Hardwick Gazette - 3 changes to grow digital subscriptions

Hi, I'm Pete. And today we're going to talk about three simple changes that the Hardwick Gazette can make to their website in order to grow their visitor traffic, grow their email list, and convert more paid subscriptions. The Harvard Gazette is neighbor. They're located in Vermont. They've been publishing since 1889 and have been running digital subscriptions for a little while now. And Sabrina. Hello, Sabrina. Thanks for asking for the review for this site. I'm going to help you do all those three things. Now, first of all, when we take a look at this local news site, what I notice is that the paywall is set up as a hard paywall. So if I click into any article, I am stopped. I can't read the article. What I would recommend as a number one is to change the meter so that you're leaking at least one free article per month. And what that will do is it will let Google index or rank every single article that's on the site to generate a lot more traffic. So anyone who's searching in Google who wants to go read an article will be able to read one article. And as an added bonus, they'll be able to share any article in social media. So Facebook, Twitter, wherever, and that will generate more traffic to the site. So simply changing the meter from 0 to 1 will allow Google to index everything. And it will encourage those that can read a full article to take that article, go to Facebook, share it. And it's only when the individual browser combs through the website where the meter counts and then stops and says, hey, just like this. To read this article, you must subscribe. Okay, that's the first thing. So what's the second thing? The second thing is improving the checkout experience. This is very easy thing to do, but also very important. So if I click on subscribe here, it takes me to three choices. First thing I would do is I would offer one subscription option. That subscription option, annual recurring, is what that should be. The least amount of options that you have, the higher chance someone will have of paying. What you don't want to do is make people do math. So if I look at this and I say, okay, I can get one year for 45, I can get six months for 25, I can do an annual renewing. Let's see, that one's also 45. Now I have to make a decision and it's throwing me off. The best success comes from the simplest options. And an annual recurring subscription is the one that works today. Now, on another note, if I go into annual renewing I notice that PayPal is selected. You will need to set up Stripe for credit card recurring credit card transactions. Unfortunately, if I don't have a PayPal account and I try to sign up for your recurring subscription, I won't be able to succeed because PayPal does not support recurring recurring credit card transactions unless you're a PayPal member and have an account already. But most subscribers today do not have a PayPal account, or at least a large chunk of them don't. So make sure you set up Stripe with leaky paywall. You can add the credit card option right here at the same time and you'll give readers a choice PayPal or credit card on checkout. Very simple thing to do and it will boost the number of folks that actually pay for a subscription. Now the third thing is a little more strategic and that is setting up a free registration level as a way of offering a bit of a trial to the casual readers that are more interested in your publication. They just haven't decided to pay and you need to push them, give them a nudge, build that relationship a little bit over time in order to get them to finally pay down the road. And a free registration. What is that? I'm going to show you here. We're going to head over to Small Boats Monthly and take a quick look here. Small Boats has been using leaky paywall for years now. They installed a free registration last year and they're email list has been growing about 20% month over month and their paid subscriptions have also bumped about 20% month over month. This very simple addition works really well. So when I hop in and click on an article, let's say they have the meter set to one free article per month by the way as well. This is what I get as a casual reader when I come into your site and I run out of articles, or in your case, the one free article that you're going to set up. I get this message, read this article now for free. And this is very tactical and I can sign up here to finish reading the article. So what Small Boats is saying, hey, if you register, we'll give you more, right? And you can decide, is it one more free article? Is it 2 free articles per month, is it 3 free articles per month? A little bit. Depends on how many articles you publish every week there. But for local news sites, regional news sites, offering a few extra free articles per month is very appropriate. And even the New York Times offers one free article. Then you have to register in order to get a few more and in your language you can say a few more and then that'll let you adjust things on the back end. So if I click sign up here, instead of going straight to the payment, I'm going now to the free registration. And it's just a simple form. I fill out a little bit of information, I hit subscribe. And then let's say you're using mailchimp for your email newsletter. That email gets carried into mailchimp, it's tagged free, you can target them later. This will grow your email list. And then the way you can set up leaky paywall is as soon as I hit this, you can carry the reader back to the article they were reading, they'll be logged in, it'll unlock the article. It's a nice smooth experience for you. And that reader that is now a free registered reader is on your newsletter. The idea being that now you're sending your email newsletter to everyone on your list. The articles there have links. That free registered reader is clicking the link, the link is taking the person back to the your articles. They're using up their free allotment, let's say two or three articles a month. And then they get the what we call the upgrade message or nag. And now they have to pay, right? So that's where you say, okay, it's time to subscribe. This simple combination of capturing the casual reader, getting them to register, building your email list, putting them on your newsletter, sending them back to the website over time so they see the upgrade message over and over again over the weeks or months or however long, at some point the chances of them actually paying go up enough where a percentage of those I call them super casual readers will pay you and join. So if you offer a credit card as an option, that's going to boost your conversion rate and that now will take care of getting more traffic to the site, building your email list and getting more paid subscribers. One last thing, take a look at the Small Boats subscribe page. They have one subscription option. Here it is, it's a one year recurring. There's a subscribe button that's hey, subscribe and then give a gift is the only other option. So the only decision that I have to make when I come here is do I subscribe for me or do I subscribe for someone else? That's a very easy decision. So when I hit subscribe, there's no other option. I just go ahead and fill this out. And by the way, if someone is already registered for free, their information is already pre filled. So all they have to do is go next and then check out with a credit card. I hope that helped. And let me know if you need any help getting this set up on your website.