Optimizing TownsendLetter.com to boost subscription growth

Hey, Ben, I'm going to review your Townsend Letter website. I know you've been working on it and I've been looking at it, have some thoughts to improve it for subscription conversion purposes. So no particular order. I'm going to start with the homepage here and just give you my thoughts. I like the overall content layout. You have a long scrollable list of articles that the browser can kind of cruise through and figure out what's important to them. So this is good. This shows off your deep archive that I know you have. One of the questions I do have for you is how many articles do you actually have on the site that might be something to bring forward and promote? Now, as far as improvements go, I like this slider here. I know this is the print version of the Townsend Letter and now it's digital only. I think that the 40 year journey. This section, this should be a little more benefits oriented. This is an about statement and even about statements need to be benefits oriented. So your reader, doctors and patients, how do they benefit by reading the Townsend Letter? That's really the question. And that should be the purpose of this paragraph here. I would move this 40 year journey as a. Maybe as a caption. You could shrink this down a little, make this a nice big caption for the slider and that would tie the two together very nicely and infer that there's a deep archive here. This content here, this should be shortened down to maybe one paragraph. I would go with larger text. This is a little small. And then I like the Read More link to get to the about page. And the about page is, is really good. It's important to have a strong about page, especially for a site that's an expert site. And you have a lot of good stuff here, including all the contributors. It looks like a serious publication. I like that. Okay, let's go back to the homepage. This top bar here is a little bit invisible. It's hard to see or hard to notice, I should say. You don't certainly don't need the date. That's clutter. And this, my account icon is almost invisible. I think a lot of people will miss that. The search box. I get wanting to have a search box on a deep archive. Most people tend not to use search, but it's. It's certainly not a terrible idea. If you could put a little expandable search icon in the menu, that would be ideal, but that might be a hassle. Now what I would do though is add a subscribe button here on the right on the navigation. You Just need to have a subscribe link and then put, just put some background color, maybe the. To match the blue, and then have a login link in just plain text. So you need that subscribe button to be always visible. Always there. Okay. Going down the homepage, this sidebar doesn't show on mobile. I get that. But if you're on desktop and you're. You're doing a deep dive, what I would do here is you don't need recent posts. You have all the recent posts scrolling down. What I would include is a nice call out to subscribe here. So people know this is a premium publication. So I know I've seen those in the sidebar and I would use that here and then below that. What I would do instead of having recent posts is I would have a category listing. You have. If I go to the navigation here, it looks like the nice deep archive is showing up on all these categories. I would replicate this in the sidebar. And I know WordPress has a standard categories output widget or something like that that you can output, but that would, I think that would clean up the sidebar a bit and give people a useful way to navigate. In addition to this quick comment on the. On the menu structure here, when I click into a category, what I get is a slideshow. This needs to go. Just output the articles in that category in a standard sort of excerpt, title, excerpt photo scrolling down because nobody has the. First of all, you might think there's only one article here. People will miss this little slider. People don't want to target the slider and hit the mystery button to the next article because they don't know what the next article is. Just give them something to scroll quickly. Especially on mobile. Let me just go to mobile here real quick. Anyway, on mobile you definitely want to be. Be able to scroll down and see everything in that category. All right, so here's a call out for getting instant access to our full archive. Is it a thousand articles? Is it 10,000 articles? How many articles do we have here? And what you. So this is good. I like. This is clean, nice. What you could do is you could use Ad Dropper to put in some different messaging based on the benefits. And you can rotate the different ads through here and just put a UTM code on it to track which of these ads get clicked on the most. And then you can figure out what messaging is going to work best for your reader. Okay, so let's just hop back to the homepage and I think that's it for comments. I See that we have categories here. Took me a while to find that. I think by cleaning up some of this sidebar, these will be a little more obvious. I would make these, I would bump the font size. I don't know some, I'm not a designer, but I would say that these categories here need to pop. So it's obvious that you're going from category to category here. Okay, so let's hop into an article and take a look. Now I assume you're going to have a free registration here so that maybe you give away an article and then you have to drop off your email address and password to get the to the next one. So that's great. Now in the article itself, again, the font's a little small. I, we're getting more and more used to bigger, easier to read fonts. So I would, I would take a look at that. I like the title and one thing that I'm noticing, which I agree with, is that if you want related posts, related articles to keep people on the site and click more, that's a good idea. I would do that in content. I think you have that running at the bottom here. Yeah, I don't see any related articles here. So I would, I would use a related posts plugin to output for a long article like this. It might be two sections of related articles in here. That's pretty much the comment from that. Let me just check my notes real quick and see what else there is. Oh yeah. So let's take a look at the subscription checkout process. Now let's say I'm going to subscribe. I'm going to hit the subscribe button, get myself over to the subscribe page. Okay, this is. This sort of took me aback, if that's the right expression when I first saw it. I don't. This is a, this is a serious medical publication. I think we're. This is old promotional tech where there's the countdown and nobody believes that there's actually a countdown clock. I would absolutely remove this. I think this chips away at the value, the strength of your content. Now the subscribe cards, you have the monthly, yearly and three years plan. I would stick with monthly and yearly. Give people a choice. Monthly, recurring, yearly, recurring. The three year plan. You can't, it can't be recurring. It's a one time purchase and so not having it recurring is a problem. It's also adding to the choice factor. Three is not terrible. Again, things in here are pretty small, hard to read. I would, I would use really one card and go with what the Salem Reporter is doing style wise. And I think you want to do an introductory launch as well. A discount. Gotta be careful with discounts. You don't want to devalue your content. I know you've seen this and I'll show it to you again. This is a great way to promote, to give people a break. But you're not devaluing the price of your content. Giving away first three months for the price of one. It's Salem Reporter actually went to a price increase. It used to be 10, now it's $12 for three months and then it's $12 per month. I think you're in the same price bracket monthly 1295 and so this approach could be your introductory special. Just leave it up for a while, test it, see how it works. We know this works incredibly well. Plus there's the annual annual purchase link which works very well as, as well. And then there's the gift subscription down here with this layout too, you get the opportunity to have some benefits either stacked on top or stacked to the side, showing off what the Townsend letter can do for the reader. So this would clean things up very nicely for you. Okay, let's see. And lastly on the benefit side, I actually ran your and this is a good trick is take your about page which is found off your homepage here. I'm just going to read more, get to the about. You might want to have an about link at the top of the menu because people are going to be wondering what is the Townsend letter? If somebody's new, it's okay, it looks like you have a lot of good stuff. But I would, I would encourage an about link plus the subscribe and login so people can click on that and get here and see exactly what you guys are about. Now what I did as far as creating Benefits Copy is the trick is to use the about page and feed that into ChatGPT or your favorite AI software. And I used a, an app for ChatGPT called Benefits Copywriter that worked really well. And I'm I'm posting, I'm going to post the results for you in the email. But just literally copying all this text that's on here, all the text, putting it into Chat GPT and the Benefits Copywriter and saying hey, write up some taglines and some paragraphs with the benefits. I think it, it came, I think it came out really well. And you can use that on your subscription touch all your subscription touch points. Hope that helps and talk to you soon.