NTindependent Subscription Optimizer

Hey Ryan, it's Pete from Leaky Paywall and I'm going to give you three ideas here to optimize your subscriptions for the NT independent. So I've been taking a look at the site. I've been triggering the subscription messaging on here and have some thoughts. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is just some of the details, just a little bit of cleanup. The second one is the subscription function funnel and then the lastly, I have an idea for some potential additional subscription revenue that I'll get into. So first, just a few details. What I would do is just clean up this header a little bit. Your Donate button and subscribe button and your login link should likely be all next to each other. I would recommend focusing on the subscribe make that the big orange button. Make donate maybe a link or a smaller or just a subdued button and then have a login text link so you have everything in one spot for people to get to. The subscribe button should really be the thing that's highlighted. And just keep in mind that in the subscription marketing side of the equation, you want to create a very simple funnel for readers to flow through. Too many choices really means that people bail out of the funnel early in the game. And so one choice, one button. That's a good philosophy to go with these social buttons. I would just move these to the footer. There's no need to really have them up here. People know to go down to the footer to find some basic things if they really want to. And then I see you have your My Account page here. Now there's also a good you might know this, there's a good plugin called User Menus which lets you switch the buttons based on state. So like I'm not logged in now. So I see the subscribe button. That's great. But and there should be a subscribe and a login link. Now once I'm logged in I should that login link can change to my account or subscribe, you know, subscriber profile. And then the subscribe button can just be suppressed. It can just go away. So you have a. So the menu delivers a nice experience for the subscriber. Okay. The rest of the site looks good, it's clean. I like the black and orange theme and of course the white. It's really good to go. So let's jump into my main point here, which is the subscription funnel. And so I've hit a few articles here and it looks like the meter is set to five free articles before the message triggers. So I can't remember which article I was in that triggered it, but I'm just going to go pick one here and let's see here. Maybe it wasn't this one. Let's see here. Go in and choose this one. This one. Maybe I was here before. Go. Go a little deeper down and into. Oh, no. I think I actually read this article. National news. Let's take a look at this one. Maybe these are free. That's possible. Let me, let me go back up to the top. Where was I? I'm not sure how exactly you have the free and the paid content broken out. So I'm just fishing for an article that'll trigger the nag. Here we go. Okay, this article. So now I get the subscriber login message. This, this image here takes a long time to load. So then it sort of pops at the last second. It. Which, which is tough. I would, I would suggest, you know, compressing this, slimming it down. It's a. This is a lot to read. And then a very small subscribe link. So here's, here's where I would change things up. Right now you have a settings for 5 free articles. Then you pay. Well, what's working best for our publisher group now is a free registration approach that's sometimes called a reg wall. And the idea is that before you're asking for people to pay because right now I'm just a casual Facebook or, you know, Google Reader that's wandering in here and NT Independent's asking me to pay. It's too early. Like I'm not ready to pay. Right. I'm just, you know, most people are just going to not be ready to pay and they'll go away. So instead of going away, what you want to do is you want to capture their email address. So the registration wall does that job. And so what you do with the registration wall is you say, hey, if you want to read this article and maybe a few more each month, just register for free and you'll get our newsletter. So get more articles, get our newsletter. Just got to register with your email address and then you get access to what you want. The second thing too is it's taken me five, let's say at least articles to get to the messaging, which means the paywall is not, it's not doing its job. It's not converting anything. Most people come from Google and social. They look at 1 1/2, 1.7 articles per visit. You want to stop people at Article 2. So what I would recommend is you set the free registry, you set the meter to one free article a month, that's it. And then you insert a free registration or a registration wall that basically says, hey, read this article now for free. Get a few more and get our newsletter. That messaging work converts really, really well. And I'm going to show you in a second what that can look like. And then in the back end of well, what is this free registration level or subscription level give you, you can play with it a little bit. Maybe it's three articles a month, maybe it's four articles a month, maybe it's what you're currently doing, five articles a month. And you can change that at any time. But as the New York Times does, I would suggest use the language of you get a few, you get a little more content, you get a few more articles and then you can, you can change that. But what that does is it introduces the messaging that says, you know, hey, become part of the community for free really early in the, in that casual reader's experience on your website. And that converts incredibly well. What you'll see if you install it, you'll see those free registrations skyrocket and you know, the newsletter pop ups, they're, they're just not that effective. I mean they do work and it's better than not having one. But you get, you get a lot of sort of spam users, some bots, low level commitments and when you do the free registration, you actually introduce a little piece of important friction so your quality of your readers is higher. So, all right, now I promise I'd show you, here's a really good example of a free registration. We've tested a lot of them. This is the one that's worked, currently working the best. And this is a, a West coast news publisher. I've been here before. They have the meter set like I mentioned, to one free article and then this is what they get. This is very, very simple. There's one really one thing to do here that's promoted and that's, hey, this story is free for you. Create a free account and get more of the Salem Reporter's top stories directly to your inbox. This is good language. Your newsletter. You're going to get the free story, you're going to get the newsletter. If you want to include a few, a few extra, you know, premium articles per month on here, that's great. Email password submit now. This is, this uses our new Quick Register extension to pull this off and then you can, it's just a short code. You just drop in the pick the fields that you want to show. I recommend email and password. Drop the short code into the subscription message area and that's it. It shows up. Now a couple other important things. There are two links here that are also important already a subscriber log in here. So if I am a subscriber, I can quickly. Oh yeah, this is where I log in and then. Or subscribe for full access. Most people will not click this link, but it's there just in case. And again, the funnel is simple. The idea is you have one button, one call, one call to action. That's, you know, register for free. And then if you look at the data shows that those that register for free and get on your newsletter, their chances of subscribing are bumped up pretty significantly. And it's, you know, happens over time. They might not subscribe today or tomorrow, but maybe in three months. You know this when I register here, the email gets sent to mailchimp or whatever email service you're using. And this email should be tagged as free. So this, you're segmenting the these people as this is a free list. And then the new the free newsletter sends people back to the content, which triggers the upgrade message, which is the next message. It says, yes, you have to pay. And you want, over time, you want the free registered reader to see this upgrade messaging, you know, 10 times, right, 20 times, whatever it takes until they finally get tired of seeing it and saying, okay, I'll support this publisher. Okay. Just another note too. When you. There's some benefits here to this free registration beyond One is that you have a free newsletter which is excerpts and links back to articles. If you install free registration, you by definition end up with a free newsletter and a premium newsletter. You can easily add a premium newsletter to the publication here without doing a lot of work. And that adds value and quite a lot of value to a paying subscription. So you can can imagine it's like, okay, you register here, you get the free newsletter, but if you, if you pay, if you go back to the subscribe page and you pay, you can add, you can include the premium newsletter as part of the subscription benefit here. And okay, what's the difference? What's a premium newsletter? Well, the free newsletter excerpts. It also needs to have upgrade messaging. So I can send you an example. But as at the bottom of the newsletter, simply install, you know, hey, upgrade for full access, join the community and whatever, you know, benefits that the reader gets to join. And that sits at the bottom of every single free newsletter that goes out Constantly promoting the full subscription to the free list, the premium newsletter. Now let's say I pay. Well, Leaky Paywall will send the paid tag, let's say to mailchimp or whatever service. And now you know that these folks are on the paid list, they get the paid newsletter. Well, a paid newsletter does not have upgrade messaging in it. 1, 2. A premium newsletter could be as simple as full text, which is really popular, really effective. So in other words, you're just sending full text out in the emails to paid subscribers and that's a big benefit. So me as a paid subscriber, I get your email. I can just read it in my email box. I don't have to click anywhere, I don't have to log in anywhere. And it's just super convenient, super convenient. So anyway, if you have questions on that, let me know. I'll send you an article on that as well. Okay, so that's the, so that's really the big message here is getting a free registration installed in the, in the funnel here so that the casual visitor that comes in from Google and Social, they get to, you get to capture them and nurture that relationship over time as a free registered reader that gets the newsletter in order to increase the chances of them upgrading and paying. Okay, all right, so on to my last point, which is the subscribe page here. Now I would. This looks pretty clean with the three choices. If you can slim this down, make this absolutely, you know, like, you don't have to do any math here. You'll increase your conversion rate. So right now I have to look at this and say, okay, it's 15amonth or 150 a year. Well, geez, what is that? Okay, that's. It looks like it's two months free. Is that worth it? I'm not sure. And then there's this. 360 a year. And this is maybe something I don't, maybe, I don't know, some premium thing I get or maybe it's like a donation thing. I'm not really sure. You're making people think a little too hard about what, what to do. And again, if you, if you, if you want to bump your conversions, just keep it super simple. And so my recommendation actually would be to have one offer and that's an annual recurring. So your free registration kind of counts as the free trial. That's where you're going to register people, they're going to get, you're going to give them free content plus the newsletter for no money, just to register. And then when they're ready to pay. The thought is that they've already tried you. Now they're ready to try. Now they say, okay, I'll try you for a year. And that's pretty, pretty typical. So I'll show you a good example of a. That's a good subscription conversion page here. So if I hit subscribe on Small boats now, this is a magazine style publisher, but look at what they give you for options. They haven't. They have a nice intro. And by the way, I would absolutely have a nice intro here. Your mission. Why will the life of your reader be better here on this intro, right? So you have a nice little paragraph. Here's a signature from the editor. It looks real nice. Now subscribe now. What are my options? Well, I have like one option, right, subscribe. You know, they're charging 30 bucks a year recurring. Here's the benefits, the features. Okay, subscribe. For me, that's pretty easy. I don't have to do any math. I don't have to think. I just, I just hit subscribe or. And if you see, this is super clever. Gift is a gift, right? And gift subscriptions should be 20% of your revenue. Your recurring revenue. I should say recurring subscription revenue. But that's not a, that's not a mental lift because it's either I subscribe for me or I subscribe for someone else. That's, that's, that's a pretty easy decision point right there. So I would steal with how Small Boats Monthly lays out their subscription page. And that'll help you slim down this choice to ideally one option plus gift subscription. Now I see you have the group subscription underneath, and that's great. And that's fine. You might want to minimize this a little bit. And I would put it in text. Hey, if you're interested in your organization having full access, you know, get it, get in touch. And then I assume this goes to a contact page. Oh, I see. You're going to different subscriptions. Okay, I don't know how this is working for you. I just saw this. Maybe this is working. Well, maybe not. Typically bulk subscriptions require conversation. But if this is working, please let me know. That's cool. This also opens into a new tab, which I'm not sure why these, these are doing that, so. But I would keep it small and really focus on getting that individual, you know, $150 a year. Get, get that subscription running. You won't need this. Not ready to. Because your, your free registration is taking care of these newsletter signups. So what I would do is I would replace this with a nice testimonial. I have a picture of maybe somebody wrote a nice letter to the editor or whatever. And there's. And there's a nice testimonial here because people like faces and, you know, happy, happy customers, and that would be a much better thing to have here.