Episode 16 | 7 ways to successfully sell corporate, group, and bulk subscriptions

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Okay, welcome to episode 716 of the Paywall podcast. Can't believe we've gotten such far. Hopefully you've been finding these helpful to build your subscription revenues. Before we get started, though, I thought it would be appropriate to introduce the intro music composer and player in this podcast. That nice, funky guitar music that you hear early on. That is our very own Jeremy Green. So next time you listen to it, you'll have a connection. Thanks, Jeremy.

Yeah.

So today we're going to talk about seven ways to successfully sell corporate, group and bulk subscriptions. So what does that mean? Well, if you're a publisher and you're selling individual access, you might have thought at some time that you want to sell a bigger ticket item to a bigger customer, such as a school or a library or a large business, a sports sporting group. There are lots of grubs, groups and bulk subscription options available for you now. Now what we're going to do is talk about three things in this podcast. We're going to talk a little bit about sales, a little bit about pricing. We're going to talk about the types of approaches, how you can actually provide bulk access, let's call it. And then we're going to go through some publisher examples that publishers that we've worked with that are offering successfully offering these bulk subscription options. So first, let's talk a little bit about sales. The first thing you should do if you're not offering corporate subscriptions or bulk subscriptions, just start offering it. Don't install anything, don't set up anything, don't even look at it. Just think about who might be a good customer for you. If you're a local news publisher, you know, maybe local schools want access, maybe libraries want access, maybe local government, you know, wants access. If you're a fishing publication, maybe you have advertisers that want to give access to their readers in a special way. Maybe there's, there's other clubs or fans of, you know, fishing that may want to provide access to their members. So think about who would be a good customer. Pick one, the most likely one to go after and just go talk to them. One of the Things that I get asked a lot is how do you price a corporate subscription? And you know, we really don't know an answer to that because it depends on the audience. But as far as philosophy goes, you know, pick a number that you think you could sell comfortably without too much friction that someone would, would be hard pressed to say no to and start right? And what you, what you need is, you need one or two or three examples of, you know, bigger corporate subscribers that then you can learn from, you have experience with. You know, how successful are they? How many is there is their base reading your content? What are the benefits to them? And then as you go on, over time, you can increase, you'll get a feel for pricing and you'll keep increasing your pricing as you attract new corporate customers until they start to complain about too high a price and then, you know, you're at the right point. Okay, so the bottom line for sales is just start now because you can, you know, with leaky paywall, and we can offer lots of different ways for that, that access to happen. Okay. All right, so let's talk about the, the types of approaches and we have seven outlined here and we're going to discuss what they are. The first one is what we call IP based access. And that IP address is basically the Internet address of a physical location. Like a library is a good example. So if you're a news publisher and you want to give access to a library, essentially you ask the library's IT guy, hey, what's the IP address, which is like the WI FI address for that library. The IT guy will give you a number or a range of numbers, and you just drop those numbers into the back of leaky paywall. And magically, anybody sitting at that physical location at the library will have access to your content without having to log in. That's, it's very simple. It's a very popular way for our publishers to sell bulk access. Anything else I missed on that? As far as what it is?

No, it's pretty straightforward.

Okay.

I might also mention that it, you know, it can be a range of IPs, so it doesn't just have to be one IP. So if you've got an entire network in a school system or a government building, you can add all of those into the system.

Cool. Yeah. One of the ideas that we also talked about a while ago was to provide credit for the person who's paying, sponsoring access to your content via ip. And we don't have this, but it's possible. So if you're listening to this podcast and you think, hey, this is a great idea, get in touch. But that's providing some sort of a little banner or little header bar that says, hey, this access is sponsored by X group or X business or school or whatever. And so that when somebody's sitting at that, let's say business or organization, they see that little bar and they know that they're a sponsor. So to give credit and some exposure to that sponsor. So just a thought. Okay, so that was ip. The next one is email based. We call this one corporate subscriptions, which is a pretty typical way for larger businesses to give access to their employees. Simple concept. If you have access to your company email address, abccompany.com, you can have access to a corporate subscription. So you'd approach a business and say, hey, we, you know, you can, you can give access to our content to all your employees. All they have to do is, you know, go to our site and click a link and then just Register with the abccompany.com email address and boom, they get access. So that's, that's email based access. This is another very popular way for our publishers to offer access to, for bulk subscribers, corporate subscribers specifically. One nice benefit of this too is every email address that gets registered on the site this way actually ends up in your leaky paywall subscriber list. So you're building your email list as well. Okay. Anything to add on email based access? Is that making sense? Okay, number three. I told you there were seven. Number three, groups. So groups is an add on we made a little while ago. And it lets you offer access to a small group with a limited number of seats. And they can have any email they like. Someone will purchase a group subscription, let's say it's five seats or 10 seats, and they'll purchase that through leaky paywall and they'll become an administrator of that group. And then they'll have a little dashboard that will let them drop in any email address they want to offer access to that group. So it works great for clubs or. Jeremy, you had originally created that for, for a soccer publication, right? The group.

Yeah. For coaches. Yep. Yeah, Groups of coaches.

So, yeah. Do you have any more specifics on, on how they're. How that. I think it's soccer coach weekly. On how they use that.

Yeah. So the way that their coaches work is a lot of times one coach will be kind of the head coach and then they'll have coaches underneath them. And so that way they can buy one subscription and then they can invite any of their assistant coaches in to be able to get access to the coaching content on the site.

Gotcha. Cool. I took a sneak peek and I can say that it seems to be pretty effective. There's a fair amount of group subscriptions going on for those coaches. All right.

Yep.

So number four. So the fourth way to give bulk access is, Tyler, something you stumbled on, and that is a bulk import for a large account. So if there's a large. Let's say there's a large business that might have, you know, thousands of employees that you want to give access to right away without having to go through a registration process, you can do that by creating a special subscription level for that large corporate customer and then importing their email list against that subscription level. Does that sound right, Tyler?

Yeah. So essentially, you bulk import all of those emails into a specific level that you name for that group or company or whatever. And, you know, this isn't an automatic setup, but as you know, the customer pays month to month. If they don't pay, then you could essentially bulk import again and change all of the expiration dates on a manual basis. This is great if you've got, like thousands, hundreds of emails that need to be added that, you know, the group admin wouldn't want to do on a, you know, email per email basis like that, one by one, some.

Right, right. I think that was Elevator World. That's. That's handling it. Yeah, about right. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah, yeah.

And they have some large, Large corporate corporates in. In the elevator industry that. To get access and of course, paying them for that access.

Right. And the reason you want to have a separate level for this is when you do the bulk import, you can attach the level ID for these customers. And so.

Right.

It just makes it easier to keep track of.

Right. And like you said earlier, if the contract cancels, everyone's attached to that special subscription level. So you can just. You can. You can import again and wipe out their expiration dates.

Yeah, that's cool.

All right, so that was number four. Number five is something I ran into recently, which I thought was really clever, and it's family access. So what is family access? Family access is essentially when you tell your independent subscribers or individual subscribers that they can share their login with their family, which everyone does anyway.

Right.

And so this was. I think this was Owensboro Times, I believe, is where I saw this. And so, yeah, I can subscribe as an individual subscriber and I Pay, you know, 4.99amonth, or I can subscribe as a, with a family account and get five seats right now. How do you control that? Well, so the easiest way is to not bother, just sell the five seats plan and people won't, you know, a percentage of people. And I've looked at the numbers, it's not a huge percentage but you know, it's several percentage points, you know, will actually subscribe to a family plan and that's an, that's an instant bump in your, in your revenue and you, you really don't have to do anything. Just, just let them in. They can share their, the login with their family members and it's good to go. You can actually restrict access with a concurrent logins type of plugin. But that creates administrative overhead and we really don't recommend it. The twist for Owensboro is they run apps, our app integrated app platform. And with apps you have a very different, you have, you have more control and you actually set how many logins that an individual can have on different devices in the unit. Press apps options. So it's very easy for them to just say, okay, if you have an account, you get five devices right in the back end of Unipress and it's all done. And that's what they did. And it works great because when you have an app and you have a subscription, that subscription gets tied to a device. That's just the way it works with leaky paywall and apps. So family access, there's a new one for you. Okay, number six. So this also falls into bulk subscriptions and it's free student access. This is something that I Politics and other publishers have done. And essentially what you do is you create a free student access subscription level and it turns into a list building promotion. So you're, you're, you're. What the goal here is you're building your email lists with students. Students typically are not going to pay you for subscriptions. I think that's a very hard uphill battle. At least what I remember being in school at no money and so why not just offer them free access, have them register on the site, set up a free registration level. And then I think what Ipolitics does, it's been a few years since we helped them set this up, but they're still running it, which means it's working for them. And I see the subscriptions pouring in from Edus and what they do is they monitor. Does this email have an edu on the end? And the subscription is for one year every year they do a review and students can re. Review, re up their subscription. And, you know, a student might share your articles on social media and send them via email, and you might end up with new paid subscribers from that new crowd of fans that you're really grooming. And you're also grooming, you know, future paid subscribers if they get hooked on your publication. Jeremy, I don't know if there's anything that I missed there, but I remember we went through a lot of conversation about setting that up with Ipolitics.

Yeah, no, I think you pretty much covered.

Okay, cool. And, Tyler, you want to talk about number seven? I think this was a great one. And that one's sponsoring free subscription accounts.

Yeah. So I met with a weekly newspaper here in West Virginia who is transitioning from their, you know, publishing a print newspaper and going all digital. And I believe it might be the first print newspaper in the state to actually do that, to go from a print product to fully digital. And, you know, one of the questions that came up in that meeting, you know, how do we, you know, can we still sell advertising online? And, you know, that's. That's difficult when your traffic isn't very high. You know, can you really sell banner ads when you have 10,000 page views per month? Right, right. And that's a difficult thing. So they're in a small community, and they have local businesses who advertise, and they're used to advertising their print product who I believe are still willing to advertise digitally despite the page views that they have. And so one thing that we came up with was allowing those local businesses to sponsor free accounts for readers in the community. So, for example, the local bank or, you know, whatever local business wants to sponsor 20 free accounts or 100 free accounts or whatever, and run a banner ad on your site. You could create a subscription level named after that sponsor, and users could simply just subscribe for free. Those emails are then, you know, collected in leaky paywall. Another way, you. You could use a coupon, and the coupon could be the name of that local bank or local business, and subscribers would just sign up. And again, those emails would be passed on to the leaky paywall and, you know, possibly to the local business as well.

Yeah, those are both great ideas. Absolutely great ideas. Yeah. Why not use a free. A free registration to get. Get the sponsor's name in front of that. Yeah.

And in their case, you know, this is helping them maintain the ability to continue publishing. It generates revenue for them a lot faster and allows them to slowly grow out those. Those paid members, those paid subscribers over time.

Yeah, that's.

And with the, with that kind of a free registration, you could also, you could also promote the sponsor in a welcome email. Right, right, of course. Yeah, yeah. So with each, each subscription level, you can have a unique welcome email and really target and promote, you know, that sponsor and email.

That's right.

And, and since it's. Right, of course. So since it's a custom subscription level, you could most definitely do that.

Yeah. One, one other example of exactly that. It's funny we kind of ran into this at the same time, but I was looking at rugby news in Australia and they have a. Something called a student pass, and it's free, and the copy reads free with a valid high school email address courtesy of UOW Crusaders Global rugby program right on the, right on the subscription card. You know.

Yeah.

So I think that, you know, I think it'd be. If I were pitching this to a sponsor, I would basically say, look, you know, you're, you're, you'll get, you'll be on the free registration card, whatever you call it, student pass or, you know, free. Free access sponsored by. And then, and then you're right on, on the front end. The free registrations are by far the most popular registrations on, on a publication website. They're, you know, they generate a lot of registrations and you're, you know, you're getting people that are really targeted. Right. Like these are people that are willing to spend time to cough up their email address and register on the website. Plus the sponsor would get the view in the welcome email and I don't know what else you could figure out, but that's a pretty powerful one, two punch for a sponsor. So that's how I would promote it.

Yeah, well, and also thinking that with our mailchimp integration, you could tag these free local business sponsored levels and segment them out in mailchimp and you know, you could target them directly after that first month is free or that first six months or whatever they're.

That's right. Yep. Excellent. Yes, of course you'll have the emails, all the emails are registered. And yes, you could give the sponsor access to sending promotion or promotions to that email list. Yeah, that's fantastic. You could even set up a drip campaign against that email list. The sponsor could really go after it.

Yeah.

All right, cool. All right, so that was the seven ways to sell group subscriptions and we had a few examples in there. Another note about before, we're going to cover a few more examples, but I want to talk about payment a little bit. A lot of our publishers will ask us, you know, how do you get paid for this kind of thing? I'm going to take a quick sip here of water and the answer is it really kind of depends. Right. So the larger the sponsor that's going to argue for just for selling it offline and taking a check or whatever. If the, or the larger the group. I should say if you're selling small like group access where you're selling five seats, 10 seats at a time, then you need to automate that and that's where you'll set up a leaky payable subscription level and you'll sign, you know, that'll be good for group access. And then the administrator will pay for that subscription right through leaky paywall. And then access is automated. You don't have to deal with it and just be something you sell on your, on your site. Okay, so let's jump into some more examples. One thing, if anybody's listening and they run a local news and you run a local news site, I'd love to see if you could sell IP access, if you remember what that means to coffee shops. So in other words, you have Pete's Coffee Shop right down the road or whatever and you want to let anybody who's sitting physically in Pete's Coffee Shop have access to your local news publication. That would be something that Pete's Coffee Shop would, would pay you as a sponsor, but you would. That would be a promotion for. It would be a benefit for sitting there and also get the. Your local publication out. Or maybe it's worth not even charging for. Just provide access to the coffee shop and then you get your publication in front of a lot more eyeballs and maybe sell other products. So. So I think there's some opportunities there. This would also be a nice thing to produce. That little header banner that I mentioned before, sponsored by Pete's Coffee Shop might show up on your news publication if someone's sitting at that IP address. So if that sounds interesting to you, get in touch. Any other ideas about selling IP address based exceptions, in other words, physical location.

I just want to add challenge accepted on that. So I love that idea.

Okay, cool. All right. Any other publishers we want to note that are selling IP access to libraries or schools or local government? Larger businesses, I think. Jeremy, you mentioned track and field sells via ip, is that right?

Yep.

Are they selling to schools?

Yeah, like schools and their library and.

Yep. Right. Cool.

Yeah.

So track and field. Track attracting. It's hard to say. Fast. The track and field enthusiast. And these are parents of students in high school and college and beyond who compete in track and field. And so, yeah, these students go to schools and the schools are good sponsors of that. Okay, so let's see what else we got here. Stone Soup. I'm going to call out a little bit to Stone Soup. They Stone Soup magazine is a magazine that publishes writings by kids. I think they're, you know, from when they start to write, I don't know what age that is. 4, 3, 4, 5. However fast they start writing up through 12 or 13 or something like that. And so they do, they publish a print version, they have digital access and they sell their. Their primary customer actually is schools. They do sell an individual subscription, but if you go to their website, you'll see that it kind of breaks into two paths. There's for individuals and then for teachers and then there's school subscriptions. And they use a combination of IP access so the school can. Anybody who's sitting physically at the school can just get access to the publication as well as the corporate subscriptions add on so that anybody who has a school email address, a valid school email address, can register, login and gain access. And that works for them depending on the needs of the customer. And that's, you know, so you know, your job is to sell the benefits of access and then the mechanics can be handled several different ways for the same customer. So you don't have to restrict yourself to one. Just focus on the benefits to the bulk subscriber customer and we can help you with the mechanics. And as always, get in touch with us at infoine101.com talk to you next time.

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