Improving Bass Magazine's paid subscriptions

Hey Ben, Jamie and John. I thought I'd take a pass through your website here and give you some ideas to help boost conversions. What we find works best with our publisher base is really taking a nurturing approach to building your email list and then converting paid subscriptions. So I have a few thoughts here. I think that's pretty low hanging fruit you guys can implement and see some results with. So in no particular order, I'm just going to jump in here. I like your photo centric layout of your site. Looks good. Let's just clean a couple things up. Minor detail on the menu bar here. I like that you have subscribe and login. I would have a little background button made for the subscribe here so it pops and it's always a little more present. Okay, so let's get into the content itself. If I jump into and I'm not sure exactly what your meter is set to, but if I jump into an article here, I get the subscription nag here, which I'm going to show you a something that's styled up a little bit better. But let's say I decide to hit subscribe and get get some options here. What I get is this. Three choices. One is free, two are paid. I'm not really sure. It's a little confusing. There's a free option here. There's. There's the founding member looks like monthly and then the founding member yearly. So what I would do, first of all just remove this free card altogether because when somebody lands on your subscription page, you really want to focus on selling the paid subscription. But let's go back here and we'll get into that in a second. A better approach here is to ask for the free registration right away. And I'm going to just show you what a very compelling free registration looks like on the Salem Reporter. So when I run out of articles, I get this prompt here. And this is a new, this is a new extension we have. It's called the Quick Register. And the way this works is hey, this story is free for you. And that's really the motivation of the reader when they land on your article and they want to read that article. So they, if you tell them the story's free, that's compelling. And then you also tell them that they're going to get the newsletter if they register. And then it's just email password. There's one submit button. And this all happens right in the content. And if I fill this out, it unlocks the content, sends the email to mailchimp or whatever you're using and, and now they can read this particular story. So that's the first thing. And that keeps, that will boost your, that will grow your email list more quickly than the way it's set up now. So that's, that's number one. Now when we get to, when you get to the. The subscription promotion. So let's say I registered for free and I'm going to read some more articles, then it's time to ask for payment. Right? So here's again. Salem Reporter. This is how they lay out their. The actual paid subscription prompt. Support us stay informed. Local news you can count on. And then the benefits of, of subscribing here. Now we can, if you like this, we can actually just hop in and, and lay this out for you, set this up for you. It'd be pretty quick for us to do it. But again, the idea is it's a clean look, it's benefits oriented and there's one button upgrade your account. Okay, now let's go back to your subscribe page. I'm going to dig into that just a little bit more. Okay, so if you remove the general admission here and basically you're sliding that into the content itself, you have two options here. One is monthly and one is recurring. Really it's the same access option. It's just, it's just your subscriber choosing, okay, do I want to pay monthly or do I want to pay annual? And when you get to a subscription page, you don't want to make the reader think you don't want to give them too many choices. So one choice is really best. But you do have two options, monthly and an annual. So I'll show you on again. Back to the Salem Reporter. We've been testing, we've been testing promotions pretty aggressively on this site and this is the current winner as far as subscription conversions go. And you'll see that it's pretty simple. And it actually offers both annual and monthly in one card here, one button. Not much to think about. And the promotion, this is an interesting promotion. It's called the delayed trial. You just, you get instead of discounting, you get two free months for the price of one. So first three months for the price of one. This works really well. Act now. And what in the bullets here it's now their monthly is $12. So you pay them monthly, you get three months. So you pay for one month, you get two months free. That's a good deal. That feels pretty good. I can hit subscribe now. But wait a second, there's a text Link here. Choose a yearly plan and save 17%. So, so you get a price break for the yearly plan and then they have gift subscriptions as well, which I would recommend you guys explore because you definitely have a giftable publication. Now, what's really interesting about this is that more than 50% of subscribers actually choose the annual plan, even though the monthly plan is promoted first. So psychologically the way this works is when I'm ready to maybe subscribe and I'm looking at my options. I read this and I think, oh, that's a pretty good deal. Three months for the price of one. I like that. And maybe that's enough to be compelling. But we find that subscribe or readers who are ready to subscribe will read all the text and then you get to the second promo, which is, hey, I could save even more money at 17%. So that's an even better deal. So you start with, with a good feeling, hey, that's a good deal. And then that this is even better. And that's why most people choose this option. And annual plans just generally outsell monthly plans across the board. Okay, again, we can help you lay this out if you like. And it, this converts really well. So I, I absolutely highly recommend this delayed trial subscription approach. Okay, let's go back to. And I want to mention something about pricing here. You're charging 199 each month in 1999 for a year of access. I don't know your audience, but it seems way too low across the board on the low end of paid subscriptions. We're looking at. We see 499 per month as a low end of subscriptions. And then that would mean $49 for the year. And that gives you about an 18% discount if you set that up. So I don't know how ready you are for a price increase, but I would absolutely recommend you guys increase your prices. Stripe is taking 50 cents out of every $99 transaction. So it's not even. It's. You're getting a buck 50 in in profit. I would absolutely raise the price and I just go for 4.99 on monthly and $49 for the annual. Okay, let's see what else we have. Oh, so another thing to help build your email list. Now, I believe you have your issue content locked down with leaky paywall. So you have to pay really to get access to this content for the most part. But you have news content, post content that's totally free and open. I'm not sure exactly where it is here but what I would recommend is to set the free registration up for the free content as well. So you let, maybe you let folks read one or two free articles on the free content, but then you insert that free registration. And part of the benefit of registering is you get a full access to your free content. Your free news content, your magazine issue content is still gated and requires payment. But if you want full access to your new to the news content, you do have to go through that free registration. And what that'll do is it'll introduce this pre registration gate much more frequently. You'll find your email list grows much faster. People are very much okay with registering, especially if they're going to get full access to your newsfeed and maybe a limited access to one article on the magazine side. So that's another thing I would change on the, on the metering. Otherwise what happens is if somebody combs around your, your newsfeed, your free newsfeed, they don't, you're not capturing their email address, they don't run into the subscription system. And, and what you need to do is you need to get them into that free registration puts them on your newsletter. And then when you're sending your newsletter out, you basically your articles are pointing, pointing people back to your site to read the article where they get the upgrade messaging. And that's a, that's the nurturing part of the flow is getting the newsletter to really work on sending people back to the site to see the, the targeted messaging that comes up and says hey, become a paid subscriber and get all the benefits. That's the flow. I don't know what you're doing on the newsletter side. I would like to be on your newsletter to take a look at what you're doing. And I'm happy to talk about your newsletter strategy. That's something that we do with all our publishers because the newsletter is such an important part and a lot of it has to do with the layout is the layout. But the messaging for the free registered list is important to, to so they see upgrade messaging. The frequency of the newsletter is super important. You want to be sending your newsletter out as frequently as possible. Maybe you can't do it daily. Try to strive to get there because we see a correlation between frequency of newsletter and paid subscriptions. It's a pretty close correlation. Okay, I'm going to send you some, some benefits copy that you can use for your subscription page as well. I'll show you one last thing. This is the Civil War Monitor. This is their subscription page. And it's a nice layout that you could copy where you have maybe a nice image, you have some nice sales copy here, some benefits copy. And I'll send you. I'll send you something that we can whip up. And then you'll have your card. And you could lay this out. Maybe something like this where the card's here, and then you have your benefits copy on the right hand side. But I thought I'd show you this as well. So in any case, happy to jump on a zoom. And let's talk about bumping up your subscriptions. And let's talk about your newsletter strategy, too. Talk to you soon.