Gretchen Peck interviewed John for the most recent issue of Editor & Publisher, the news industry magazine. John discussed some of his work with paywalls and his excitement for driving subscription sales, online and offline at one of the best newspapers in North America. Check out the full story.
“We need to see social media as part of the conversation …”Mark Miller @MarkJMill has written a great story on trends in audience development. He quotes me and my work at Sandow as well as several other great audience marketers.
“We made our content the most prominent part of the website. This created an environment where our loyal readers could easily find and explore the news and analysis we’ve built our brand on.”For many years now, I have been working on a variety of b2b and “pro-sumer” magazines and news products here at Access Intelligence and elsewhere. As I have learned (and sometimes unlearned) subscription acquisitions best practices, I’ve come to understand all the rate-term-offer tactics that make up most control packages. I’d like to think I understand how and when to deploy soft offers, manage free trials and exploit a wide array of other direct marketing techniques. Despite all that fluency, all I really need to know now is how to not apologize.
In our pursuit of ever more responsive marketing offers, we have trained our audiences and potential audiences to expect deep discounts or worse. We have taught professionals that all business information is free–free from payment and free from having to truly qualify for the content. In effect, we are often saying to our audiences, “Oh please read our content. We’re not sure it’s worth much so here’s a big discount, a generous free trial…We’re sorry, we’ll leave you alone now.” And as we deeply deploy most or all of our content online, we have the added issues of the common notion: Isn’t everything on the Web free?
At a recent conference on online marketing, one of the speakers said that clarity is extremely important when selling subscriptions online. We’ve been taking this literally– basically saying to our content audience, “We’ve been working hard at this content, this news, this analysis…it’s good stuff. This is what it costs, and you have to pay to see it.” No heavy discounts, no clever offers (OK, a few clever offers) and no bait-and-switch when it comes to free subscriptions.
In b2b magazines, we have usually focused on managing the audience to maximize the quality of the BPA statement for obvious reasons. This means that in hybrid paid-controlled environments we’ve had to take a middle ground, flooding the space with free subscriptions or having extremely high CPO numbers for paid subscriptions. With our Web sites and online offerings bringing us new and exciting channels of sale for all types of customers, the message to potential readers and site users has to be even clearer, better integrated and more focused.
We have the tools and the technology to go way beyond forcing customers to purchase the way we want them to, when we want them to. Online and offline, we’ll use these tools to get our pay-to-play message out in a straightforward manner. Our no- apologies strategy affects our pricing, as well. We have simplified all our internal and external pricing tables, removing many special offers that were reinforcing the, “We’re sorry, please take a subscription…here’s a huge discount” policies of the past.
How have these new strategies affected our subscription sales? I’m happy to say positively. As we’ve been clearer about pricing, subscription options and what content is available, we’ve seen stronger Web site traffic, new customers testing and paying for our services and our traditional customer base paying more. So much of what we’re doing is basic direct marketing technique. Now that we’ve gotten our content marketing strategy back on track, we can focus on the downstream variables to truly exploit these opportunities.
