speaking, I think if you've been a publisher for a while, you're not going to do all that. But, but think about maybe one thing you could do and you can test this. Super easy to test. It's like in leaky paywall, you just change a setting. You send someone to a thank you page instead of back to the article they were reading. Do it for 30 days and see what happens. See if you get a gift subscription out of it. You want to send people back to contribute more page. See if that works. I think it'd be worth measuring. And if that works, maybe it's Something you stick with. But I really, really thought that it was a smart. Now, was I upset that I didn't get back to the article I was reading? Not really. Because their messaging was, hey, we need your support, you know, right up front. Thank you. You know, we count on you. You're the reason why this whole thing's going to work and we're going to be able to provide better and more content. So it was all about me. It was all about how I'm helping, and they made me feel good. So that messaging component was a really sort of strong, strong factor on that.

Yeah. You can also promote, you know, if you have a physical product or something you're trying to sell, kind of like you could do in the welcome email, you can do that on the landing page as well.

Yeah.

You could also direct them to that thank you page. But then, you know, if you've got some technical. Know how you could actually just put a link back to the article they were reading?

Oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Oh, I like that idea. All right, Jeremy, you're on the hook for that. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, so, right. So one of your options is like a big button that says, go back to the article you were reading. So you're, you're delivering. Okay. All right, that's what I would do. That's, that's really. That's probably the best of all solutions. Yeah, that's a great idea. I like that. I'll bug you about that later. Okay. So where were we? All right, so that was. All right, number seven. Okay. Converting digital subscriptions to print subscribers via email. So I had a conversation with Greg Wolf, very. Who's very. Been in the subscription business, magazine subscription business a very long time, knows a lot of stuff. And one of the. And I talked to him this week and you know, he said the thing. If you're, if you're a print subscriber and you get a paid digital subscription, it is the perfect opportunity to upsell them to a print and digital subscription. So again, it's back to the honeymoon period and as he called it, where you, You've just paid like you, you have transacted and you have gone through that whole step. You're registered on the site, everything's hunky dory. And then you, you have that person to go after to up to. To. To upsell them to a print. And yeah, I mean, you could just say, hey, consider subscribing to print, but you could also provide a discount coupon for the print Subscription and because typically it'll be a little more money that gets all prorated and it's very easy for the subscriber to make that transition. So the concept is when you get a digital subscriber in the door, after their general welcome message, send them a promotion to upgrade to print and digital. And it works. So he's been doing that with his clients and it works great. He definitely will convert a number of digital only subscribers to print and digital.

Yeah, I actually had a publisher reach out to me and tell me that just because. And they're new to the paywall and the digital setup. Just having a digital option to be able to pay for print has actually increased people who just want the print only option, which I found fascinating. Just having that option online has actually made it an increase for them.

The option of having the upgrade.

The option of just having a print only option for people to be able to even just pay for people who don't care about digital. Yeah, yeah. So really interesting.

And that actually lines up with what we've experienced with a bunch of print publishers is we had a print publisher that went digital only. This is a whole story in itself. So imagine printing for a long time and then making a hard choice to stop printing and go to digital only. And out of all the campaigns, all the email campaigns, all the postcard campaigns, they weren't doing email campaigns. Strike that. Of all the postcard campaigns, mailing campaigns, they did to try to get their print subscribers to log into their website. After months of trying this, 50% of their print audience refused to log in. They basically didn't want to have anything to do with digital at all. Right. And they actually, they actually changed their mind and went back to printing. You know, they raised their prices. It went to a small, smaller batch printing. You know, the print, print subscriptions went from 29 a year to $129 a year. You know, it was a, what a huge change. But to your point, the half of their print audience wanted nothing to do with digital. They didn't want to log into anything. Yeah. And that blew me away.

Yeah, it's all about knowing the audience and the publisher that sent me that message. I mean, they're doing pretty well with digital too. But they've, they've, they were reaching out to tell me that they're seeing additional print only signups too, which, you know, before it was, it's a pretty manual process you had to call in. And it was a whole, whole process. So just the convenience of the online sections made it easier.

So everyone's on the web and they are willing to pay online, but they don't want to be reading online.

That's right.

Yeah. Well, I think that's, that's important to note too, that, like, you have different segments of readers these days, right. You have those who only want digital, you have those that only want print, and you have those that are in between. So even, you know, adjusting your messaging in each of your different correspondence with those different levels is important because they all want different things. They're all trying to accomplish something different, even with the same content.

Right. Same content, different modality. Yeah. How do I want. And you know, I'll add that apps are a contribution to that as well. You know, we get, we get asked. Publishers will ask us, well, so if we use apps, how many subscriptions do we get out of the App Store? And the answer is some more. The numbers vary between 10% plus to up to 50% depending on the audience. But, okay, let's say you get 10% of subscribers come in through the App Store because they discovered the publication in the App Store. Well, that's a big win, right? You just boosted your paid subscriptions by 10%. And Apple just announced that they're dropping the 30% royalty fee down to 15%. So there's. Now there's even a little more motivation to go to the App Store. But that discovery happens in the App Store where we've seen publishers try to send people from the App Store to the website to pay and subscribe to avoid the 30%. Used to be 30% and then, you know, to go, and then go back to the app and it doesn't work. You know, if I'm, if I'm, if my mode is phone and I'm just, I just want an app so it's convenient, then I, that's what I do. I'll subscribe on the app because my itunes account or Google Play account is all connected, ready to go boom, boom, boom. It's easy, quick, and I'm done. Oh, you're gonna tell me to go to the website, I gotta pay there and figure out where to go, and I gotta fuss around with credit card number and all. I.

Forget it.

It's not gonna happen.

I've even seen publishers offer the same exact plan on, you know, itunes and Google Play for more than double what they're offering on their, on their website. And people still do it because. Yeah, yeah, people still sign up through the App Store just because that's, that's their preference. They like it that way. And so they don't want to go to your website. They don't want to deal with that.

Right, right.

So.

Right. Interesting. Fair argument. I mean, you know, they pay, you gotta, you gotta pay money to, to get into the app stores. So there's an additional cost there that they're returning. Oh, good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the reason that that publisher in particular.

Yeah.

It costs more is because of that 30%. So they figured, hey, why not just add a little bit more?

Yeah. Sir. Yep. I find it amazing that Apple decided to cut their revenue stream in half brand purchases. I'm going to guess that. And because we've seen this happen, and it happened with automatic WordPress WordPress app too, is that a lot of. They started giving deals to some larger vendors who had influence and said, look, we want to be in your app store, but we're not going to pay the 30%. And so if you're, I don't know who they were, but you know, if you're some, you know, if you're Google or whatever, you know, it's like, hey, we just won't put you in there. Well, now we want you in there. Right. And so they negotiated a deal and I think they had probably negotiated enough deals. They were like, wait a second, there's a trend happening here. We need to, obviously we need to back down a little. Yeah.

I think there were a number of different lawsuits too, that may have. Actually, I don't know if all of it was just in this, you know, we're being nice and giving you half off. I think part of it was.

Oh, yeah, of course.

Motivated by those, those lawsuits.

That makes, that makes much more sense. Yeah. Yeah. Number eight. Oh, okay. Number eight. This falls a little bit more into the, into the being super direct with your pitch for supporting us category. But, you know, NPR does it, so I think any publication can do it. And that's literally asking for support and doing a campaign around support and, you know, publishing an article, maybe even more than an article, but pushing an article out right in your, your news stream that explains, you know, like kind of gives maybe some background of where you came from, what you're doing, the support you need, where your income comes from, and being just very upfront about, hey, you know, we're. And, and of course with that, you can offer a discount, you can offer a place to pay more. Maybe that's a good application for name your price. Right. We need your support. This is how, this is a big part of our income stream. And, and you know, we'll Give you full access and for either, you know, do a limited time discount or, or, or maybe a name, your price range, you know, where you could pay a dollar a month or $3 a month and up to, you know, $100 a month, depending on how high you want to go with that. But that's again, something that, the timing is probably important on that. The messaging certainly is important on that. But I'm tired of hearing publishers tell me that their readers think that they get all this free money from somewhere.

You know.

I want to mention this Knight foundation study that was released in 2019, and it says the public is largely unaware of the financial crisis facing local news. Oh, yeah, yeah. So 56% of the people surveyed believe that local news organizations are doing well financially. So for those of you who are, local news messaging is important. You know, tell people, you know, tell your story, you know.

Right. Yeah. Tell your story. Yeah. You're in the story business. Make yourself your own story.

Yep.

I like that. Yep. Yeah. Interesting data. All right, so number nine, a welcome email series. So this is otherwise known as a drip campaign. If anybody's into digital marketing, you. Somebody signs up free or paid, they get a welcome email. Well, what's next? Okay, you're sending, you're doing a good job sending them content every day, every week. Whatever your schedule is for, as you publish new content, you're sending them back. If not, listen to episode two. So what do you do next? Well, you feed them over time, different content and maybe promotion that they can, that they can consider contributing to, whether it's a paid subscription or a product or something. And so a drip campaign or a welcome series is kind of what it sounds. So after the welcome email, they might get an email the same day or maybe the next day. Right. That says, you know, that says, hey, we have. Don't, don't, don't miss this category of content or this special issue that we've created from our existing content, which you can do with issuem very, very easily, which we should probably do a segment on, but where you're, you're, you're, you're giving them extra. Right. And maybe, maybe then maybe in a couple of days they get something else from you. It's a, it's a different. Maybe it's a download, right. Maybe you have a white paper on something. Maybe you have a, if you're a print publisher, you want to give away a free issue, you send them the link to that issue in the welcome series could be whatever. You know, you have a lot of Content Dig, dig, dig down into the archives and see, see what you have. Maybe in a couple days you send them another email. And this one, yeah, maybe this one comes from the archives.

You know, don't.

This was our top article, the top articles of, from last year. I don't know, I'm just, I'm just making things up. But this welcome, welcome series is really important because the, this subscriber that you just got is on their honeymoon with you and they're the most excited that they're generally going to be about joining, you know, your publication. And so this is a time for, you know, if it's a free registration and you're sending them a welcome series, at some point in that series you want to promote a paid subscription, right. So maybe you don't do it right off the bat, but you can, you can very easily drip out these series over any time period you want. And with mailchimp, with constant contact, aweber any of these email service providers, drip.com is a good one. It's really easy to do so with mailchimp, which you know, we really like to work with because you can just do. It's so flexible. They charge well last I checked and what we pay is $25 a month for the drip functionality. Right. And so yeah, okay, it's $25 a month. But you get the ability to build these drip campaigns. You can have several of them for different purposes. And I signed up for a service, I got a 30 day drip campaign from a software company recently and every day I got a different email which was basically about like how to use their product. But it was a very short, very lightly written hey, you know, did you know and the subject line was very clear, this is how you do that or you know, and, and so I didn't read all of them, 30, 30 days of drips, but I read some of them and over time I absolutely did. Especially when something caught my eyes. Oh yeah, I want to learn more about that. Read that and I'm in. So think about, you know, as a publication absolutely building a follow up welcome email. If it's a digital paid paid subscription, part of that series of course would be an upgrade to if you're a print publisher, print publication. If it's free, you go to paid. It's an amazing tool that, and once you set it, yeah, it takes a little effort to set up in the beginning, no doubt but maybe three emails is really all you need right in the beginning. Send out one the day after the welcome email, then maybe a Couple days later, maybe a week later, maybe another week later. Something that sort of spreads out in that relationship. You don't want to go too far out because the honeymoon period is probably not, you know, six months, but you can set it up and then forget it. Right. That's the beauty of it. It's totally automated marketing. And you're following up with your, your new, new subscriber to take them to the next step. Products, gift subscriptions. Think about what you could insert into this series. Bundles. Jeremy, you had talked to me earlier about bundling things together and using them promotionally. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. So bundling is when you have someone has a product and you're recommending another product based on what they have in their cart. And so one thing I've seen that one of our publishers is doing Small Boats magazine that's really cool is if you're buying a digital subscription you go and when you're on the registration page they have a little checkbox so someone can literally just check the box and says yes, please add the Small Boats 2021 print issue to my order for a one time charge. So it's a really nice way to bundle a product in there, sell it a one click bundle almost. And so that's an additional revenue stream you can get from someone who's already, who's already wanting to subscribe. And this just gives them a really easy way to add an additional item into their transaction and increase your average revenue per customer.

Yeah, that's great. It's almost like a related products approach to a shopping cart.

Right. The nice thing is the user didn't have to go anywhere. It's literally just in the flow of the registration. You just check the box. They don't have to go to another page, they don't have to click on anything that takes them somewhere else. So it's really easy and simple for the user.

That's, that's really interesting. One thing T journey started doing was selling individual issues, like special issues. They have a Yixing. I forget what it's called, but there's an issue. It's only four articles in the issue, but it's all about Yixing pottery and they're very long form articles and they're all bundled using issue M into a special issue and you can buy that issue for five bucks. Right. And they put it out pretty recently and they, and they already started taking orders on it. So it doesn't matter whether you're a paid subscriber or not. They promoted it and people started to buy it. So it's an extra revenue stream. So I could see, you know something, you could even take a special issue like that and create a promotion on checkout so that you get that if you're going to charge extra for that issue and it doesn't, it's not already included in your subscription and checkout with something like that, it's a pure, you know, purely digital flow that takes you a little bit up front to configure, but once it's done, it's totally automatic.

Yeah. So just thinking about what's a product you could bundle in that kind of fits with the, the user's mindset at the time that they're subscribing. You could find some value there that you're maybe not thinking about yet.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. I think we covered all the tools and promotions that we were going to cover today. This is a fun conversation. I'm sure there's more to come. But we wanted to give you, the publisher, some ideas and if you could take one of these ideas and implement it to your publication, then you're gonna win. Go do it. And above all, remember to always include a deadline.

Deadline.

All right, talk to you next time. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. You can find us@paywallpodcast.com Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player of the choice and we'll see you next episode.

And you're sending them a welcome series. At some point in that series, you want to promote a paid subscription, Right. So maybe you don't do it right off the bat, but you can, you can very easily drip out these series over any time period you want. And with mailchimp, with constant contact, aweber any of these email service providers, drip.com is a good one. It's really easy to do so with mailchimp, which we really like to work with because you can just do. It's so flexible. They charge well, last I checked. And what we pay is $25 a month for the drip functionality. Right. And so, yeah, okay, it's $25 a month. But you get the ability to build these drip campaigns. You can have several of them for different purposes. And I signed up for a service. I got a 30 day drip campaign from a software company recently. And every day I got a different email which was basically about how to use their product. But it was a very short, very lightly written, hey, did you know. And the subject line was very clear. This is how you do that. Or you know, and, and so I didn't read all of them, 30, 30 days of drips, but I read some of them and over time I absolutely did. Especially when something caught my eyes. Oh yeah, I want to learn more about that and read that and I'm in. So think about, you know, as a publication. Absolutely. Building a follow up welcome email. If it's a digital, paid, paid subscription. Part of that series of course would be an upgrade to if you're a print publisher, print publication. If it's free, you go to paid. It's an amazing tool that. And once you set it, yeah, it takes a little effort to set up in the beginning, no doubt. But maybe three emails is really all you need Right. In the beginning. Send out one the day after the welcome email. Then maybe a couple days later, maybe a week later, maybe another week later. Something that sort of spreads out in that relationship. You don't want to go too far out because the honeymoon period is probably not, you know, six months, but you can set it up and then forget it. Right. That's the beauty of it. It's totally automated marketing. And you're following up with your, your new new subscriber to take them to the next step. Products, gift subscriptions. Think about what you could insert into this series. Bundles. Jeremy, you had talked to me earlier about bundling things together and using them promotionally. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. So bundling is when you have someone has a product and you're recommending another product based on what they have in their cart. And so one thing I've seen that one of our publishers is doing Small Boats magazine that's really cool is if you're buying a digital subscription you go and when you're on the registration page they have a little checkbox. So someone can literally just check the box and says yes, please add the Small Boats 2021 print issue to my order for a one time charge. So it's a really nice way to bundle a product in there. Sell it a one click bundle almost. And so that's an additional revenue stream you can get from someone who's already wanting to subscribe. And this just gives them a really easy way to add an additional item into their transaction and increase your average revenue per customer.

Yeah, that's great. It's almost like a related products approach to a shopping cart. Right.

The nice thing is the user didn't have to go anywhere. It's literally just in the flow of the registration. You just check the box. They don't have to go to another page. They don't have to click on anything that takes them somewhere else. So it's really easy and simple for the user.

That's really interesting. One thing t journey started doing was selling individual issues, like special issues. They have a Yixing. I forget what it's called, but there's an issue. It's only four articles in the issue, but it's all about Yixing pottery and they're very long form articles and they're all bundled using issue M into a special issue. And you can buy that issue for five bucks. Right. And they put it out pretty recently and they. And they already started taking orders on it. So it doesn't matter whether you're a paid subscriber or not. They promoted it and people started to buy it. So it's an extra revenue stream. So I could see, you know something, you could even take a special issue like that and create a promotion on checkout so that you get that if you're going to charge extra for that issue and it doesn't, it's not already included in your subscription and check out with something like that. And it's a pure, you know, purely digital flow that takes you a little bit up front to configure, but once it's done, it's totally automatic.

Yeah. So just thinking about what's a product you could bundle in that kind of fits with the user's mindset at the time that they're subscribing. You could find some value there that you're maybe not thinking about yet.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. I think we covered all the tools and promotions that we were going to cover today. This is a fun conversation. I'm sure there's more to come, but we wanted to give you, the publisher, some ideas. And if you could take one of these ideas and implement it to your publication, then you're going to win. Go do it. And above all.