Episode 14 | Easy ways to level up your website to build paid subscriptions - Part 2

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What is targeting? Well, targeting is when you have, well, maybe you don't have a subscriber, maybe it's just a visitor. Maybe you have a free level subscriber and you want to message that free level subscriber a promotion or something like that, or you have a paid level subscriber and you want to target that paid level subscriber promotion or a new product or something like that. And so how do you target the existing subscribers that you have? That's, that's generally a good place to look at. So one of the things that I notice, which is kind of interesting and I know understand as a balancing act, is that many publishers do not promote their own paid subscriptions on website. So I would look at your site and say, are you, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're starting the journey of paid subscriptions, are you actually using some of your banner ad space to promote your paid subscriptions? And if you look at the economics of it, and this has been true for years now, the value of a paid subscriber far outweighs the value of the ad banner on the site in general. And the margin is. Remember, Wired magazine did, did a analysis of this a few years ago and it was like 1000 to 1 or some ridiculous ratio in terms of, in terms of dollars, subscriber dollar value versus the ad.

Value.

Anyway, so, and promoting your own subscriptions is easy. I mean you can, you can just, just in your sidebar, you can add the message to subscribe in content, you can insert the message to subscribe. And so if you use our Add Dropper add on, which is really an unsung hero and we built Ad Dropper for ourselves and then eventually because we needed something that was really integrated with leaky paywall and was just a lot simpler to use but still offered data. But with Ad Dropper now you can, you can target like a free level subscriber and you could say, you know, hide, hide this subscription promotion for anybody who's paid. That might be a good use of Ad Dropper. So the way you set it up is you create your, your, your, hey, subscribe ad and it could be, could be text, it could be a little video even. It could, it's probably going to be a, just an image, a banner and that, that would be inserted, let's say in content would be the priority because that's, that's where you know, mobile lives. But you can certainly add it to the sidebar and just check off the boxes that say hey, hide this for, for any of your paid subscription levels. So that when someone's logged in as a paid subscriber, they don't, they don't see this promotion at all. But anyone who, who, who's outside that will see the, the promotion and super fast, super easy to set up. And now you can target those, you know, free and you know, the, the visitors that come in casually and aren't reading your content and the, anybody who's logged in as a free registered subscriber, that's something I would do right away. Okay, so another thing to do would be to let's say go after paid subscribers. How do you target paid subscribers? And one of the things that I would take a strong look at are gift subscriptions. So from the print industry, we know that over 20% of your subscriptions for, for a successful print publisher need to be gift subscriptions. If you have, if you are producing a publication that has, that is giftable. So you know, B2C. So if you're targeting consumers, you have a, generally speaking, you have a giftable subscription and look, you know, look, look at your subscriptions. Are you generating a lot of gift subscriptions? And if not, then that's an area that has some low hanging fruit for you. And what you want to do here is you want to target your existing paid subscribers because they're your biggest fans to gift, you know, to sell, to promote a gift subscription. And you could certainly target everyone but your paid subscriber would if you, if you targeted them specifically, you could message them, you know, hey, thanks for being a paid subscriber. You know, we're doing a holiday promotion. Consider sending a gift subscription off and maybe even, and now with our gift subscriptions you can include a little discount coupon as well to limited time. Of course, always limited time. And that very specific message will convert gift subscriptions for you. All right, so what I'm focused on is the website experience right now. And another thing, it's another little known but super powerful tool that you should absolutely look at is called our conditional display notice. It's one of our add ons and what it does is it lets you target any subscription level with a little header bar on the top of your site. So it's good for mobile, good for desktop. It's very discreet. But you can even choose the colored background for this header bar and then you can message based on subscription level. So a great example would be similar to what I just talked about. So someone who's, who's logged in and registered for free, you know, for 30 days. You know, why don't you test a 10% discount coupon that expires, you know, at the 30 day mark that's valid and only shows up for somebody who's logged in as a free subscriber or someone who's logged in as a paid subscriber and has maybe again I can go back to gift subscriptions and same thing, you know, put an offer up on that header bar that says, hey, thanks for being a paid subscriber. Consider sending a gift subscription to someone and you can really discreetly target each subscription level this way and that will help your conversions. The other thing I haven't seen would be sort of a refer a friend to paid subscribers. So you have your big, you have your fans. These are the pay subscribers. Why not, why not have them simply just refer, you know, refer your publication to, to a friend who might share the same interest. And, and because you're going to give them, you're, you're, you're offering a 20% discount or 10% discount, again, limited, limited time offer. Okay. And then one other thing I want to mention is something that's coming soon and it's something that Jeremy's building, the wizard behind the curtain is building. And Jeremy, you want to talk a little bit about the new website targeting awesomeness that's coming?

Sorry, you'll have to be a little more specific.

Jeremy's building like I don't even know.

Which one that applies to.

Okay, okay. I'm a little too crafty. I'm sorry. Yeah, I know. So I know you're building like 100 different products, but subscriber pop ups.

Okay.

Yeah, Talk a little bit about.

Yeah, yeah, so that one's pretty cool. So what you can do is you can target pop ups based on specific logged in, logged out, leaky paywall levels, whether someone has free access or paid access. And another cool thing that you can do with it is you can also target when it shows up. So if so, for example, you could have it show after a certain number of seconds or you can have it show after someone gets halfway through a page, or you can have it show up on exit intent. So when someone's mouse tries to click the little X button and then you can put whatever content you want inside of that. So it's great for, you know, let's say someone's not logged in. You could do a little coupon code if someone wants to subscribe right now, you know, you could say, hey, this offer expires, here's the coupon code. You could also put a form directly into it. And so you could even experiment with that. You can offer gift subscription call outs. Do like a cool little image in there talking about your gift subscriptions. So I mean obviously the possibilities are endless with that. But the cool thing is you can display it based on different leaky paywall conditions such as the level or logged in, logged out, free, free or paid. So it'd be pretty cool.

Yeah. What I haven't heard before is that you can put a form in there that's pretty interesting. So that, that sends me to that sort of survey side of the equation where you could do a quick, you know, one question or two question. I'd say one question survey to like paid subscribers to get their direct feedback on something. Yep. And then your messaging, because you're targeting paid subscribers with the subscriber pop up. Your messaging can be very specific, like hey, thanks for being a paid subscriber. Really appreciate your support. Love your feedback on this one question. Right. And then try to keep it to one question or as as few as possible because we're all too busy to answer anything more. That's really awesome. And exit intent too. Nice. One of the things when you showed me a preview a little while back was the fact, and I think you mentioned this early, is that you can schedule pop ups, you can actually pre build a whole bunch of different pop ups for different levels and the messaging will be different depending on whether they're casual visitor, whether they're free logged in, whether they're paid and which subscriber level they're paid under. So like if you're a print publisher, you could pop up. Hey, to a digital only subscriber you could pop up. Why don't you try a print edition with a coupon or something like that if you wanted to. And then, and then you can set those, you can, you can time those down the road in the future.

Right.

So you could do like a monthly, you could test like monthly different promotions if you wanted to.

Mm, yep. Yeah, it just uses the built in WordPress post editor. So it's Right. The same way you'd schedule a post within WordPress, you can do it with the pop up.

That's awesome. That's awesome.

So we also show some stats on how many times it was displayed and then also what pages it was displayed on and you can choose to hide it on specific pages as well so. Or show it on only specific pages. So lots of flexibility with it. That'll be coming soon.

Yeah, that is really cool. I think we might have to do an episode just on the subscriber pop ups and sort of what you can do with it. I'm sure we'll get a bunch of feedback on it and we'll get a lot of usage off of that. Yep, that's cool.

Yeah, we've got some people, some publishers right now that are kind of in beta mode with it and they're using it and it's, it's doing what it needs to for him.

So.

Yeah, and you can also use the Post Expirator plugin if you want it to, you know, expire the pop up from displaying at a certain point. Oh yeah, you do that as well.

Perfect. Yeah, turn it on, turn it off, automate the whole thing. That's great. That's where that's what we want. That's awesome. Yeah, that Post Expirator plugin comes in pretty handy. Okay. And thank you. That's really cool. All right, so that is. So that sort of finishes off website targeting like how you're going to deal with incoming inbound people. So casual, casuals, freight level subscriptions, paid level subscriptions and you know, look at Ad Dropper for promoting paid subscriptions because you can hide them from paid subscribers. And I think you have some opportunities here to get that message out. And then look at that conditional display notice that, that, that's a real gem. And you can you know, very elegantly promote whatever you need to promote to for a specific level subscription level, free or paid. Okay, so the next targeting piece, part B, section B, whatever is email. So targeting via email now again you're collecting email addresses with free registrations and which is, you know, this is goal number one. And then you're collecting emails with paid subscribers and you know, with, with the, with our mailchimp integration it's super easy because you're just tagging, you're just adding a tag to the free level that's getting sent to the mailchimp list. And then anybody who comes in for free gets, gets that tag added. And then if somebody pays down the road they, the paid tag, whatever you call it, gets added to that subscriber that's in mailchimp. So you can very easily segment your mailchimp list. And I think publishers that are using different email service providers are also segmenting in different ways. But let's focus on free versus paid as kind of a simple example. So you have a free list that's just building and building and building. And what we see is when you have that free registration going that really turbocharges that list build. So, you know, at the very least, do one campaign. You know, just create one campaign targeted to all your free level subscribers. Add a coupe, a discount code, and again, you know, broken record, make it time limited. So, you know, if it's, let's see, we're, we're in April, it's the 23rd, and you're going to do a promotion. Maybe you want to say, look, this is good through May 1st. That's a week, right? That's pretty short. Certainly puts the pressure on somebody who might want to pay to subscribe. You know, you could go out to the end of May, but now the pressure is not really on so much. Maybe two weeks is good, I'd say. I think you have to play around with a little bit. But the very least, you know, try one, see what happens and you'll get some, you know, I likely get some, some conversions and that's, you know, that's not, that's, that's not a lot of effort to, to set that up. And again, with the paid segment of your list, you know, send, send, you know, try to hit that 20% gift subscriptions goal if you can, or refer a friend, you know, send out an email targeting your paid subscribers. Your messaging then of course is different because you're speaking to your big super fans and see if they can help you share, spread the word, share your content and maybe you'll get some others that come in and at least register for free, you know, if they bring them to the site. And that's, that's the start of the whole, whole process. Okay, let's see. I'm gonna make a mention about social promotions, sort of about targeting. And you know, what do you do in Facebook or LinkedIn? Facebook's a pretty popular one, certainly for B2C. And is it worth paying for promotions, let's say, in Facebook and on LinkedIn. And the only way you're going to find out is to do it. You know, Facebook, of course, their strength is you can really target demographically and get the person that's really in your niche. And don't try to get them to pay for a subscription right off the bat, that's probably not going to work. So well, the thing that does work is to get the email address right. So to give them something for free, promote the free subscription level to, you know, to the social platforms. So yeah, you're going to pay some money, but you know, if you get some email addresses in return for that, they will convert. A percentage of those will convert to paid subscribers. So that's a little bit of social targeting. And last thing I have on the list here, I think is apps. If you are using our app platform, our unipress app platform, you have push notifications and I subscribe to, at least for a while, I subscribe to all our, our app clients and then I have to turn them off. Otherwise I get swarmed with push notifications. But you know, remember you have push notifications and you can, you can send out manual pushes if you want, if you do want to promote something. And you can also automate pushes based on category and you can also automate based on opt. Opt. Ins. So don't forget about your apps because those who, who have subscribed and they've downloaded the app and they're getting your content in the app, those are, those are, you know, super, super, super fans.

Okay.

All right, so that's, I think that wraps up targeting. Anything I missed here, I'm trying to keep it, I'm trying to, I'm trying to focus on things that are pretty low hanging fruit to do. They take a little, a little time to, you know, very little time to set up, maybe a little copywriting time. But you know, all this stuff's built into our platform and if you're using a different platform, you could probably use, you know, most of these recommendations as well.

Thank you for listening to part two of Easy Ways to Level up youp Website to Build Paid Subscriptions. Be sure and tune in next time for part three with even more tips and tricks. Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. You can find us@paywallpodcast.com Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player of choice and we'll see you next episode.