Pete Ericson advises publishers on pricing strategy: simplify to one clear plan, use free registration to build trust, and price print and digital identically to avoid confusion. Small Boats and the New Yorker show how this works. About 20% of subscriptions tend to be gifts.
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Okay, so now I've used up my free articles and I go to the next article and again I'm stopped in the next article that I want to read that I'm choosing and it says to upgrade your account. I've used up my free, my two free articles in this case, and it's telling me to upgrade. Okay. Small boats have a very effective and compelling conversion because they're selling one product. Product. And this is something that we're seeing happen a lot now with publishers. It's really, especially as a print publisher. You have print product, you have a print digital product. You have some complexity in what you're selling. But see if you can boil down what you're actually selling to one thing. I know that sounds crazy, but it works because a confused visitor doesn't buy. If I have to figure out which subscription plan I want to sign up for, you might lose me. Netflix, they have monthly recurring, that's it. No annual subscriptions. You go to the New York Times, you use up their free allotment. The registration that they have, you get one choice. Sometimes they serve you two choices, but they're always testing. But often you'll just get one choice. It's some promotion. It's one thing. That's it. You don't have to do any math. I don't have to make any choices. It's just this one thing. When you actually get the free registration going, what you're doing is you're building that relationship over time. So they're seeing your product. If you were to give away two free articles a month, they're going to get some benefit out of that. They're going to see your content, they're going to start trusting your content, liking your content. And this is the casual visitor. And they're going to see that upgrade message over time. The message just has one path. In other words, just one click. Like right here, subscribe now. I know what the price is. Then the chance, the conversion chances go up. Okay. The other thing too is if you have one plan is one registration. So you go, you don't have to sell anything else. When they're at, when the free registered subscriber is here, they're ready to buy. So just take them to the checkout page. And one of the hidden benefits of a free registration is they've already entered most of their, like, their name, their email, their password. Like, they're all logged in, they're. They're ready to go. It's just, it's really a credit card, it's print Then there's an address, but it's a much simpler checkout and you want to reduce the amount of clicks and decisions that, that someone has to be making in this checkout process. Okay? Oh, okay. So this is interesting too. So this is for the, what I've described as the free registration flow, which is great, but what about for the casual visitor who comes to your website and says, boy, this looks really interesting. I wonder what subscriptions like? And they click, you know, the subscribe button in the, in the top. So they're, they're, they're not a registered subscriber that has a relationship with you. They're just casual. They're coming in from Facebook or Google Search. Build a sales page for them. So if you go to small boats and you click that, you'll see that they have this nice sales page. It's in two parts. I think this is really well done. Just copy it. Subscribe to small boats. Nice. Welcome from the editor. Single pricing, super easy to understand. Here are all the benefits you get. And then they do something sneaky if you're paying attention, is they. There's actually two choices here. It's one psychological choice because it's a subscription, but do I subscribe for me or do I subscribe for someone else? Easy choice. And that works really well. And if you listen to Greg Wolfe, he'll tell you that 20% of your paid subscriptions should be. If you have a giftable publication, should be gifts. 20% of your subscriptions should be gift subscriptions. Great. Okay, so next. Okay, let's talk about print and digital access. So this is the New Yorker. I think this is a very fair approach. This is a good approach. It's simple, it's not confusing. If you're going to offer a print digital product and you're going to offer a digital only product, then the choice of this is well presented. It's a choice of two. The key here is to keep your pricing the same. So you're not making people do math. So it's, hey, it's 16 weeks for 12 bucks. 16 weeks for 12 bucks. Oh, it's my decision point. My decision point is do I want print in digital or do I want digital only? Okay, that's a pretty easy decision. Most people know what they're interested in as far as print versus digital only. And off you go. So keep it simple. I talked to a publisher, a print publisher recently who is actually going to have one plan was an annual recurring, which I think is great, and then they're going to have an opt out of print. So one plan, one promotion, simple, clean. And then giving the user to simply check a box that says, you know, that they don't want the print product, which might, I know you guys might go run, go screaming running. But that's. You're dealing with people that have very clear. Some people just want digital and don't want paper, and some people absolutely demand paper, just offering choices.
