A Leaky Paywall consultant (Pete Ericson) reviews flyer.co.uk and gives practical recommendations to increase subscriptions and retention. Key advice: make all subscription plans recurring (including annual), use Churnbuster to manage failed cards, simplify checkout by removing WooCommerce in favor of Leaky Paywall, create distinct free vs paid newsletters (using Mailchimp tag mirroring) and tighten free-content access by requiring free registration and gating more content to drive conversions. The consultant also suggests changing CTAs to promote free sign-ups and using in-newsletter full-text content for paid subscribers.
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Hi Johnny, this is Pete from Leaky Paywall and thanks for writing in with your question and I'm going to answer what are your best practices and tips on how other publishers are sending reminder emails for subscriptions? I thought I'd answer that and some more after I took a good look through your website, which is flyer.co.uk really excellent publication. I can see you're squarely focused on flying in the uk. The website is clean, full of content, great call outs for subscribing and making it easy to sign in. And I have a few thoughts here for you. As far as retention go, you're sending out quite a lot of emails before and after something a subscription expires and that's great. If you wanted to send me some of your if you want to send me that email stream, that would be great. I'm happy to take a look at those and dig in a little bit further. The easiest thing I'd say the lowest hanging fruit though that I would recommend is on your subscription plans. Make them all recurring, even your annual plans. Then you can focus on credit card expirations and cancellations and just let those annual plans renew automatically. We use Churnbuster here. We love it, it's reasonably priced and it really does an amazing job of following up with with customers and having them update credit card numbers and such. So that that would be the number one thing I would recommend. The other items that I'd like to cover is your newsletter itself. Now I understand you're using WooCommerce and Leaky Paywall together on checkout and Woo adds an extra layer to the process. It does work, but if you could remove the Woo layer and just use the Leaky Paywall checkout, that would give you a number of benefits. One of those is is creating a free newsletter versus paid newsletter which would be a value add to your paid subscribers. And also you would be able to use your free newsletter and upsell your subscriptions more aggressively. I'm not sure exactly how you are doing this now, but what we're seeing in the trend of paid or premium newsletters is essentially when somebody subscribes through your free registration, which I do see you have set up that would send Leaky Paywall, would send the free tag to mailchimp and then you would just target the free list in mailchimp and send out those excerpts for your content to them. And in every email you'd have the upgrade messaging to pay for full access the premium newsletter. The paid newsletter then of course does not have any such advertising on it for subscriptions. And what you can do easily enough is produce full content in the email itself. So if I'm a paid subscriber, I would have the convenience of getting all the articles in full text in the newsletter. That might be. I don't know if it's practical, but that would be a really convenient. And we've seen that before with other publications way to get it. Because then I don't have to click and go to the website and log in if I need to log in. I would just have the full text of the articles in a newsletter. And the way the leaky paywall mailchimp integration works is pretty, pretty slick so that we call it tag mirroring. If a credit card fails, someone cancels, the tag gets changed from paid to canceled. And then you can still send your free newsletter out to that canceled. And of course mailchimp, you can set up auto campaigns based on triggers like that in mailchimp easily enough. Okay. The other thing I noticed is that if I move around your website and I read articles, a lot of these articles which are not feature articles are, are free. And I read five, six, seven different articles. I didn't go any further. And I was getting any kind of trigger to register. So I'd say at the very least, set the free registration as a requirement for your free content. But what I would do is I would get the feeling that you're a little too generous with your free content. I would not only add the free registration, but I would also, after a certain number, require a paid subscription, your free content. And that's something that we see when publishers tighten up their paywall. With leaky paywall, we do see paid subscriptions increase. And of course, that's not about retention. But it is certainly effective to build a bigger base right from the start. The other thing I would do as well is if I go to, let's say I'm going to go in and read some feature articles. Let's pop up this nice menu that we have here and flyer club latest. I assume that's premium. And let's go into an article here. Okay, great. I get to read an article and then we'll go into another one. And this one's. Yes, this one's going to tell me that I've reached the free article limit. Now, currently my only option is to become a member. This is great. You have a button here. Buttons are very compelling. I hit become a member. Now, I have some choices, but if I'm a casual visitor and I'M coming in from Google search or social sharing. I'm really not ready to make this decision. It's this is a lot of information at one time. What you want to do with the subscription funnel is really take folks directly to the free registration. So this button here would simply have a join for free sign up for free. And the benefits of signing up for free right here in this message would be get X get a few extra articles per month and I would change the language to that. You don't have to call out three just say a few extra articles and that lets you change on the backend without messing up your copy on the front end. And and also the newsletter that you'll definitely get the newsletter and the extra content and that's the free registration. Now you could certainly, you could certainly have, you should have a login link in text probably underneath for those existing subscribers and you could have some copy to join right away. But most the the flow is pretty straightforward these days. You want those casual readers to you want to capture their email address and hit register. So when I hit this button become a member which would will now say join for free or something like that. I'm just going to click on the basic free option is you'll take your readers straight to the free registration and then they can fill this out. The free tag gets added to mailchimp and now you have that that new free registered reader that you're going to be sending the newsletter to over and over again driving them back to the website to trigger the second message which is the upgrade message and that's the one the new message you'll create in leaky pay wallet. Now it's going to look like your first message but it's going to have the hey join up, get our premium newsletter, get our unlimited content and why you're going to make the UK flyer's life better which is really the benefits you want to promote. So those are my thoughts for the website. I think you have a great start here. I think if you make those changes you'll find a boost your free registrations which will just boost your paid subscriptions because that's just a straight ratio 1 to 1. And if you pull WooCommerce out of the woocommerce layer out of the signup process that will clean things up. It will also let you leverage mailchimp a bit better with the free newsletter and paid newsletter. Maybe there's another reason you need woo, but at this point it looks like that might be worthwhile. And if you want to talk further about this. Absolutely. Happy to. And I hope this helps.
