In a March report, The American Press Institute asked news publishers how much potential value they thought different retention strategies could have. The results show what aspects of subscriber retention are considered most important, but of more value it shows what publishers are not doing well enough today.
The biggest gap between what publishers deem valuable and what they aren’t doing well is in identifying at-risk subscribers—83.5% to 19%. The next biggest gap appears in using metrics to evaluate churn—82.6% to 28%.
The most confounding one might be—well, there are two. While 85.5% believe it is very important to actively encourage renewals, only 44% are “very” or “fairly” proficient at it. Now that would seem to be something we can get better at. The second one is also an action that would seem easy to do: track what subscribers read—but while 75.7% believe it’s valuable, only 30% believe they are good at it.
Let’s look at six possible solutions.
To actively encourage renewals…
1. Seek early engagement and volunteerism. Pre-pandemic, the Health Industry Distributors Association (HIDA) brought its board and council committees together just twice a year at in-person events. But then in our Zoom world, they increased those meetings to monthly. “We needed to understand their pain points and their challenges,” said Kelley Taft, HIDA’s director of membership. “We really focused on increasing those member touchpoints.” Wrote Associations Now: Taft “credits several new member councils and work groups, where member experts meet regularly to share real-time responses to the many challenges the industry is facing, as one of the biggest factors in HIDA’s improved member retention and engagement rate.”
2. Keep your newsletters strong. “The newsletter is one of those things that is going to bump [up your retention rate],” said Ed Malthouse, Spiegel’s research director. “The way someone running a newsroom should think is as follows: ‘I’m going to need to devote a reporter to create that newsletter. What’s that worth?'” At the Boston Globe, newsletters play a major role in building subscriber engagement, renewals and acquisition. Tom Brown, senior director of consumer revenue, explained to Twipe that “the team is currently running 30 newsletters and while for the existing subscribers they see 25% of the visits coming from newsletters, 15-25% of all newly acquired subscriptions are generated via newsletters as well.” In their Cooking From Home newsletter (pictured above), food critic Devra First wrote about cooking during coronavirus.
To identify subscribers who are at risk…
3. Target the unengaged. The Arizona Republic found that almost half of its paid digital subscribers were not visiting their website—and that group accounted for 50% of subscription stops each month. They used analytics to guide content changes that cut the share of unengaged subscribers from 42% to 26%, increasing retention as a result. “We began providing reporters with data on which stories were catching the interest of our ‘zombies,’” two API editors wrote. “We have to start thinking outside the box with platforms and storytelling techniques… What initially grabbed a zombie isn’t what will bring them back. We have to prove to them that we are worth their money.”
4. Track what your audience is reading. We recently had a webinar on the new content metrics. What was good to see is that, like The Arizona Republic, all three organizations represented on the webinar—Money-Media, the American Chemical Society and Industry Dive—have people and/or mechanisms in place to help the editorial staff “read” and understand the metrics. Now this may be easier to do for larger organizations, but it’s incredibly important.
5. Improve your welcome package. Almost everyone (90%) encourages subscribers to sign up for their newsletters and 78% send a welcome email. However, only some publishers send educational information about how to use their products (46%) or send personal notes from a person in the newsroom (43%). HIDA created a new member guide and a private page on their website with practical tips for new members. During the pandemic, they went away from sending out physical packets but then heard from members who preferred receiving something tangible in the mail. Like swag for virtual events, mailings can be exciting for us these days.
6. Incentivize staff. The Arizona Republic increased staff buy-in with a weekly award, API wrote. The staff nominated and selected co-workers who did something great that week to engage the previously unengaged—writing a story that attracted them, creating an artful tweet explaining why a story was subscriber-only, patiently helping a frustrated caller navigate customer service, etc.
