Paywall Optimizer: 3 tips to improving the digital subscription flow on a sportsman magazine

Foreign. From leaky paywall. Today we're going to help North American Deer Hunter increase their paid subscriptions and free registrations. Now, the North American Deer Hunter has a very interesting revenue model. If you register on their site for free, you'll get access to all their content. If you pay to upgrade, you will get access to gear discounts and last minute hunts. That is, if you're looking for a hunt today, you'll be able to do that with a paid upgrade. So we have three problems with the current subscription setup on this site. One is there are too many options. Two, there are too many clicks to get to those options. And three, it's a little bit unclear what the benefit is of joining and paying for a subscription. Okay, let's do a walkthrough and take a look at some easy ways to fix these three problems and and build those paid subscriptions. Now, I'm not logged in here on the Deer Hunter site and if I go to this article and I have been here a few times, I will get the prompt to subscribe. We call this the nag. Now the issue here is that this nag does look like it needs some design help. Now remember, this is where the rubber hits the road. Let's take a look at what a better approach would be for an upgrade. I'm going to hop over to Wilderness Living and take a look at what their subscription nag looks like. And this is a really great approach. They have a nice compelling photo, they have some benefits. Copy and then there's a subscribe now button. And by the way, buttons convert better than links. So this is something to absolutely include in your subscription nag. Here there's a couple options. One is to read this article now for free, which is compelling, and then get access to all the digital content. The benefit of this would be to register and get access to all content for free, which is what the offer is. Secondly, there's another call out for registering for premium. And this is. These are two different paths and are a little bit confusing at this stage of the game. The casual visitor has landed on your site, most likely from a Google search or a social share. They want to read this article. That's the main motivation. Let's get them registered and get them into the system so that they end up on your newsletter. Jumping into premium is okay, but this should probably be just smaller text and not the main path forward. So if I click register for free, I get taken to the subscription card page, which is okay, but it's a little confusing because now I Thought I was going to register for free, but I have some other options and I have to click again to get to the free registration form. The better way to do it is to have that free link off of the article. Go straight to the registration form. There's no need to confuse and require another click to get here. Just take them straight here. Your first goal is to get them registered on your site. You'll get their email address, they'll get your newsletter, and you'll get them logged in. And that's the start of the relationship. Okay, we're back at the subscription nag. Now, if I'm ready to pay and I click to pay, I get offered the three options. The free registration that's on this subscription card page here doesn't need to be here at all because this is promoted through the article. And this is one thing you can simply remove off the subscription card page and that will help clean things up. The second comment is really about options. What we're seeing convert better is keeping the options to one. If you go to Netflix, you can sign up for a monthly recurring. If you go to the New York Times, they have a lot of products. You'll only get one option to sign up. So you have. There's a monthly recurring here. There's an annual recurring here. That's great, but I would make it one option. And also the benefits to subscribing. Now, the only thing I see here is to become a member and more content, and then I have to wait and see something about gear, but I'm not really sure what I'm actually getting. Now. I can read these bullet points, but I'm not. These are just bullet points in here. I'll show you a better way. So let's head over to small boats. If I hit the subscribe button, I get taken to this, what we call landing page. This is a sales page for the subscription. I get a nice intro from the editor. And then here in this box, I get all the benefits of what I get for subscribing. Now, if you're paying attention, you'll see that this is a bit of a sneaky trick here, where this is. Oh, this is the only subscription option available to the subscriber. And it also lets them sneak in a gift subscription. So for. For the Deer Hunter publication, you would want a similar approach. Subscribe for me or subscribe someone else, that is give a gift. If you're promoting gift subscriptions the way you should, you can expect about 20% of your subscription income to come from gift Subscriptions. So then once I hit subscribe, I get taken to the registration form and off I go. Let's take a look at Wilderness Living. They do something similar. If I hit subscribe, I get taken to the subscription landing page. In this case, there's a video which introduces the publication and then the benefits. A copy. Then I hit the subscribe button. So back to Deer Hunter. When I'm ready to pay and I'm logged in and I get the prompt to pay, this should take me to that subscription landing page which then sells the benefits of the gear discounts more clearly, sells the benefits of the last minute hunts more clearly, and warms me up to actually make the decision to pay. So the bottom line is give the reader one choice if you can. It will up your conversion rate. Okay, let's take a look at what things look like. If I'm logged in on the website as a free registered reader. This is what I get. Now what I like about this is that the upgrade message is here. And this is what we call state dependent menu. And this is easy to do. If you are not logged in, there should be a login link and a subscribe button. If you are logged in as I am here, then you have the upgrade message which should take me to that landing page which explains all the benefits of what I'm going to get if I pay. And that's that one option. Now I'm logged in here, I get to read all this content for free. And that's great because that's their model. But you can target your free registered subscriber to promote the paid upgrade. And you can do it two ways, very easily. One is with a header bar. So it's an add on that we have that lets you put a very thin little header bar with some messaging in there that only shows up to the logged in free registered user. And it can be simply a promotion to upgrade. It could be a coupon code, it could be a free trial, could be anything you want. Maybe it's a holiday, a trial for a holiday period. The second thing you can do is you could insert, let's say after paragraph number four or five, an ad that also has the benefits of upgrading that again only shows up to those that are registered for free on the site. In other words, if I'm actually a paid subscriber, I won't see it. It can also be displayed to the casual visitor that's not logged in on the site as well. And that's it. And so with really a few easy tweaks you can increase your conversion rate of your free registrations and increase the conversion rate of your paid subscriptions. Hope that helps.