How to convert more readers with targeted messaging

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Today we're going to talk about how to seamlessly communicate with your readers with the right messaging at the right time. And this is really the secret to converting paid subscribers. The, the. The days of annoying pop ups are fading away quickly in favor of taking care of your readers, both casual and paid readers, when they're on your website. So today's topic on the Paywall podcast, episode number 41 is targeted messaging. So let's go. I have outlined here seven easy areas to talk specifically to your readers, one of which is brand new, and that's a brand new feature we have called targeted subscribe messages. Tyler, I know you're excited about this one, and I am too. We just released it and we're gonna, we're gonna dive in. Hey, welcome, Tyler.

How's it going?

All right, cool. All right, so we're gonna. I'm gonna step through. I have seven. I don't know if you have any. Any others, but we're gonna touch on six of them. And then we're gonna dive a little. We're gonna dive a little deeper into the, the new feature that we have. And what I'm going to do here is share my screen. So if you're actually watching this via video, you can see stuff if you're on the pod. If you're listening via audio, that's fine too. We're going to explain it all. All right, Number one, this is the one we always talk about. It's the free registration. Why are you bringing up the free registration, Pete? Well, because you're targeting your casual visitors, the ones that come to you from social and Google, the ones that type in your URL directly. They don't have a relationship with you. And after an article or two, you can stop them and say, hey, register. And what I'm showing off here on the T Journey website is the new Quick Registers. If you haven't seen that, that one is just a simple short code that creates a free registration form. You can ask for an email address only. You can, you can ask for an email and password. You can keep it short and sweet right in the message. Okay, that's number one. Number two, since we're talking about free registration. I'm going to switch over to the My Account page. We have a short code. I don't know if you know this, but it's a leaky paywall. Short code allows you to target by subscription level. So. So a great application of this would be to drop the short code on your My Account page. And if somebody is a free registered reader and they go to my account, it pops up a little message that says, hey, subscribe today for unlimited access, which is a call to pay for a subscription. And that's essentially a short code that does not show up unless you are a free registered level of subscriber. So that's just a quick little cool thing. Okay, now let's move on to the thing we really want to dive into. And that's our new feature, our new extension, Targeted subscribe messages. All right, Tyler, what does this thing do?

Well, in short, it lets you show particular messages to particular people based on their subscription level, based on their payment status, based on the article type itself, and gives you a lot of flexibility over what you display in your subscribe message box.

Exactly. So you can target by category and tag. You can target by payment status. Like if somebody cancels or something fails, you can show them a message. You can target.

By.

What did I say? Category. Oh, by subscription level. The three. So subscription level, category, payment status. So we're looking at the back end of t journey here. And I have, I have one actual setup and functioning message for the free registration. So now you know why I brought up the free registration originally. If you're running a free registration, you could you simply create a message that, that speaks directly to that free registered reader. So instead of like basically saying, hey, you know, upgrade for full access all the time, you can now speak directly to this cohort of readers that are registered for free. So the language you use in the message, which uses the block editor, by the way, can be something like, hey, you're out of free articles, or you're, you know, thanks for being a registered supporter, but can we ask for your help, you know, and pay for a subscription? So that, and when you use language that really focuses on the. The exact status of a user, of a visitor, of a human who's on your site, it rings true, right? It just, it, it's, it's more compelling and that boosts your subscription numbers. So that's a really simple first step. If you don't do. If you do one thing, like after listening to this podcast, I would suggest, and you have a free Registration create a new targeted message just for those pre registered readers. Okay. And as you can see here, we're. This is, I created a targeted message called pre registration. The targeting is by, is here. If, if someone's on the subscription level of the free registration, which is this one is they're going to show the free registration targeted message. Another example would be show a message like, like let's say I don't have another one to show here, but let's say you create a canceled or an expired message, someone's card expires, right? And they're logged in and they get stopped by leaky paywall. And you know this because you're basically showing this. The second targeted message by payment status. Payment status equals, let's say expired. Then that new message that you create will show to the expired reader. So that message would be something like, hey, renew your subscription. Right. So the person knows that you know that they are expired and that you should renew. Which is kind of where they're at. Like they might renew. Instead of a generic just subscribe message, now you can say, hey, renew. All right, so that would be another one while you're in here to quickly create. And you can, what you can do is you can just reuse your existing subscription message and just change the copy on it. Just change the language. You don't have to do any heavy lifting here. This is all really quick stuff. All right, Tyler, any other ideas on this?

Yeah, so one thing that publishers run into sometimes is I have content.

I.

Mark it as always, something that has to be on a paid plan and someone goes to look at that and they see pre registration messaging on that and they sign up and they still can't see that particular premium article because it's always for premium only people. And the free registration messaging isn't quite accurate for those, for those articles. So one thing you could do is if you have pieces of content that should always be premium, you could tag them as premium or put them in a premium category or both and show a particular message that maybe does not include the free registration option for the ultra premium article that always require a paid plan. So publishers that have especially local news publishers that offer their flipbook PDFs, this is something that you could do to lock down those PDFs and tell people that they always need to pay in order to see the Flipbooks, essentially.

That's a great idea. That's a great idea. So if you're a publisher and you're marking content as premium, whether it's just select content or maybe it's a whole category of content. You just, just tag it or categorize it appropriately and then you'll have the message show up that says you have to pay, you know, subscribe to get access re registration.

Yeah. And again, these messages don't have to be, you know, extremely different than what you're already doing. Like for most publishers it might just be a matter of removing a few lines of language and maybe removing a button that doesn't apply and going from there. You don't have to like create these from scratch.

Yeah, no, that's actually a great application.

So.

Yep, I like it. Let's see anything else we can do with it. I don't want to, I don't want to like, you know, drown people and things to do. I think those are, you know, about three things you could do pretty quickly. Right in the, Right in the targeted subscription messages area.

Yeah, yeah. I mean you could, I mean this thing is very targeted. So you could, I mean you could create hundreds of different messaging options in here that target based on all of these different qualifiers.

And.

So over time you can, you can go just go crazy with this.

Yep. And these are the messages that, that are the subscription nag. The subscription messages show up organically. Right. In the content on Good on mobile. This is a very, very important area that when you stop people with leaky paywall, that's the message that's going to show.

Yeah.

And there's no additional styling. There's no other. Like it just fits right in as though you've created an additional subscribe message, which that's what you've done. Essentially we're giving you the option to create unlimited subscribe messages based on different, you know, users, whether they're in the expire or whether it's on category based of content or what have you.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, so we'll look forward to your thoughts on this. If you have an interesting application for this, we'd love to hear from you about it. Okay, so let's see here. That was number three, targeted subscribed messages. I'm just going to keep going here. So number four, something we've talked about before, but really good targeted messages. It's called the conditional display notice. It's, that's an extension we have. It's, it's creates a bar up. If you're watching this, there's a kind of a mustardy colored bar at the top. I've registered for free on T journey and I'm looking at the website. Then this bar Shows up saying, hey, you know, thanks for registering. Consider upgrading for full access. Again, you're targeting the free registered reader. Only free registered readers will see this. And it speaks directly to that person that's in that mode. That's the cohort I like. I registered for free. I haven't paid. But the message says, hey, consider upgrading. And as they're coming, as I'm coming back over and over to T Journey to read the content, you know, I'm going to see this message and it's, it's, it's pretty subtle, it's pretty elegant and it works. So conditional display notice, that's number four. Number five is our Ad Dropper extension. Now Ad Dropper essentially lets you hide ads or paid subscriptions. That's, that's its superpower. So it's, we built this a few years ago as we couldn't find an ad plugin that we really liked in WordPress. They were all very, they're all very heavy and complicated. So we built this very lightweight way to put ad zones onto your website and then fill it with whatever ads you want. Some publishers use it for network ads or, you know, regular ads. But it's the superpower here is you can put in subscription or membership messages all over your site and hide those if someone is logged in as a paid subscriber. So you can have that targeted experience where if I'm a casual or if I'm free registered, I'll see the subscribed messages. And I think this application is very nice. It's pretty, pretty lightweight. It's just in a sidebar. Subscribe today. But if I'm logged in to the imprint and I'm paid, I won't see this subscribe message. So that's another way to seamlessly take care of your readers.

Super handy to hide those in house. Subscribe now ads when you're, when you're logged in. So clever, clever way of doing that.

And, and you know, we, we you, you know, just side note, consider if you're, if you offer a heavy ish amount of advertising on your website, consider creating a, like an, like a premium plus plan to, just to hide ads. And you know, if you're, especially if you're a news publisher, we, we have news publishers that are succeeding with this. One of them we know gets about 10% of their subscriber base to pay 40% more. That's a chunk of revenue. That's like free money. So, you know, don't be afraid to test it. People want to get rid of ads and that's why 40% of the world uses ad blockers or some. Something like that. Okay, so that's ad dropper number five. Oh, number six is another very, very simple targeting use case. It's a plugin called User Menus. It's not our plugin, It's a general WordPress plugin, but it's super handy. Want to explain that one while I stop choking and drink some water?

Yeah, yeah. So essentially what User Menus allows you to do is you can show specific menu items based on whether the user is logged in or logged out. So if someone is logged out, maybe you only want to show the login message and the subscribe option in the menu bar. But when they're logged in, you instead of showing logged in, you might show my account and log out and you might drop the subscribe option on your menu bar when they're, when they're logged in. So this creates a little bit more of a personalized view of your site versus just putting up, you know, a standard My account button that is also the login and also the account. It just kind of goes along with everything else we've been talking about.

Yeah, you can be more communicative in your menus and news. News. Thump does use this. I was just signed in and it changed to my account. Yeah, they use the word sign in. Login is a login link or a sign in link. Those are really important names or the action of logging in. Some publishers will have like my use my account to handle the login. But people get confused with that because it's not really, you know, if they want to log in, they're looking for login. Yeah, right. Or sign in. Not my account. So this, this makes the experience less frustrating for your user, more personalized, more targeted, for sure. Okay, so that's, that's user menus, the user menus plugin. And then number seven here I'll touch on in a little bit. And that's targeting your free subscribed readers and your paid subscribed readers differently with your newsletter. Yes. So, and I'm going to show, we're showing Small Boats here. This is their free newsletter to their free registered and casual readers. And really, what's, what's the difference here? Well, and this is a nice, from the archives, they pull a couple of articles from the archives. But if I scroll down the bottom here, this, this message shows on every newsletter. Right. Join the small boats community and you'll receive all the, you know, benefits, features and benefits of subscribing. There's a big button for join small boats. And so in this free newsletter, they're always promoting their paid subscriptions, Always promoting their paid subscriptions. And it works. And if once you pay, you switch to their paid newsletter, which is this really the same newsletter, but it doesn't have any of this promotion in it to subscribe. And your paid newsletter, an easy way to make it even more premium and make it a real value add for your reader to pay is to, you know, basically publish full text in the newsletter so the reader doesn't have to. The reader can conveniently read the text. They don't have to click to your website, they don't have to log in. That's a real value add. And, and an easy way to create a premium newsletter. And then you're targeting your free readers and you're targeting your paid readers in, in a very powerful way because newsletters are. It's part of your superpower as a publisher, building that email list and directly communicating.

Yeah, and this is all built in. If, if you're using leaky paywall and you're using mailchimp, then you can do this segmenting of your audience based on the plan that they sign up for. And even when they stop paying, tags can be sent over to mailchimp to let you know that, you know, they should now start receiving the free newsletter again versus receiving the paid. And if you're using. I always like to promote this. If you're not using mailchimp, you can always use our Zapier integration to do this. With any Zapier supported, which is virtually every newsletter platform, esp. On the market, you could do the same thing. You could, you could tag people based on their plan and, and do it that way.

Yeah, we'll send the, like, the zapier integration will send all the leaky paywall subscriber data that you need into a system or from a system into leaky paywall.

That's right.

Yeah.

Super handy. And whenever people update, like, if there's an update and stripe and then you know, there's a change, then that change can be sent through Zapier and can land in your choice of newsletter platform. So it's super handy and you can really dial in on your tagging.

It's a good one. Zapier is a good one. I know you like that one. I love it.

Gives you a lot of flexibility. A lot of flexibility, which is what we, I think we talk about all the time. And I've got my zapier set up doing all Kinds of crazy things based on different conditions. So you can really. The sky's the limit on it. That's awesome.

That's awesome. All right, so that, that was all, all seven targeting tools. But I'm gonna, I got a bonus tool. Oh yeah, I got one more. This, this is really an idea. This is one that keeps cropping up over and over again. And it uses our new targeted subscribe messages extension. And the idea is we have a lot of publishers want to give away free subscriptions as sort of like a limited time free, you know, you might be at an event or you might be doing a campaign, like a referral campaign where like paid subscribers are going to give away like, like a free subscription to get new, you know, to get new readers onto your list and into your system. So one of the ways that works really well is, is you create a, a hidden subscription level. Maybe I'm just as an example, maybe a three month subscription which is pretty compelling. It's like a free three month subscription and you, you, you can link to this hidden level and anybody can sign up now. So what can you do with targeting? Well, let's say I, you know, Tyler, you pay for some subscription and you send me a link saying, hey, there's a, there's a free subscription for you, Pete. I say, oh great. I click the link, I go and I register for this. At this hidden subscription level, I get three months for free. That's compelling. I'm like, yeah, I'll do that, that sounds great. And I'll get full access to the content. I'll get on the newsletter. Now at the end of the three though, I get stopped, right? Like I get the message that says.

I'm out, I'm out of time, I'm.

Out of, you know, I need to upgrade. So with the targeted messaging now, you could create a special message for that subscription level that says, hey, thanks, thanks for you know, reading, you know, such and such publication. We hope You've enjoyed your 3 months of access. Please consider, you know, paying for continued full access and whatever other benefits you're going to give them. So, and I, I kind of bring this, this up because a lot of I, I end up in a conversation with publishers all the time. They're talking about how do we, how do we get more readers into the system, you know, into how do I, how do I like build and nurture those relationships with casual readers and you know, using your existing readers to share links, you know, like a free subscription with, with their friends that they can email or post on social media or whatever, you know, you want, you want to bring people into, into your publication, and it's just, that's just a great application. And then you get to message them, you know, exactly as you wish when they're three months or whatever you decide to give them runs out. So. Okay, just a little marketing tip. If you've stuck with us to the end, you can put that on tour. Okay, cool. That's it for today. I'd say go. Go get the targeted messages installed. Go create a nice special message for your premium content for your free registered readers. And let us know how it goes. Thanks, Tyler. Thank you. Till next time. Catch you later.

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.