Growing Paid Subscriptions with Facebook Ads - A Small Boats Magazine Case Study

Welcome to the Paywall podcast, episode number 52. I'm here again with Tyler and we are going to talk running Facebook ads, should you do it. Welcome, Tyler.

Thank you, thank you.

Glad to have you back. Literally back in the country. I had a conversation with one of our agency partners, 50 Fish. They're based in Maine. They work with a lot of publishers and leaky paywall. And they, I discovered had about a year ago had started a Facebook ad campaign for Small boats magazine and they had some success with it. So I thought that this episode would be great to talk about Facebook, our everybody's favorite topic these days, and whether it makes sense to spend some money with Facebook in order to drive traffic, ultimately paid subscriptions to your publication. So let's dive in. We're going to cover the offer, the framework, we're going to cover the reader flow. That's important in this approach, really, in any advertising approach. But we'll show you exactly what small boats did and how the reader gets impacted. And then we're going to share costs and we're going to share results on this, on this test. And it's pretty, pretty fascinating actually. Okay, so first of all, what are Facebook ads and are they good? Other than using Facebook for a marketplace and groups, Facebook ads is really a pretty decent place to experiment with as small boats found. What you can do with Facebook is you can target very specifically. And that's really Facebook's strength is you can. What they did is they went looking for higher income people that are interested in building wooden boats or building boats. And I don't know how granular they actually got, but these are the kinds of demographics you can sort by. So if you're a news publisher, you can sort geographically, you can go local or regional, you can go by income level. If you're a magazine, you can absolutely sort based on your area of interest because everybody in Facebook is just giving them all the data. I know. Tyler, you're a big Facebook fan. Yeah.

I'm sitting here thinking as you're going through that, it's like we're, we're giving money back to Facebook. And in many ways Facebook and, and Google too have. Are large parts or large reasons why a lot of these publishers are struggling or have gone out of business.

Yeah, for sure. And like posting content into Facebook is not working. They're not showing up in feeds. Facebook is waffled severely on that. Ultimately it's not your platform to control, so you, you should only use it sparingly, not really expecting much. But when you're Paying for advertising. Then you are appearing in your target consumer. You know, you're that target subscriber. You can just message them directly. Okay, so that's. That's probably one of the few things about Facebook that is good. Now, I'll say that there's actually two goals here with this particular Facebook campaign. Certainly, the primary goal of signing up paid subscribers, but also the secondary goal of signing up email addresses. Literally, email capture, which really falls into sort of the nurturing flow from Facebook to your site and then capturing the email or converting the paid subscriber. Okay, so let's jump into the offer. Up on my screen here, I have the. The actual landing page that was presented from the Facebook ad that was run about a year ago. And the data's starting to come in now, which is why we needed a year for this to happen, as you can see. So the Facebook ad. I don't have a copy of the ad itself, but essentially the Facebook ad is a promotion to. To get essentially, unlimited access for a dollar a month. That. That's the core of the promotion. And, Tyler, you and I have Talked about this $1 a month nonsense.

Yes.

It cheapens the value of your publication.

Yeah.

But what I will say is it did work. Their churn rate was. Or their renewal rate was pretty good, I would say. How would you. Let me put you on the spot a little bit, Tyler, if you were to rewrite this promotion a little bit, how would you approach it?

It's a good question. So I see that they're normal pricing. So for everyone that's listening, they're offering their promotion at $1 a month for 12 months, billed at $12 for the first year of access, and then it jumps up to 30 bucks, I think. Is that what I'm saying? For the entire year. Honestly, I think taking out the $1 a month would be enough. I just. When I see $1 a month, I just. This isn't. It just seems. It just devalues everything that they have to offer.

Right.

Right out of the gate. And I'm glad that. That they've had a good success rate on getting people to renew, which that's fantastic, because you often run into that problem when you have promos like this. People tend to just buy it once, and then they never, ever renew because they don't see the value in it. Take out the $1 a month part of the promotion and just say $12 for the first year, which is still way too cheap.

Right.

And do that. And I think they would probably have an even Higher rate of renewals.

I think you're right on. I like that a lot. Yeah, I don't think there's any need for a dollar a month. They're going to charge you a $12 for the year anyway. But what I do like about it is that it is a year. So you get a chance to experience this publication for a year. It's not like a three month promo or whatnot. It's you get the whole year. So you get that newsletter coming at you every single week for the year, driving you back to the content. It's a great way to run a promo. So, yeah, I think we're in agreement there. Promoted as 12 bucks for the first year and then yes, it renews at the 30 bucks for the year. All right, so let's. I'm going to follow this offer and show the structure of it. So essentially up top is the pitch, right? That's. Here's the money. Get un. Get unlimited access to small boats nation. $1 per month with 250 per month crossed out, billed as 29.95 or $12 for the first year. And then there's a subscribe button. So you just get right to the offer and you can click subscribe and then and go now. If you're ju. If you're like the curious reader, this sounds pretty good, but I'm not sure. Then the next. If I scroll down a little bit, I get. See what's inside. And this is essentially copy that promotes what small boats is. Because a lot of people who come to your site don't know who you are and you might have been around for a long time, but especially when you're reaching out until Facebook type of a marketplace, you are reaching outside your own circle of readers, which is one of the advantages of advertising. Paragraphs and bullet points. Looks good. And then sample our premium content. So they have four articles here, Premium articles read free sample which you can go into. And then below that at the bottom essentially is we're back to the offer. Only $1 per month for the first year. Another single subscribe button. So it's a really clean offer. You got the bookends top and bottom of the. Of the subs with the subscribe buttons. And then you have the what it is in the middle and you have a link to some content. So let's take. Let's keep the nurturing this sort of this reader flow going, right? Let's say I go in and I want to hit. I want to read this free row sample. Okay, so now I'm. I'm just the Facebook curious reader and I'm going down and I get to read this row article. Okay, this is great. So now let's say I get to the bottom of this and I want to go to the next article. Let's go to across the ocean here. More than this issue. Now I get to be teased with the, with this offer. And I get. What do I get, Tyler?

Get the free registration sign up.

Bingo. Okay, so we get the free registration. So now I might not still be ready to pay that $12. Now I might. And I might go back and pay for it after I register for free. So what this is saying is I can read this next article for free. We've talked a lot about free registration. Please look up the other podcasts and articles on it. But this is an email capture. So if I sign up here, I'm going to be asked for my email and then you, the publisher will have the email address. So you get the double benefit of, yes, this is a great offer and it's going to convert some paid subscribers. But if someone's really not ready, they can register here, get the next article, and get the newsletter, which is really the critical part of the nurturing process. So you get both email, paid subscriptions. Okay. I thought it was important to go through this flow if you're thinking about running any kind of promotion. Could be. Could be Black Friday like we talked about. It could be Valentine's, could be whatever. This framework is worth copying. Just if you're listening to this, you can grab the. Come to LeakyPaywell.com and check out this article. The video will be on there. You'll see. You can see all what we're looking at. Yep. Okay, so now what we all came here for, what did this cost and what were the results? All right, so what they did is they ran this campaign for about three months. It costs about a thousand dollars a month to send traffic. And for those $3,000 that small boats spent, they got about a hundred subscribers paid subscribers. For the 12 a year promotion, they essentially paid right up front. The first three months, they paid for the cost of the ads. The ads that they ran on Facebook were essentially free. They got that money right back. And what we know now, a year later, and we're not done yet with conversions, but a couple of months into the conversion period, they have 47% of these trial readers have converted and paid the $30, the full amount per year to become paid subscribers. They were pretty happy with that. That's a Pretty decent conversion rate off a trial and it's not done yet. So there's still about another month to go. Right. So you just get right to the offer and you can click subscribe and then. And go now. If you're, if you're sort of like the curious reader, this sounds pretty good, but I'm not sure. Then the next. If I scroll down a little bit, I get. See what's inside. And this is essentially copy that promotes what small boats is. Because a lot of people who come to your site don't know who you are and you might have been around for a long time, but especially when you're reaching out into like a Facebook type of a marketplace, you are reaching outside your own circle of readers, which is one of the advantages of, of advertising. So paragraphs and bullet points looks good. And then sample our premium content. So they have, they have four articles here. Premium articles Read free sample Read free sample Read free sample, which you can go into and then below that and at the bottom essentially is, we're back to the offer. Only $1 per month for the first year. Another single subscribe button. So it's a really clean offer. You got the bookends, top and bottom of the, the subs with the subscribe buttons. And then you have the what it is in the middle and you have a link to some content. So let's take, let's. Let's keep the nurturing this, this sort of this reader flow going, right? Let's say I go in and I want to hit. I want to read this free row sample. Okay? So now I'm, I'm just the Facebook curious reader and I'm going down and I get to read this row article. Okay, this, this is great. So now let's say I get to the bottom of this and I want to go to the next article, right? So let's go to cross the ocean here. More than this issue. Now I get to be teased with the, with this offer and I get. What do I get?

Tyler get the free registration sign up.

Bingo. Okay, so we get the free registration. So now I might not still be ready to pay that $12. Now I might. And I might go back and pay for it after I register for free, right? So what this is saying is I can read this next article for free. We've talked a lot about free registration. Please, please look up the other podcasts and articles on it. But this is an email capture. So if I sign up here, I'm going to be asked for my email. And then you the publisher will have the email address. So you get the double benefit of, yes, this is a great offer. And, and it's. And it's going to convert some paid subscribers. But if, if someone's really not ready, they can register here, get the next article, and get the newsletter, which is really the critical part of the nurturing process. So you get both email, paid subscriptions. Okay. I thought it was important to kind of go through this flow if you're thinking about running any kind of promotion. Could be, could be a Black Friday like we talked about. It could be Valentine's, could be whatever. This framework is worth copying. Just, just if you're listening to this, you can grab the. Come to LeakyPaywell.com and check out this article. The video will be on there.

You'll see.

You can see all what we're looking at. Yep. Okay, so now what we all came here for. What did this cost and what were the results? All right, so what they did is they ran this campaign for about three months. It costs about a thousand dollars a month to send traffic. And for those $3,000 that small boats spent, they got about a hundred subscribers. Paid subscribers for the $12 a year promotion, they essentially paid right up front. The first three months, they paid for the cost of the ads. The ads that they ran on Facebook were essentially free. They got that money right back. And what we know now, a year later, and we're not done yet with conversions, but a couple of months into the conversion period, they have 47% of these trial readers have converted and paid the $30, the full amount per year to become paid subscribers. They were pretty happy with that. That's a, That's a pretty decent conversion rate off of Hoffa Trial, and it's not done yet, so there's still about another. Another month to go. That is how you run a Facebook ad campaign. I don't know if there's any other data that we can share at this point, but what I can say is that it worked. They're happy, and they're going to experiment with the next one for sure. And if you're looking to go to Facebook and spend some money, then here's your framework and put together that irresistible offer, and you should be able to cover your Facebook fees and then convert down the road.

Yeah, that's impressive. A hundred people paid for an entire year, and then about half of those renewed at the full rate. That's impressive. And we're not even talking about the free signups. I mean, who knows what that number is? As well. So even if the majority of people don't sign up right away to your promo page, there's probably a high chance that your newsletter list will grow by default because they're, they're interested, they're going to meander around.

Absolutely. One thing I can share is their free registration list has grown quite a lot since its inception. It's been about a couple years. And they started at about 8,000 email addresses and they're currently over 15,000. So it's almost doubled in two years. Wow. The free registration throws off so many benefits. Not only do you get a bigger list because you're drawing a line in your content saying, hey, you gotta register to read the next piece, but you're getting better readers because you have people that are putting in their email address and choosing a password. Yeah, these are motivated readers. Yeah, better list. More of them.

Yeah, they're. They're way more qualified. And I always say that even if these signups never, ever pay you, there's. I have publishers I work with who sell advertising in their newsletter. There's more ways to generate revenue around this than just the subscription side. There's ways to benefit. There's other benefits to the free registration email collection.

Oh, yeah, we love us some free registrations. The sponsorship angle is huge. And it's amazing how many publishers that, that I talk to that haven't really looked at finding sponsors for their email lists. Of course we work with getting these email lists, these registrations going, and then now they're growing and it's, oh, it's time to start monetizing. So, yeah, your point is right on. All right, I think that's it for today. Good luck with Facebook. If you want to talk about it, give us a get in touch leakypaywall. Com. See you next time.