How to convert casual website visitors into paying subscribers

Hey, I'm Pete from Zine 101. We are the makers of Leaky Paywall. And today I want to talk to you about the number one question I get from our publisher customers. And that is how do you convert a casual website visitor into a paid subscriber? And the answer is really pretty simple. But you have to do it the right way. The challenge is that you have a lot of traffic, some of you have loads of traffic, and you're trying to figure out how to get that traffic to convert into a paid subscription. What your Google Analytics will tell you is that a visitor hits your website and reads maybe one or two articles and then disappears. Will they come back? Maybe. Are they sticky to your website? Are they naturally coming back? No. Generally you have to promote hard to get them back and that's time and money. So going away is really not a great outcome for that visit. So what are the opportunities here? Instead of going away, why not have that casual visitor join your email list? And then you would be sending your newsletter to this casual visitor, right? That's the start of a relationship between you and the casual visitor. And the data suggests that if you're doing the right job sending your newsletter to this new casual reader that they have, you have about a 10x chance of converting them as a paid subscriber. And then down the road once you bring them through this funnel of sorts is they'll have an opportunity to sign up for other products or events or promotions that you have down the road. Now let's start with a story that we just experienced with a all digital, just about all digital online magazine, Small Boats magazine based up in Maine. And what happened with them is they were, they're taking paid subscriptions. They were letting the general public, the casual visitor read two free articles. And then once the visitor went to the third article to read it, they prompted them to pay and subscribe. And the visitors generally wouldn't do that, not the casual visitor. So what they did instead just a few months ago is they allowed the first two articles for free without any effort from the casual visitor. But when they went to the third article, they prompted that casual visitor to register for free in order to read that third article. So here's what it looked like. So this free registration promises that they can read the article for free. And this works better than a pop up because they're on a piece of content that they really want to read. And what this publication is saying is saying, yeah, sure, you can read it. You, you can read it for free. In fact, but we just want you to register. Now what happened? The free registrations came in because free sell is pretty good. And they saw their, they have been seeing month over month a 20% gain in their email list growth and in their paid subscriptions. And that's a pretty amazing result for a very simple change on their website. Okay, now what I'm going to show you here is a framework that we've come up with, we call the Subscription Accelerator. And it essentially shows the path from the casual visitor that lands on your website, usually through a Google search or social sharing. And you want to take them to step three here, the paid subscriber. So there are a couple of steps in the middle and one at the end. So the first step is to grab that email address and do it through a registration form. Get them on your Step 2 newsletter that then you diligently send out to this free registered subscriber which has titles and excerpts, not all the content. They click it, they go back to your site and this cycle happens over time for the, especially the casual reader. They're generally not going to pay for a subscription right up front. They're going to get your newsletter. Could be daily, could be weekly, could be monthly, and they're going to see what they want to read, they'll click into it and then they'll say, oh well, I have to pay to read this one. Okay, now you can set up your free levels, let's say your registration levels, to offer more than one free article if you wanted to. In fact, we have publishers that offer maybe three free articles or five free articles per month if you're a news publisher with a fair amount of articles being published every day. But the idea is that it's kind of like farming you, you need to get that visitor to register and make the commitment to getting on your newsletter and getting logged into your website and then sending them back to your website over time, pestering them with that request for paying for a full subscription to get full access. And that works. That's what bumps the take up rate about 10 times. Now the last thing I have here is new products. Once you get your subscription flow going from attracting the casual reader, submitting and registering with their email address, getting the newsletter and then finally paying is that now you have a really good, you have your best audience member that's a fully paid subscriber and you have opportunities to sell them premium, premium articles, premium products, events. We have publishers that sell archive access if they have deep archives. Of course you can sell bulk subscriptions, gift subscriptions, there's really a lot you can do with that new subscriber that you have and the free level subscribers as well. So now people say, well, you know, we have our pop ups on our site and you know, people can easily, you know, add themselves to the list. We're not really sure it works. Well, first of all, when you offer, when you make somebody go through a registration form, it's an effort. They got to fill in their name, they got to put in their email, choose a password and hit submit. So there's a little bit of, a little bit of work there. If they're going through that, they're pretty interested in your content and so it's a nice sort of screen for who's really interested. They're essentially opting into your list that way. Okay, so let's recap here. Get a registration form going on your website. Something like this works great. A little bit of friction, not too much, no credit card required. Gives the new visitor access to, you know, a little more content. So that builds your email list. You get your newsletter sent to the all the new free registered subscribers as well as paid subscribers. That will actually drive your site traffic up. Another thing that we hear is, geez, if I put a paywall up, it's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna reduce my traffic to my site. Which affects your advertising revenue? Well, no, it's actually the opposite. When you build a free registration, you will attract quite a lot of people that are registering for free and then you're driving them back to the site, which is essentially your direct marketing to them through email, sending them back to your site and voila, your traffic goes up. We've seen publishers double their traffic just simply by bringing on their best content and taking on free registrations. Increase your chance to subscribe by 10% future revenues. And if all this sounds pretty interesting to you and you want to dive in a little deeper, just head over to zine101.com grab our subscription accelerator guide and enjoy. And get in touch if you have any questions. We'd love to talk to you.