The Subscription Page Formula: Best Practices Blueprint

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.

I'm going to share my screen here, goal here, if you're listening, and we are recording the screen here. So if you're listening to this via the podcast, I'd Recommend Hitting. Hitting YouTube and watching and looking at what we're. What we're going to look at. But I'll try to sort of. We'll try to break this down via audio as much as possible. And I'm going to jump right into, I think, one of the finest landing pages that we've. What we've seen and just kind of just, just start from, from the best, and then we'll kind of like. I thought it might be good to look at and talk about the details of each sort of components of the landing page. And the site we're looking at is the Civil War Monitor. They launched Leaky Paywall a few months ago, I think. And this is a. This is a print and digital component or print and digital subscription. And one of the things that really, I think the. The overarching theme. I don't know if you agree with this, but I think probably the most important thing with any landing page is to make the decision to buy as absolutely simple as possible. Yep, Yep. I've seen landing pages with nine subscription cards, 12 subscription cards, all these options. Yeah. And it feels like, yeah, you're giving a lot of choice, but. But it's actually the opposite. It's too much choice. It's analysis paralysis. It's, it's. It, it. It's. If you look at Netflix, you know, they give you monthly recurring. That's it. For a very good reason.

Yeah, yeah. All the major, like, paid subscription systems, especially like Wall Street Journal, for example. I was looking at that last night. Two options. That's it.

Two options. What were the two options?

I believe a monthly and a yearly.

Okay.

And they weren't kind of distinguishing between features. It was just, these are the two options. And here you go.

That's it.

Yeah, that's it. And it was, you know, the same on the app as it was on the website. There wasn't any fluff. It was just, here's how you sign up. That's it.

Yep. Yeah, that's. That's the way to do it. 1. I think one decision point is mandatory today.

You, you, you.

Okay, you got content. The content's converting. The newsletter is driving the readers to the content. You have great messaging upgrade messages are popping. Okay, time to decide. Don't, don't make, don't set them up to have to make a decision. Your reader doesn't want to make a decision. We're making too many decisions in life. We just need to look at it and say yes or no. Make it as simple as that to eat the easy mental load. Okay, so let's just look at the Civil War Monitor. Now the first thing I want to say is when it comes to a subscription landing page, you need to get your readers to that page. And if somebody. And you have a couple ways to do it. Really two ways. One is I'm new to the site, I'm looking, I'm here for the first time or pretty new. And huh, this looks really interesting. I wonder what it costs to subscribe. How do you get to the subscription page? Right, and that's where a button comes in. And ideally it's in the menu. And where. And if you're looking at your own menu right now, I bet it says subscribe and maybe in a link. But it shouldn't just be a link. It needs to be a button. You need to put a background behind that subscribe, tuck it over to the right hand side. If you're doing it in the menu, have the login text next to the subscribe button. That works really, really well. Don't, don't bury that. The second way to get to the subscription pages through the content. So you get upgrade messages. When you're reading an article, it gets blocked and it says subscribe or membership or whatever it says. And then you click to that to the next step. But if you're coming in cold, you need a landing page like at the very, very least. And that landing page needs to be rich with information. But the decision point on checkout needs to be super, super simple. Does that make sense? It does. Okay, so let's go to Civil War. So now they have their button right in the middle here, right up top under their logo. I think that's okay. It's pretty decent. I would probably, you know, and it's, it's up in the menu here. But I'd still buttonize it. But I think this landing page has a lot going for it. So if you're listening to this, I would head over. You could just go to civilwarmonitor.com and take a Look at it. But let's break it down. There's some elements here that every publisher should have. The first one is the intro. And this is where it's easy to kind of, I think, gloss over this. I see a lot of landing pages that, you know, may have, like, a few features listed in terms of what you get, but you, this is where you, you get the emotional, you get to appeal emotionally. They have a nice image with two Civil War soldiers and then a nice introduction from the editor with the signature. And it all feels. And it's all elegantly. There's a lot of white space here. It's elegant, it's friendly on the eyes. Not too much going on. Join our ranks. A good tagline. Speaking of taglines, if you're looking for a tagline, make sure you fire up ChatGPT and just tell it to create a catchy tagline for your, your content. I would literally copy your about page because I've reviewed a lot of about pages and just paste it into ChatGPT and say, Write a, write a great tagline for, for my publication and, and it'll ingest your about page and you'll be surprised. And then you can, you can tell it to refine. All right, that was a side note. Okay. So having an intro at the top, that's rich with information, very important. Okay. Next thing, next thing up are three subscription cards. What do you think, Tyler? Do you like. You like these cards?

Yeah, these are clean. Not a whole lot going on. If you're looking at this on their website, very pleasant look at. Not too many options. You know, when publishers have a print component, they often will include 5,000 options to receive that print product because that's what they're used to selling. That's, you know, that's how they started subscriptions in the beginning. In this case, what I really like about what they've done is they have this print, print only option, which sounds great. Maybe you don't really care about digital access, but you see this print only option, you subscribe to this, and it does come with digital, but they're not telling you that. Because people who want print probably don't care that much about the digital access. And they're not. And why that's important is because they're not adding all of the additional information on this card to explain that you also get digital access. Don't worry about it. You want print. You want print, Here you go. And then our digital product is next to it on the right. So.

Yep, print only. First card, digital Only second card, all access, third card, which gives you print and digital. I love the fact that the print subscription and the digital subscription are priced exactly the same. Yeah. 2495 for print, 2495 for digital. So if you're struggling with pricing on digital and print, keep them the same. It's paying for content, not for how the content is being delivered. Yeah, yeah.

And they're also not talking too much about the term. So they don't have this monthly option, this yearly option, this six month option, this trial option. It's. These are just the options. And if you look closely. Oh, these are yearly. But I'm not, not really a big deal. I'm not really focused on all of these different.

Right.

You know, terms. So.

Right.

Keep it simple. It's 25 bucks. Oh, it's yearly. Great.

Yep.

Keep going.

Yeah. So yearly. That's a good point. Now this is print and digital. You might be listening, and we'll talk about digital only in a second. But for. Regardless of whether you're print or digital, the annual subscription tends to outsell the monthly subscriptions all over the place, especially when you have a free registration set up, which if you don't, you need it now. But if you're taking people through a free registration, then they're on your newsletter that, you know, you're doing all the teasing. Like you're, you're, you're, you're teasing them, you know, day after day, week after week. And when they're ready to pay an annual just feels like it makes sense. Like, okay, let's just, let's try it for a year. Quote, unquote. Right. So focusing on annual helps with simplicity, helps the decision. Like I go to print only. It's like I'm not choosing monthly. Not typically. It doesn't make sense. But if I go to digital, there's no monthly option here. That, that's good.

Front load it.

Front loads your cash and it's just one less decision point. It's like, oh, okay, yeah, okay, let's try it for a year. And then all access, you get both. I also like the fact that, and Tyler, you pointed this out yesterday that there's three or less bullet benefits on each card. Right. Like, we've all seen cards with a, you know, like the mile list of features on it and it's, it's unreadable.

Right? Right. Yeah.

You know, personally, when, when I know, when I work on our own website and you have like, and we have, you know, with, with our software, there's a lot of features. Right. Attempting to, to just list all of them in one spot. And you do have to have like the, the special spot for all the features which does exist. But when it comes to like cards. Yeah. You pick the top three. Like what's really important to your customer. What, what's, what's the most. And it works because you can scan and you can. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So three. And the way they have it laid out with the checkbox, the check mark next has the bullet point and the circle is really nice, really elegant.

Yeah, it's quite clever. They're. Although they're using one check mark for each feature, you know they're including multiple features within one check mark.

Yeah, yeah.

Instead of lighting you up like at first, if you're looking at this on the screen, there's like maybe 12 or 13 features within one check box, which is pretty clever. Instead of listing these off one by one, you would have 50 different checkboxes.

Right. Yeah. So the singular. So on the digital only, there's only.

Two check marks, but the first one.

Is member only access to Civil War Monitor, including bimonthly website only digital history columns, weekly book reviews, photo essays, author interviews, subscriber only newsletters and much more. That's one bullet.

And it's fine. It works fine. It's small. The text doesn't, you know.

Yeah.

Isn't crazy. It's not overwhelming. It's.

Yeah. Right now let's. I want to flip to digital only real quick and we'll look at digital only. But um, I don't want to jump around too much. The digital. The, the advantage of digital only is now you can get really simple. So one option, there's absolutely no reason. Well, that's wrong. Usually there, there's very little reason to have more than one option. And if you can, if you can bring yourself to one option mentally like the mental load, your conversion rate will be higher. It's just the data supports it. It's what we see.

You.

You know, we're all just, we're all just too distracted and busy. Make it easy for your subscriber. And when, when, when I talk about mental load, it's like sometimes I'll see cards that have, have. Yeah, this is a good, good example. Right. So um, we're looking at a, a site here that has three cards on it. Full. It's all. This is all digital. This is full access yearly. There's a six month plan and a full access monthly. Now I know a little bit of the backstory on this particular Publisher and the six month plan actually makes sense for them based on the, on the topic that they're covering. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's in the medical field. Uh, but what I, what, what is what, what's breaking this setup is that there's a, there's a yearly option on a card and then there's another whole card with a monthly option. But mentally it's the same product. Right. It's digital access if it's yearly, if it's monthly, if it's quarterly, it doesn't matter. It's one card. It should be one. You, you're, you need people to look at it and say, oh, digital. Okay. And then when they check out. Yeah. If you have to have those options then, then on checkout they can choose, right. Or you can have like a couple of buttons in the same card. One that says monthly and one that says yearly. And then you can choose. But mentally the decision is, has to be a yes. No. Yes, I want digital access. Oh, monthly or yearly. Okay. That's an easier decision.

Yeah. I've even seen publishers have one single card. Nice and pretty. You had the big subscribe button, but underneath the card some tiny little links that go to other plans.

Yeah.

Should you want something, you know, different than what we're promoting at this point in time.

Yeah, yeah. And we'll look at the best digital landing page that, that works in, in a minute. Okay. So I think that's good for the cards as far as an element on the site. All right, Next thing, don't see this very often, but really important frequently asked questions. Right. So like I said before, your subscription landing page needs to be rich with information and, but the decision point needs to be super simple. So frequently asked questions is a place where someone can scan and just get some reassurance. Right. Like, can I cancel? Like, how do I cancel? Like that's a big one. Right. So I'm going to give you money, but I just need to know that I can get out without you, you know, making me call you or whatever. Send up a smoke signal and jump over, jump, oops or whatnot. And there's, there's actually, there's actually quite a bit of FAQs here on this page and they're all listed with little, little drop down arrows so you can expand and read the ones you want. So I'll just kind of read through them a little bit here. What is the Civil War monitor? What do I get if I subscribe? How do I access the website. What if I'm. What if I'm blocked? What's the difference between all access and digital only? Can I only subscribe to print? When will my magazine be delivered? Can I subscribe if I live outside the US I can't remember my password. What do I do? That's a good one. Can I upgrade? How do I update my mailing address? The one that's missing on here I think is can I cancel? What's the cancellation policy? So FAQs, good stuff. Any other question on here that's missing to be be asked? Okay, so, and then on the bottom here, which I think is really great, it's like, hey, you still have questions, then you can get in touch, right? So you have, they have a phone number which you may or may not want to do, but they definitely have an email address. So if you have a question, you can just click the email and send an email off. Okay, so this is a nice looking landing page, but it's missing one thing on it. We have a beautiful intro from the editor. We have the simple subscription cards. It's three, but it's print. So you know you're going to have to have a print option and a digital option. So you're sort of stuck with that. You have FAQs, you have an easy way to contact the publisher. What are we missing here? What's the one thing.

Good question. I don't know.

I think you just don't remember because we did talk about it yesterday. But testimonial, Testimonial. So find some happy readers, get some testimonials, add them below the pricing cards. You can have like three little blocks, maybe next to each other, 1, 2, 3. With a picture of the person at best with their quote. You could have like one sort of wide block that rotates through that. You just sort of load a few different testimonials in so it doesn't have to take up too much space. If you're in the, if you're in the B2B space, you could have maybe some businesses or groups that subscribe to your publication. You know, so basically that means logos on the site, you know, read by. But that'd be the one element that would be added to this. So great landing page. Especially if you're in the, if you're doing print. This is fantastic. But this totally applies to digital as well. In fact, if we go back to small boats, which is digital only, we'll see that they have the, the nice intro, the signature of the editor and then we have the benefits and bullets. But it's one card. It's basically one large card. And it's. It's simple. There's really a one. A singular checkout. And it's. It's annual. Okay, so that's. That's the overview. I wanted to sort of jump into a couple of other things. I'm just reviewing my notes here. All right, so I want to talk about something I call the two button upsell. And here we're looking at it. So we have a rich landing page for subscriptions, but we have a singular decision, ideally. And in digital only, you can pull this off. And that is. Okay, this looks great. I'm going to subscribe. You have one. One button that says subscribe. This happens to be an annual plan only, which I would recommend. Sell annual plans only. But if you look closely, you'll see there's another button next to. And this is. This is small boats. We've talked about them. This is. This is B2C business to consumer publication.

And.

I can. My decision is subscribe for me or subscribe for someone else. Give a gift. Give a gift subscription. This is a brilliant way to set it up if you're a B2C publisher. Because this doesn't confuse me at all. It's for me or someone else, like, that's. There's a clear delineation here. And just set it up this way. Now you may ask, hey, I'm a B2B. What do I do now? And if you think about it, you want to. You want to keep that delineation. A lot of B2B publishers are or should be selling bulk subscription groups to other organizations, schools, government, you name it. So you have subscribe for me, and then you have subscribe for your business or for your organization. Right. Really, those are the two. And I wish I had. It's a great landing page. Or somebody who had created a whole subscription landing page for group subscriptions.

Oh, yeah, I remember who that was. But they don't offer it anymore. Oh, okay.

All right. Anyway, it was. It was a great page. And I. You can. You can handle it that way. Or you could just go to a form. Basically a landing page with a form on it says like email message and just. And get in touch because it's typically sold, you know, they're more expensive and you're, you know, have a phone call, you know, talk to. Talk to somebody about it. So. So in the B2B world, it's subscribe for me or subscribe for your, you know, your organization or Your group or whatever makes sense for your publication. What would be, what would be good words for that button? Ask, Chat, GPT. Okay. All right. So that's the, that's the, that's the two button upsell on the, on your subscription landing page. The other, the other thing I want to call, I want to call attention to. I'm calling it the double discount. Now this goes to our favorite, favorite model. We're using the Salem Reporter. And their subscription landing page is super simple. There's not a lot of fluff around it and it's not as rich as I would like. I think there's opportunity for boosting the richness of this page as far as the other, the elements we talked about. But it works and it converts and it's really hard to argue with that. And again, if you wanted to, if you want to offer a promotion on your subscription landing page, this is the way to do it. Now this is a local news publisher. It's, it is digital only. And. But they're sticking to the rule of simplicity in a big, big way. There's one button and by the way, buttons outperform text links. You have to have buttons for all your call outs. There's one subscribe now button. And here's the way the psychology works. I call this the double discount for a reason. The pitch is first three months for the price of one. One of the pitfalls of any kind of promotion or discount is undervaluing your content. Right. So if you do like a. And Tyler, I know you, I think you dislike the $1 for whatever time trial. Right. Because I think that does make your content feel like a dollar.

Yeah. Well, and the churn rate is really high after the promotions typically. So it's, it might look great, you might get a bunch of signups, great. But they tend not to stick around because you've given away everything for nothing. If you're going to do a dollar discount, you'd be better off just running a free registration and collecting emails like crazy and doing that instead.

Right.

Versus gating stuff at $1 or, you know, a year or even a month. That's way too cheap.

Yeah, agreed. Yeah. $1 one that, you know, don't do.

Your.

You work so hard to produce original content that you know has value. So don't devalue it. So the psychology here is pretty interesting. So you have a discount that doesn't undervalue the content on this screen and you also have the double discount approach. So first three months for the price of one. That sounds pretty good. Now this is essentially pay 10 bucks for three months and then afterwards it renews at 10 bucks per month. So what you're saying is, yeah, we're 10 bucks a month, but we're going to give you two free months. You can pay the one month, we'll give you two free. So you're not giving money away, you're giving time away. Access. Time. Access away. So it doesn't feel like you're discounting your content even though it is a promotion.

Yeah, right, it does. There's the high converter, the churn rate's low. And I think the psychology around the $10 for three months. I think we've talked about this before. Which moves to $10 per month after three months. People don't tend to question it all that much. They see the $10, they know they paid $10. Oh, it's $10 again. Okay, whatever. It's, that's normal. And so it's not like you're going from $10 for three months to $59 or something. It's, it's predictable. People recognize it, they like what they're getting, they continue to stay on, on the, on board. And, and I've even seen people sign up for this three month plan and just be like, you know what, I'm going yearly.

You know, I don't, I don't need.

To pay $10 per month. I've even seen that.

Yeah.

Happen after, after a trial.

So what's the, what's the churn. Do you have any sense for churn rate after somebody signs up for the 10 bucks for three months?

I don't, but I don't know the exact number, but I know it's super low. A super low churn rate.

Yeah, super low is good. So. Okay, so I said double discount. So the first, the first discount is this. It's the, it's, it's the $10 for three months sounds good, right? Psychologically. Oh, there's a promotion here. I like that. I'm going to get a deal. Okay, 10 bucks, three months sounds pretty good. But then if you go and I can hit that subscribe now button and I can go off and pay. But that doesn't happen usually. What happens is they read the rest. And so right under the big subscribe now button, which is gigantic by the way, and beautiful, there is a choose a yearly plan and save 17% text link. That's really just normal text. And what happens here?

Yeah, so I haven't checked in a while, but at one point these little text Links that are underneath the subscribe. This ginormous subscribe button where this particular yearly plan was outperforming this. This. I don't know what, why that is. People maybe see this and think they found a secret or something or this, like, hidden deal that's underneath this promotion. I don't know. Maybe that's, maybe that's it. But that yearly plane tends to convert being in this textbook.

I think you're right. I, I think that. Well, what we know is that people read all the text on when they're ready to pay. You're ready to pull out your, your money. I'm. I'm going to read everything. Because now you're, now you're, now you're dialed in. Now you're laser focused. Am I getting the value? What's, what else? What are my other options? And they're finding the other options. And the fact that the annual plan is. Even if it were matching or even slightly less conversions than the annual plan, the fact that a big chunk of readers are converting annual is amazing to me. So this is the second discount, right. And psychologically, you're building momentum. You have your three months for the price of one. That's great. Oh, I'm interested. And then like you say, you find the secret annual plan that'll save you even 17% more, and you're like, oh, well, that's even better. So you go from good to great.

Yeah, just lock it in. Go ahead and lock in a 17% discount.

Yeah, yeah. And that's what people are doing. At least half, maybe more are doing. So it's the double, it's the double discount if you, and if you step back and look from sort of the top level, because there's a, there's a free registration approach tied to the newsletter set up here. So I come in to, to Salem Reporter. I read an article, and then on the second article, it tells me to register for free and I'll get the newsletter and that article. And I do that. And then I get access to that second article. And then on the third article, it's telling me to pay. I may or may not do that. Probably not. Some do then. But then I get the newsletter and then the newsletters. Obviously the links in the newsletter are driving me back to the articles and I'm getting more upgrade messages and I'm like, all right, well, okay, so they gave me a couple free articles. They're giving me the newsletter. You know, this is all. I'm teasing, teasing, teasing. They're, they're teasing this feels pretty good. Yeah, I think I want to. Gosh. Okay, let's. Let's take a look at subscribing. Ooh. Okay, so now you've warmed them up with the free registration. Right. So like you're nurturing and that's really what this whole success story is about in digital publishing is nurturing the reader from the first time they hit your site to when they give you your credit card.

Their credit card.

And so pre registration, that feels good. First three months, the price of one. Ooh, that feels even better. And then the secret link at the bottom. Wow, that's great. So you're just nurturing this person emotionally through the process and feeling really good about saving the 17% or.

Yeah, yeah. And if anyone wants to see how to do a newsletter, sign up for free on on the Salem Reporter and just experience their daily free newsletter and you'll get a good sense of why. Like, yes, they have a great simple subscribe page, but I think the key for them is the way that they treat their newsletter. It's very personal, it's very community oriented. It's what people want to read. Check it out. I think you'll understand why they do so well on conversions and retention.

I agree. Do it doesn't cost anything.

Just register and you can experience the entire funnel that we talk about all the time. Just sign up, sign up as a user for free, get their newsletter, get driven back to the site, hit that news that upgrade messaging and replicate it on your site.

Yeah. Copy. A successful model.

Yeah.

I talked to a publisher, print publisher, that was thinking, I think it was print news that was thinking about preserving the singular choice checkout, the annual recurring subscription for print and digital. And I haven't seen this implemented. I think it's, I think it's a great idea is have a single choice checkout and then you can opt out print on checkout and that would help keep things really slim. So basically you can, you could visualize an annual subscription in this way in a single card like this. And then you could have a link that just says, you know, get digital only and then click that and off you go. But mentally, it's one simple thing to look at. If you're doing that and you're listening to this, please reach out. Love to talk to you about it. I think that would be an amazing, amazing thing to do. One other just quick quickie thing here. Where am I? Where am I? So when you're doing the actual checkout, this isn't really a landing page. Well, in Catch magazine, which we're looking@now catchmagazine.com It's a fly fishing digital only magazine they're running. They have a single annual recurring plan.

That's it.

And super simple. And on their landing page they have the registration form on the left so you can just start filling stuff out. And then they have the, in a right hand column they have their, their logo and some copy and price. And so it's a very, very clean checkout process that front loads the form itself. You can pull that off super easy by using our short code for the registration form in one column and, and having the visual catchy content in the, in the right column. So if you're, if you want to get people right into checkout and you're not running a promotion, this is a nice way to, to set it up as well.

Yeah, one, one other small point too. On this particular checkout page, there's no ads. The menu's gone.

Yeah.

We'Re just looking at checkout. We're trying to focus people in. So if you've got pop ups occurring on your checkout page. If you've got ads rolling in, turn those off for all of the registration components of your site. And if you can turn off the menu, just have your logo at the top. Don't let people escape from this, you know, this page. You don't want, you don't want to disrupt. If they've gotten this far, there's a, probably a good chance that they might subscribe. So let's, let's not disrupt that moment.

Ah, that's a great, that's a great ending. Keep it simple falls right into that simplicity. Yeah, good point. Thanks Tyler. That was great. Hope that was helpful. If you have any comments, ah, send them in info@zine 101. Com. Talk to you next time.

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.