Escaping the Discount Trap: Why Your Promo is Killing Your Email List

All right. Greetings, Tyler. Happy Monday, Snowy morning. How's it going?

Good, good, good.

All right. You ready to talk Valentine's Day promotion?

Oh, yeah. Let's see.

Okay, so we had a publisher run a Valentine's Day campaign since it was not too long ago it was Valentine's Day. We got some real numbers on it, on what worked and what didn't work. And what we're gonna do today is share with you what it was, how it did, and how to do it better. And I. I'm thinking at this point, a lot better and a lot easier without so much pain, which I'll show you in a second.

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So I'm going to do here is just going to share the old screen here. I'm going to show you what this campaign looks like. This is something we are going to keep on the private. So we won't disclose who this publisher is, but we're going to show you what actually happened. Okay. And then how to. How to actually run a promo with all the tools that. That you have. Okay, so this discount promo, what. What was it? It was 50% off their annual plan, so they focused on 50% off on their annual plan. Their annual plan was 60 bucks. They were sending out a $30 coupon for. To get the plan for 30 bucks. What happened? They got 80 new paid subscribers. If you do the math, it's about $2,400 in revenue. And that doesn't sound too terrible, right?

Yeah, it's not bad.

Sounds okay.

Yeah. How. How. How big is their. Their list?

About $40,000.

Oh, yeah.

So when we start looking at the numbers, things get. Start skewing south a bit. They also got 379 unsubscribes off of that list.

Ouch.

So That's. Yeah, that's about one. Almost 1% of their list unsubscribed. And I'll show you what happened here. Let me see if I can bring up the right chart. Okay, so this is a chart of their free registrations and paid subscriptions. The. The red line is free registrations. You can see every time the newsletter goes out what happens. It peaks like crazy. And then the blue line is paid subscriptions. Now, what they did was, is they sent out this campaign over a 16 day period and they sent out standalone, 10 standalone promotional emails. So. So it wasn't part of their existing newsletter. This is 10 in your face emails saying, hey, which I just showed you earlier. You know, here's our promo. That's 400,000 emails that went out for 80 subscribers, if you think about it. Right. And I made a little box around this time period. And if you have an eagle eye, you'll see that, you know, their regular subscriptions were kind of ticking along. And did they actually take a bump? Well, they, they did, but it took, it was like day, day 11 or something like that where the, they were kind of getting to the end of their promo where, where the subscribers came in. So we got 80 paid subscribers, 2,400 bucks, 1%, almost 1% unsubscribe. The uptake rate is like 0.2%, almost five unsubscribes for every conversion. So a little bit of a loss on their, on their list. Okay. All right, so the, one of the big problems I see here is that 16 days is way too long. Absolutely. Way too long. So if you're going to do a promo and the data shows it here is, I don't know, what do you think, three day, you know, campaign or something like that? You know, we humans love deadlines. Like, we respond to deadlines. If, if you say, oh, the discount's good for, you know, two weeks, I was like, okay, two weeks. All right, you know, wake me up in a week or two, tell me when the deadline's coming.

Right.

Oh, man. All right, so, okay, so how do we, how do we, how do we, you know, rate this campaign? How, how would you rate this as effective from a scale of 1 to 10? You think this was, do you think it was worth it?

Not, not really. At first I thought so based on the high level numbers, but then learning that their list is 40,000 deep, you know, it doesn't seem like it was worth it. Maybe as you suggested, if they compress the timeline and give a deadline, then maybe it would, it would be different. It's just way too many emails for too long and yeah, it's kind of, it's almost like it's having the opposite effect for a good number of your free subscribers who would at some point maybe convert anyway. So.

Yep, yep. Yeah, so maybe a two.

I was going to say two. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. All right, so let's talk about how to, how to do this correctly because I know we, I mean, we Talk to a lot of publishers that they're always like, I need to do this promotion. Whether it's, you know, Christmas or Valentine's or whatever. There's, there's a lot of urgency to generate revenue. And certain, you know, okay, we have a holiday period, let's do it. I get like, I get the motivation, and I also get the reaction too, where it's like, you get like, what you just said, you get 80 new paid subscribers and you think, oh, man, that's great. Like, all right, cash in the bank, let's go. But there's a better way to, I think, drive that number, to double that number. Easy. And to not tick off your readers. Cause if you're sending, you know, 10 campaigns that it's like, you know, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, that, you know, you know, how we are today with, with promos. It's. It's rough.

Yeah. And I, I'll just add one more thing. My, my biggest concern with those, with the group that signed up for this promo is how long do they hang around? Like, what's, what's the attrition over time in terms of turn? Because when you're offering a discount that deep at 50%, right. You're starting to devalue what you're, what you're offering. And the people who signed up, I mean, it's good that it's a yearly plan. At least they're on the hook for a year. But whether or not they hang on longer than that, who knows?

Right? Yeah. And you could also argue that the 1% of unsubscribes, they were probably pretty weak. Like, they probably were just not that interested. But still, one percent's man, that's a little bit of a chunk for a moment in time right there. Okay, so back to what we would actually do. All right, so one of the things I'd say the main thing other than the three day compression of the campaign, is to embed the promo into existing newsletters. There's no reason to send out standalone campaigns 10 times. Maybe you send out a standalone campaign, like, right. Like 24 hours before the deadline, like one time, right. Where it's urgent. Like, you got 24 hours to react and maybe, you know, maybe that'll sort of wake up some people. But, you know, just pulled this off a newsletter that's, you know, deal of the week. This is obviously a Valentine's themed promo. And if you're, if you're listening to this, it's essentially you have your regular newsletter and you just take a section of it. And you, you put in your Valentine's promo in that newsletter. And if you do that for three days and you're sending out your newsletter every day or twice a day or whatever your cadence is, you're going to get a lot of exposure for that promotion. I mean, if this publisher did this for 10, you know, for the 16 days, they probably would have. I didn't do the math on how many eyeballs would have seen this, but this would have been 16 days. I think they're sending once or twice a day. You know, you're talking about maybe 25, you know, views instead of 10. But you're not ticking anybody off because it's just part of your content. It's just part of your regular newsletter. Right? So just bake it in. Okay? Another thing that I think a lot of at least our publishers forget is useful. Something we call the conditional display notice, right? So what you want to do here is you really want to target your free registered readers like that. Those are the ones that are, you know, they've, they've, they've engaged, they've committed because they've dropped in their email, chosen a password and they're, and they're a little higher engaged. So that's your target audience. Conditional display is something that shows up like a little header bar or footer bar that has some text in it that you can promote something and it's very elegant, very subtle. Just shows up. I don't have a one to show right now, but the key is you can target by subscription level. So you can show this bar only to those who are logged in as free and it can persist. So they could have had this bar persist for 16 days on their website if they wanted to. I wouldn't recommend it, but that would have been probably another jillion eyeballs that would have seen the Valentine's Day promotion without ticking people off. If you've made it this far. We got a little, little preview, little secret preview for a new product that we're coming out with. And it has to do with Insights and going to show you what this looks like. So this, if you're listening to this, this is a snapshot of our new Insights dashboard. It's just the home and what I've done is I filtered the last seven days just paid subscribers. And we look at one of the data points that we're tracking is how many with this, just to give you a little high level, this tracks logged in subscribers. So if someone's logged in as a free registered reader or someone's logged in as a paid subscriber. This tracks every single article they look at, everything they do. So we're pulling all this data into our new Insights Dashboard. If you want this set up, just get in touch. We'll set it up. It's free, up to 100,000 events per month, which is for our paid subscribers, which requires quite a lot of traffic to. To blow through that. In any case, if you look down here, there's a piece of data which is interesting. 620 free readers hitting the paywall. So what this data point is, and this is under Action Items, is these 620 free registered readers, they're logged in. They've seen the upgrade message on the paywall at least three times in the last seven days. So the idea here is that we're going to flag who's logged in as free and who's active and who might respond to a paid subscription. So going forward, I would suggest that publishers, that you, as a publisher, look at what your free registered readers are doing and then. And target the crew that's seeing the upgrade message more than a certain number of times per week. And you could do this every week if there's, you know, obviously if you have like a Valentine's promotion, this is perfect. Just, just targeting the readers that are more engaged. With the right offer, you might beat 80 just with one campaign, if you're hitting the right people at the right time. So, okay, I think that kind of covers it. I'd say any, you know, just to kind of rehash it when you're going to do a promotion, bake it into the newsletter, make the timeframe really, really short. Tyler, I think what you said is, you know, that sort of devaluing the promotion. I mean, doing an annual plan, I think was smart. 50% off is a lot, and it does devalue a little bit. Um, we always recommend to discount time versus money. So in other words, for like someone who's going to sign up monthly, give them, you know, have them pay a full month's price, give them three months of access. You're giving your discounting time, but the. So the monthly plan price is still there with the annual plan. I guess you could probably do something. You could do something similar maybe with free access for a bit, and then the annual plan kicks in at. At full price. You know, a free trial or something like that might be.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could, you could charge the full price and then just give extra time on the end of it. Right. So you see that quite often as you you buy a year and and then you get maybe three extra months or something so versus a 50% discount

so discount time not money. And then use use the conditional display to target the free registered readers with the promotion and then now look at your insights and see who's hitting the upgrade message that's logged in as a free registered reader. And I think you'll beat that 80 number by a mile for sure.

Yeah, target who you're after. Right. So you'll have a much better response rate with probably a fraction of of the number of emails as part of that campaign.

Yeah. This should be the how not to piss off your readers with a promo episode. Yep. Okay. Thanks Tyler. Awesome. Good stuff. Catch you next time.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription Strategy, go to LeakyPaywall.com see you next time.