Special Episode: Publisher Mastermind | How To Convert Your Casual Readers Into Paid Subscribers

Welcome to the Paywall Podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall Podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com and now for today's episode. In this special episode from our Publisher Mastermind series, we reveal a framework framework that converts casual readers to your website into paid subscribers via a free registration. We've tested the touch points in the UI in order to show you what works best. The results from this framework are shown at the end, but if you're listening to this via our podcast, you may want to catch the video. Please note the Q and A sessions at the end are reserved for Leaky Paywall customers. Enjoy. Tyler's here, Jeremy's here, gang's all here. I'm going to set this up and I just want to welcome you guys to our first ever publisher, Mastermind. This is pretty neat. I've been thinking about doing this for a while, getting customers, users of Leaky Paywall in and then sharing best practices, the things that we work really hard on to help all types of publishers convert paid subscribers. That's really our mission. And today we're going to talk about setting up a conversion framework that's going to generate more paid subscribers for you. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you this framework and then I'm going to show you the results of a couple of. Couple examples on what actually happens here. So we're recording this session. We will share it to customers. If you're logged in on our website, you'll be able to get access to it when it goes out on our blog. This. This will be about 20 minutes of presentation, and then we'll open it up for. For Q and A. So if you have questions as you, as you, as. As I speak, please use the chat button. I think it's called the chat in zoom. And then just start. Just drop your questions in there. And then Tyler here is. He's gonna be in charge of either interrupting me or we're gonna save these questions for the end. So that would be awesome. Okay, so you guys can see my screen. Let's. Let's jump into it. Oh, okay. So the problem. Some time ago, a publisher told me, you know, what do I do here? I have a lot of traffic that comes to my website, but I'm just having trouble converting paid subscribers. And fundamentally, I think that's the challenge of most publishers because publishers are good at generating traffic. But making the leap to getting somebody to pay for a subscription has been a big challenge. And yes, you have a lot of visitors going to your website and you have a lot of visitors going away from your website. And why is that? Some of it has to do with. And if you go and ask your best friend to take a look at your website, you might see that there's some pop ups that, you know that show up right away. And I, there's, there's, there's some offenders, but there's things like newsletter pop ups and browser notifications and ad blocker pop ups and all, all sorts of things that get in the way of what I would suggest is a seamless reader experience. Okay. So the solution is really building a framework to capture and nurture. And what I'm going to, the recurring theme for this is going to be drawing the line with your readers that hit your website. Okay, so this is a little bit of a review. If you guys, any of you guys follow our podcast or have read our blog articles, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll see. You, you probably have seen this before, but it's really important. I just want to review it really quickly before we get into the, the examples is you basically have three buckets of readers. You know, you have the readers that hit your website and no matter what kind of paywall you have set up, they'll, they'll pay you. They love you. They'll pay you. Here's my money. And they tend to subscribe early and then you have a lot of random traffic that hits your website that will just never subscribe for, for, for a lot of reasons. But the sweet spot are these readers that come to your site. They're real humans. They like, they may even love what you do. They're just not ready to pay you. And there are a lot of, a lot of reasons that get in the way of payment. Not just financial, but just, they're just not ready. Right. And so this is the opportunity and what, what, what? Keep in mind that if you, if you nurture these, I call them super casual readers properly, they will subscribe or a percentage of them will subscribe down the road. Okay, so this is the framework. Some of you may have seen this before. It's a very important framework. It works incredibly well. You have your casual readers coming in from Google and social. Typically, to start, they land on your website, they should be reading an article. Like, let's say they come in from Facebook or Google Search and they land one of your articles, you should, you should let them read that article without popping anything up to them so they can read in peace. And I was thinking about this and I was thinking, okay, well, when's the last time you went to an article and were and were not assaulted by some form of pop up? Right? It's like if you actually read an article and you were not assaulted by a pop up, it was kind of a nice experience. You felt good about it, right? But you get to draw a line in the sand here because you need, you, you need. And you want to engage these readers. And that's where the free registration comes in. It's a piece of friction that you purposefully drop in so that on the, and I will suggest the second article that you, that someone goes to, they see this, hey, register and get access to more content to this article specifically. What that does, of course, is when somebody registers and they go through this piece of friction, which is intentional, that that email address ends up on your newsletter. Right? And the newsletter's job is to every day or every week, and I would say no less, send those readers back to your, your articles on your website, which then triggers the upgrade messaging. And there are ways to do that. Okay. All right. So I talked a little bit about first article being free. This is, I know that some publishers like to give away a number of articles and then trigger a registration prompt or trigger a subscription prompt, a paid subscription prompt. But we've tested this a lot. And what works best is you offer. You set the leaky paywall meter to one free article, let's say per month for 30 days. And that's it. And assuming I have seen and read the first article for free and I go to the second article, this is what should show up in the article content. Some model of this. So let's, let's unpack why this works so well. Readers, readers, fill this out. Now. This is using our, our quick register extension. And the, the concept here is to keep the subscription funnel extremely simple for the reader. So there's no, there's no math involved in making a decision. There's no looking at, you know, two buttons or three buttons or, or multiple choices. There's really one clear path here, and the path is that the story is free for you, which speaks to the motivation of the reader. They want to read this story. That's their primary motivation. And in order to do that, they drop off their email address, they drop off their password, and they hit submit the copy here. Is important to create a free account and you get more of your news or your magazine articles directly into your inbox. So they know that they're going to get on your newsletter. That's the main push of this free registration and this. We've been testing different shapes and sizes of this and this structure works really well because it's just, it's one button. Submit. You know, sign up now. If I'm already a paid subscriber, I'm looking for a login link. You don't have to tell me to log in. I know I'm paid subscriber and if I'm not logged in, I'm looking for it. So just having a simple text link up top. Already a subscriber log in here, that's all you need. The bottom link, this is optional. Subscribe for unlimited access. Readers don't really click this. I talked to a publisher yesterday who had an idea of. And they're leaning into. It's a B2B publisher. They were leaning into sponsorships heavily and they wanted to use this space to promote a sponsor. Like the free registration would be sponsored by, you know, the newsletter. The, the free article would be sponsored by whoever they, they get to sponsor. Okay, so that's the pre registration. This is, this is the first step. It's one free article. That's it. They have to register. And I know you guys are squirming, some of you anyway because I've seen it. Okay, now let's say I've registered email address goes to mailchimp or goes to whatever email service you're using. And the quick register unlocks the article. If you're not using this, I'd recommend to grab our conditional display notice which is an extension we have. And it's super simple and it lets you output this little message, this bar here and just type in the text you want upgrade your account. It's just an elegant way to remind anybody who's logged in as a free registered reader that, that they can upgrade for full access. And that's it. This, this bar you can set so it only shows up to the free registered reader. Okay. Okay. Your newsletter nurtures. So the, the concept here is that your newsletter is sending your readers back to your website over time, over and over again. And the upgrade message, which is what you see here is something that they need to see 10 times, 15 times, 20 times, 5 times. They need to see it a number of times, typically on, on average. And it's, it's. This is a, this is a nurturing Process. Some people are, will, will subscribe earlier in this process. Some people might take a year. But it's, it's a process. And let's unpack the upgrade message here as well. Again, it's very simple. There's one button, one thing to do and one thing I want to sort of lean in on because I see this, I see this mistake happening over and over again is that most businesses, not just publishers, but most businesses sell their features, right, of their, of their products or services or whatever. And selling a feature for, for a publisher is great. You know, get, get unlimited access. Get the, get the newsletter, you know, early. Get the, get full text in your paid newsletter. There are a lot of features that you can, that you can promote and those are good. But what's great is, is when you speak to what, what the benefit is to your reader. I mean, how are you making your reader the hero in this relationship? Right? So this is a pretty good example here. You know, you reach subscriber only content support us stay informed. Okay, so if I support this publisher, I'll stay informed and I'll get local news that I can count on. So that's a benefit to me, right? You want to really focus on your reader, on that subscriber, stay informed with our award winning coverage. Help us hold officials accountable. This particular publisher does a lot of work with, you know, check reporting on what's happening in town hall and helping the community understand what the ramifications are. Get 24, 7 access support transparent journalism practices. Be a supporter, Enjoy our clutter free digital experience. So what I would suggest is homework is look at your free registration, what, what that looks like and look at your upgrade messaging and what that looks like and just copy what's here. Just copy the approach. I mean your content's different, your approach might be a little different but, but this works. And one of the things that. Yeah, I'm going to get to that in the next one. Okay, let's talk a little bit about. One more, one more comment. You set the meter to one free article. When do you show this next message? Right, So I come in, I register, I get the article, I go to the next article, I get the next message. In other words, it's one and one. So what works the best that we have seen so far is you set the meter to one free article and then the reader gets one more article and that's it. They have to pay. So it's not, you know, the New York Times started a long time ago, 11 years ago. I think it was with 20 free articles per month, right. No registration required. And then they've sort of tightened and tightened and tightened and tightened. And now if you go there now, now you have to register to read something. So they figured out that the registration is the key to conversions. So you have to draw the line here. That's the theme here. You have to take a breath and really draw the line. Say, look, you get one free article, but that's it. Okay. All right, let's switch gears a little bit. That's the free registration. Let's talk. I, I want to show you a couple of, of really good subscription pages. This is going to make you squirm too. I promise. We're going to go back to our old friends here at Small Boats and I want to unpack this subscribe page to you. The bottom line is they offer one subscription choice. That's it. And I know some of you are print publishers as well as digital and. But the, the concept here is don't make your readers do math when they're checking out because I can't tell you how many subscription pages I've looked at or I'm trying doing math, trying to figure out is the monthly better than the annual. But what if I get the. What if I get this the membership level or there too many options in life. One offer. And you can, you can. If you look closely, you'll see that there's actually two offers on this page. But the, the mental weight is really just one offer. So let's go from top to bottom. First of all, just a quick note in your navigation. Make sure you have a very clear subscribe button or membership button in your navigation and then a login link next to it. Buttons increase clicks if you don't have a button in your navigation, you need to go put one in right away because you need. People need an easy way to. Oh, I need to subscribe for full access to understand that this, the way that Small Boats sections this and they've been testing this for, for a long time is they have the benefits. It's a, it's a benefits paragraph. It's a warm welcome at the top and then the features at the bottom. This sort of one, two punch works really, really well. I'm coming in. I'm considering subscribing. Gee, should I subscribe here? Here's, here's the emotional reasons, here's the features and then really it's one choice. I subscribe. But wait a second, there's another choice. I don't know if you can Read this. But this is give as a gift. But that's not hard to. That's not hard for my brain to calculate. I think, oh, it's either subscribe for me or subscribe for someone else. It's a pretty easy calculation to make. Okay, the other, the other secret here that I'll share with you is that if you go to their website and you click subscribe, in other words, you're not coming from an article upgrade message. You're coming. Maybe you're maybe been here a few times. Maybe it's random traffic. You hit subscribe, you get to this page, you go straight to this page, which has all the benefits and the features laid out. So you're not gonna. You're gonna make sure you get your, your message across to somebody who hit subscribe. If you go to smallboats monthly.com, which is this website, and you run out of articles and you get the upgrade message, you go straight to the registration form. You don't go to this page because you've been nurtured through the, through the subscription funnel so that you know, you join the email list, you're getting the newsletter, you're getting sent back to the content. And the day you decide to hit the upgrade message from an article takes you right to the registration form. You skip this and go straight to the form and fill out your payment information and the registration. The free registration has the added benefit of having that reader's information already in. So all they have to do is put a credit card in. Okay, let's take a. This is. And small boats falls into the magazine long form content category. Okay, let's look at one more. This is news, news publication, very different. But if you go to their subscribe page, you'll see a very different approach, a very different offer. But it's. It's really like doing math. It's just one. It's one offer. It's like I have this subscribe now button. That's. That's really all they're promoting. And this looks like this might be part of a bunch of offers, but it's not. It's just one offer. Now, if you look closely, you'll see there's actually two offers because they sneak in a. This is the monthly plan, they sneak in an annual plan and save 17%. So what this does well is it keeps things super simple. It brings the pricing forward so people know what they're paying. That's good. And Tyler, you worked with Selling Reporter pretty closely. I think you told me that. I think that this approach results in about 50% annual subscriptions, even though the monthly is the big winner here. That's right. That's a. That's an interesting piece of intel which might suggest that you would switch the two offers and make the annual the big one and the monthly the. The small link. Yeah. Okay. All right. And they. I'm personally not a big fan of discounting trials, but these guys made it work. They, they. This works really well. First three months for the price of one. You pay 10 bucks, you get three months, and then it renews at $10 per month for them. It works really well. So if you. If you've been thinking about and you can't resist the urge to do some sort of promotion, this is a good one. Okay. Okay. I'm just going to. Because I know everyone's squirming. Well, some of you are squirming about how tight this approach is. But yes, you. You want to set your meter to one free article per month. So anybody coming in just gets an article, no registration necessary. And then, then the. The next article says, register and you get it for free. And that's it. You get the one free article, and it's set as one free article per month. And essentially what you're giving away is one free article per month in any case. And that's it. It's really tight, but it works. It works really, really well. One of the things that you have to keep in mind is you guys have awesome newsletters. Like, your newsletter is awesome. The free newsletter is great. It gets. It gets sent to my email box and I get to see it and it's like, oh, I might not read it every time, but I look at it. Sometimes I read it, Sometimes I find an article that's awesome. Then I click and I get reminded that I need to upgrade and pay for full access. So the val, the free newsletter you have, is a huge value to the reader. Yes, you're being restrictive on the website, but you need to remind people that you are. You. You need their support. Right. And if you look at your Google Analytics, you'll see that one. You know your average visitor views when somebody comes in per session per time they come in is about 1.7 page views, 1.6 page views, 1.8 page views, something like that. So you need. You need to stop people on that second page view. Otherwise they just go away forever. And that's a big chunk of traffic that's doing that. So stopping people with the paywall is really, really important. That registration needs to be really tight. Okay, so let's look at the results of this. This is, this is two, two publishers. One is news, one is magazine, and they have this exact framework set up. The one in one framework set up. They've been running it one for a very short period of time and one for a long, a longer period of time. So this news publisher we helped launch less than 30 days ago, they have a fair amount of traffic to their site. And in less than 30 days they have attracted a little over 300 paid subscribers and a little over 3,000 free registrations with this approach. That's pretty good. That's almost 10% the ratio paid to free. And now if you look. And by the way, this is our Insights feature. I don't know if you've looked at these charts, but if you go to leaky Paywall Insights, you'll be able to get at this chart. The blue line represents paid subscribers, and the pink line here represents free registrations. And if you look closely, what you'll see is, you'll see a relationship between the, the amount of free registered readers versus paid readers. There's a spike in free registrations, there's generally a spike in paid subscriptions. Okay. And then this is a magazine publisher, very different numbers. You know, this is the long form content results. And you can see again, there's a, there's a, you know, 30%, over 30% relation, you know, new paid subscriber relationship versus the 200 free subscribers. And if you look at the relationship of the chart, you'll see, generally speaking, if there's a spike in free registrations, there's a spike in paid subscriptions. And what we have found is a lot of, a lot of subscribers do subscribe early in this framework because they've land on an article. You're not, you're treating them well, you're not popping up anything. They read the article, that's great. They go to a second article. Now you draw the line, oh, you got to register for free. I don't want to do that. Well, maybe I really want to read this. Okay, here's my email, here's my password. Boom. Okay, you got the article, they're on the newsletter. And then they get to the third article and they're like, oh, okay, this is pretty good stuff. And then they go and they pay. It doesn't happen all the time, of course, but it does happen as these two lines would suggest. Okay, so I don't know how long we've been here. A little more than 20 minutes, about 20 minutes. So three things to do 1. Clean up your subscription messages Again. We're going to post this video on our blog. Just make sure you're logged in to LeakyPaywall.com and you'll be able to see it. And so clean up the free registration message, the paid subscription message. Simplify your subscription offers. I know this is a big blip, but if you can keep your readers from having to do math when they land on your subscription choices, you're going to find you're going to convert more. I would, I would suggest just try for 30 days. Sell one subscription for 30 days. If you're a print publisher, offer a print and digital and let people opt out of print if they don't want print. Same price though. Keep the pricing same and then tighten the paywall so it's one meters on one. Free registration gives you one one per month. That's it. Okay, that's the presentation. Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription Strategy, go to LeakyPaywall.com see you next time.