Maximizing Your Conversion Rate: Tips from LA Times, NPR and Reuters

4:30PM Aug 25, 2023

Speakers:

Keywords:

newsletter

people

audience

conversion

newsroom

data

subscription

work

questions

content

funnel

paywall

strategy

donation

la

donate

users

talk

signups

engagement

All right Interesting.

First off the runway I didn't realize how much time we had, like seven minutes ago

don't even know.

Good

Day digital telephony but of course the standard manual

Good morning still two minutes I could have had five

a copy to James Brown she's going to make a beeline for a session. There's a lot of overlap

Supreme Court

on All right I think that we are a couple minutes past one now and I see a few more people still trickling in but I think we can probably go ahead and get started. Hi everybody. It is nice to see all of you. I see a few familiar faces out there. But thank you for joining us today. We are all super excited to chat with you. I'm joined by three absolutely fabulous panelists up here. They're going to be doing the majority of the talking today. But before I turn it over to them to introduce themselves, I definitely want to introduce myself as well. My name is Brad Brad striker, and I am a senior customer success manager at Chartbeat I have been there for about two years now. Prior to that I was a TV investigative reporter. But I promised these panelists that I put those days behind me so no trick questions from me today. I did not make the same promise for all of you though. So as journalists, we're going to count on you guys to ask some questions at the end of this as well. I'm going to run through a few questions. Myself. We're going to talk all about conversion strategy, conversion analytics, a few things along those lines. And then again, we're going to open it up to all of you at the end. We're really eager to hear what questions you have for them, what insight they can share, etc. With that, I'll go ahead and turn it over to some of our panelists to introduce themselves. Why don't you guys start with telling us your name, the company you work for your position, maybe a little bit about your background as well.

What we're trying to figure out how close or far to be from that. So if you guys could give me a signal, you know when I'm two miles closer, closer,

there you go there. Oh

my gosh, okay. It's gonna be a long session. Hi, I'm Sam, Melbourne Weaver. I work at the LA Times. I'm assistant managing editor for audience, which means I oversee like a weird bundle of departments. newsletters, news partnerships, social search, the infamous 404 But LA Times content team bunch of random things, including sometimes bits and pieces of our subscription strategy. So yeah, I Oh, what are their background? Do you guys what else do you want to know about me? I'll just pass it.

I am Claire Rodgers. I'm from NPR. I'm in the analytics side. And basically I oversee our digital analytics for our website npr.org. Also for some of our station digital platforms, I think there's some station folks here. If you can say hi, after Yeah, I would love to chat, a public radio. And I also cover analytics for our fundraising efforts.

I'm Elaine Penyet. I am the newsletter, audience and revenue Strategy Manager at Reuters. So I like to describe my role as like the bridge between commercial and editorial. I'm actually on the commercial side of things. And I work very closely with editorial and marketing product sales and to make newsletters happen.

Fantastic. At Chartbeat for those who aren't aware, we do website analytics specifically for news publishers. I know there are a lot of you in this room who either use Chartbeat now have used it in the past. But increasingly we're seeing a growing number of our publishers who are focusing more and more on conversion analytics. Obviously a large reason of why all of you are here. big reason why all of our panelists are joining us today to chat. But well, the first thing I think that we can start with, as far as you know, kicking off the conversation for each of your individual sites. Talk to us a little bit about what are some of the conversion events that you all are most interested in tracking? I imagine that it goes a little bit beyond subscriptions. In some cases. Samantha Do you want to start?

Yeah, I mean, I think signups for things like newsletters is paramount. We know that people who are subscribed to newsletters tend to stay engaged longer as regular subscribers and just tend to more often be subscribers. People who sign up for like a comments accounts are registered on our site in any other way like that. That's certainly what we love. I don't think you can quite counted as a conversion event. But social media engagement hopefully leads to some of that as well. So those are kind of the main things besides the like traditional digitalized subscription that I care about.

And subscriptions, obviously pretty big for the LA Times two very important.

Yeah, we have some overlap there with kind of those like micro conversions and you know, that indicate engagement. But for us, of course, our content is free. So the ultimate conversion is a donation since we don't require a subscription to consume our content.

So for newsletters at Reuters, we're primarily looking at signups mostly from registration. So for our registration process, you come to the wall you fill out your basic information with that we recommend three newsletters according to the industry that you're working in. So 60% of registrants to reuters.com are actually newsletter subscribers, which makes up the bulk of our subscription base.

So as we look across the variety of different conversion events that are happening across all three of the websites that we see here today, talk to me about what goes into the decision making process of when and how you decide where you're going to put one of those calls to conversions, right, whether that be a paywall in the instance of driving subscriptions, whether it be a newsletter, signup, a donation link, etc. Where and how do you decide where those go? Elaine, why don't we start on your end? Sure.

So we have signed up calls in all the standard places like I said, registration, the right rail of articles, our newsletter signup page and then we have landing pages for all of our newsletters. Most of our subscriptions, as I said come from registration and also the rate are from our main newsletter page. And we focus on making our signup process relevant and easy for people so we want it to target people based on their industry for registration, and also their interests based on what they're reading. So for the signup source on the right relevant article, if you're reading a healthcare article, we're going to recommend our health newsletter to you. So we want it to be frictionless and relevant to what you're interested in. But we're always looking for new signup sources. So most recently, we've been testing house ads in our newsletters, we've been cross promoting. And some of our newsletters have overlap overlap topically so we're be we're targeting people specifically based on those interests. Again, we've seen a really good bump so when we don't have inventory from advertising clients, that's what we're using the ad space for. And we're also going to be testing a sentence in articles. So again, if you're reading a article on the auto industry, we're going to recommend signing up for auto file. We have tested that in the past and we've seen success during the cup with sustainable switch or newsletter last year, so we're going to try it with some other sections and if it's successful, apply it to our other newsletters. So

yeah, NPR. I don't want to speak for the decision makers. And again, I'm on the on the analytics side, but I can talk about the data that goes into those decisions. So for donations, one of the things that I analyze and we provide to those who are running campaigns is his understanding of propensity to donate. So what that means is that we analyze our current donors and look at the kinds of behaviors that they exhibit prior to donation. So we can kind of create a profile of an ideal donor, or maybe there's a few different types of donors. And then we can go back and look at people for example on our website, and find those users who haven't donated yet but they're showing those behaviors where, you know, maybe they're going to be ready to donate soon. So basically, that allows us to target potential donors, when they're ready to donate where they might be ready to donate. And this allows us not be annoying either and like constantly asking people to donate and also allows us to ask throughout the year when people again are ready to donate and not have to wait till like an end of your campaign.

That sounds great. I wish we do not have a propensity model of any kind, but that sounds awesome. So I hope you talk about that more. Um, we have like a litany of things we have a we have a paywall that activates on your second click refreshes as often as Google Chrome refreshes its cookies. So you can only beat it to a certain extent. So there's that normal paywall. We asked for, you know, we prompt people to sign up for newsletters once they get to a certain sort of scroll depth and an article that's sort of set on the content. The contents of the content level so you know, a sports store is going to prompt you to sign up for the sports newsletter and then we also do a lot of the same sort of internal promotion, whether it be the ad placements on our website or within newsletters. We're always trying to get people to like do more things, to get more addicted to all the things that the LA Times offers.

I think one of the universal truths about online media in general is nothing really stays the same, right? Everything is constantly changing. What was true a few days ago is probably not true anymore. How are you all as you decide where you're putting these, you know, conversion opportunities. How are you determining how effective they are? What are you using to measure those like do you guys have KPIs that you're using? What are some of the benchmarks? Claire, why don't we start with you this time?

Sure. Yeah, cuz this is my wheelhouse. Yeah, for the for those who are working day to day it's different the metrics we're looking at, than the ones we necessarily are reporting to, like the higher ups for example, you know, obviously the higher ups you know, leadership, the board, they care about those top line numbers, how many donations we got, at the end of the day, how many newsletter subscriptions came through, but those are just so variable depending on you know, audience levels, news, fatigue, economic factors. And so for us to really understand if our specific strategies or campaigns are working, you know, it's going to be conversion rate, which is what we're talking about today. And we have a few different offerings for different types of audiences. And how they can support us. So we make sure that those conversion rates are kind of all growing, they're not necessarily cannibalizing each other or affecting each other because they have they do kind of have these discrete audiences they're targeted towards and we look at every step of the way. So even as granular as once they get to a donation form like what, what might be stopping them, what are the obstacles to them understanding where their donation is going, for example. Other metrics we use are actually kind of these tertiary metrics of what we call leads or known users. Because we're free. We don't have people necessarily logging in. So we don't have a lot of email addresses, like maybe some other publishers do. And so we we want to get to know our users better. We want to collect that contact information to be able to ask them to donate for example. So with getting newsletter subscribers, we are also tracking this metric called leads or new known users and sharing that across the organization so they can see the impact of the work. They're doing towards engagement.

She looked at me so in addition to new signups, we're tracking total subscriptions, engaged subscribers open and click through rates, revenue, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, but we want a real holistic view paying close attention to engagements and loyalty as well. So we are also looking at average session the number of users who come from newsletters to reuters.com. You know, users who view three or more pages the average pages they view bounce rate all of that. We have found that our newsletter audiences highly engaged 75% of our audience is engaged with our newsletters and an engaged user for us is somebody who opens or clicks in the last 30 days. But we've also found that they are highly engaged on sites and loyal as well. So they're twice as active compared to other users.

So you found a correlation between somebody signing up for your newsletter and then how engaged they are and how loyal of a visitor they are in the future. Yes.

Yeah, we found that too. I mean, the more newsletters subscriber is signed up for the longer they stay a subscriber so that lifetime extends we have all the same metrics but bounce rate and everything. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it really is like trying to get people to do like, again, like sign up for the cinematic universe of the LA Times rather. than just one specific product helps, obviously. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it does change all the time, particularly the sort of more volatile social and search referrals and messing with the sort of entry point. And the paywall for the entry point has been sort of a new experiment for us at the LA Times, particularly on Reddit, where we switch to a reg wall from like the standard paywall, so again, that's like leads and a different type of conversion. So yeah, we experiment with that all the time. And our subscription marketing team is really focused on conversion rate as well as just kind of cost per click for the ads that they put out. So that can be telling as well.

Do you guys feel like you're constantly like reinventing your conversion strategy? Like are you making changes to what you're doing, etc? Does that happen pretty frequently?

I think so. I mean, we're always trying to get new signals from readers more than anything. It's also really tied to the content that we're putting out there. So yeah, everyday new experiment.

Talk to us a little bit from from especially like the three of you. I'm sure everybody in here is eager to know best practices you guys have Right? Like what has worked for you what has not worked for you are there any like universal truths that we would like impart wisdom on to all of these people about things that they should be keeping in mind when they're thinking about conversions on their sites? Elaine, do you want to or Samantha you want to go? Well, yeah,

I mean, I think, Gosh, universal truths? No, absolutely not. I spent some time talking with audience editor from the Financial Times yesterday and her audience is totally different than our audience. So they expect things to be hard walled and, you know, premium, if you will, whereas that Lifetime's audience sometimes converts more for something that we've made free because it's a public service. than something that has a hard paywall on it. So I know I don't think there's any sort of universal truth to any of this. I do think I mean, most of my time is spent thinking about how our content relates to what our readers need, and one and translating that for the newsroom and then saying, using conversion as an explanation for yes, you can connected with readers, you gave them something that was valuable for them rather than thinking more about the sort of financial aspect of it. So for me, the sort of only truth is that you have to keep thinking and learning about what your audience wants from you and then adjust from there again, because sometimes a free thing makes people want to help you out in an NPR donation kind of way. And hardwiring something turns them off. So

I'm going to answer this question a little bit differently. Since you want to go first.

Sure, thanks. Well, as I mentioned, registration has been the most successful conversion tool for us. But we're looking beyond that to like, we can't just stop at conversions. We want to see that these people are engaged and clicking back to site too. So we do a lot of AV testing. We survey consistently throughout the year, and we apply what we learned from those. So for example, many people many of our readers vocalized in surveys that they want to see summaries and bullet points and headlines and links and make it more easy to read. We tested that and we saw that that was true. Our click through rates increase and we're applying that across our newsletter portfolio with sections that are dedicated to summaries and bullet points and whatnot. We did a survey of our flagship newsletter the daily briefing which my colleague Judith will be speaking to in a session after this if you're interested. But we offered three prototypes, and gave people the option. What would their preference be? It wasn't what we expected, but that's what we launched with. So we're listening to our audience, frequently, reaching out to them we also have reengagement campaigns for all of our newsletters, which aren't just about re engaging, disengaged people but also lists quality which helps with deliverability and cleaning the lists and engagement and all of that. And we also have welcome emails for all of our newsletters. We're going to be experimenting with a more elaborate series to try to engage people from the get go. But all of these things work together to create an engaged audience and to have people coming back to the site and building that loyal readership.

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up engaged audience. That's what I want to talk about. Kind of stepping back a little bit again, from the audience analytics perspective. One thing I noticed at organizations, not just NPR not just in news, but in other organizations as well, is this kind of focus on the bottom of the funnel where like that final step of getting someone to convert and then also the top of the funnel, so just to make sure we're all on the same page about what the funnel is, it's basically visualizing an audience's journey or like their status of relationship with us. So at the top of the funnel, those are people who are just, you know, reading one story occasionally, they're kind of fly by users. They see one post they listen to one podcast episode once in a while, and then as you go down the funnel, they're getting more engaged, right, so they're coming back more often reading more stories, subscribing, doing stuff cross platform. And then finally for us, like that's that ultimate conversion of of donating is the the bottom of the funnel. And so like I said, there's a lot of like rallying behind the bottom of the funnel and there's entire teams dedicated to that. And then there's a lot of focus on the top of the funnel which is because it's often kind of like represented by numbers that can get kind of scary if they're dropping, or really exciting when they go up. So that would be just like, total users on your website. And that number is very much fluctuating based on those fly by users by those top of the funnel people and what doesn't get as much attention is like everything that happens in between, right? So when someone comes to the site for the first time, they're not going to magically become a donor eventually, like they have to do so many other things. And for NPR, for NPR, with a donation model, it can take years and so I'm always pushing through all the stuff that happens in between, but I might not see the fruits of that labor for a very long time. But I'm very much committed to that. And so it's not as exciting. But it's something that I'm always pushing for within NPR outside of NPR. And so those are things that basically get someone to go down one rung down to the bottom of the funnel. So for us, we know on the website, people who will be moving backwards from people who donate we know people who donate are more likely to be very, very loyal, consuming multiple pieces of content, etc. And so then how do we get people to be very loyal? We know that they have to read multiple pieces of content in sessions to want to come back to how do we get them to read more stories, right and so that, you know, can we design the website to make it more conducive to those longer sessions? Can we have better suggested stories with catchy headlines? How do we just improve our content in the first place to get people to recirculate and stay on the site? So it's much like the smaller engagement pieces, and it creates this kind of sustainable middle of the funnel to eventually hopefully be kept more donors.

I cosign that like 100% two metrics that are like widely and regularly reported to our newsroom staff, our return user rate and how many our readers yesterday were, you know, multiple read multiple stories, how many came back multiple times yesterday? And then what percentage of our subscriber base read that article, right so that we're kind of focused on retention as well as that middle of the funnel stuff that you're talking about? I also think I do have one universal rule which is like, if you're worried about converting, you should be equally if not more worried about retention, like keep the people that you already have. We often focus so much on bringing new people in while we have this huge churn problem. So you should have a retention strategy, probably it's probably more important than having a conversion strategy.

At Chartbeat, we're constantly pushing people to focus on loyalty and retention. So that is music to my ears. I love to hear that. Again, as a former TV reporter, it's a bad habit of mine that I would continue to ask questions. All day long. I do really want to get to the audience questions, though. So the last one that I will ask you all before we turn it over to the crowd to kind of ask some questions that they may have about conversion, when you guys are looking at what the future of measuring and implementing conversions across your newsroom looks like. How do you anticipate the balance of you know focusing on coverage of topics or conversion strategies that is maximizing conversion rate maximizing revenue versus you know, focusing on what needs to be covered what what should be covered, etc, even if it doesn't necessarily drive the highest conversion? How do you see kind of the revenue side and the new side working together in the future? Elaine, do you want to take this one to start?

Sure. So in my role, I'm the bridge between commercial and editorial. So I'm working equally close with editorial as I am with sales, and Reuters. We are striving to have a professional audience specifically in the areas of sustainable business, auto health legal, and the editorial strategy is aligned with our newsletter strategy. So if we are committed to providing deep coverage in sustainable business, we're going to launch a sustainability newsletter. And that ultimately helps with engagement and impacts revenue because the higher the engagement, the better the quality of content, the better the sell to our advertising clients. So I would say the tension between editorial and commercial, we strike a really good balance at Reuters. We have a cross functional team at Reuters that's working on newsletters. And it's very cooperative. We have open discussions weighing commercial value, editorial value, the resources that go into a project that we're discussing. And I think that's the key like we should consistently have those discussions openly. And we should also evaluate the work that we do consistently throughout the year, like, are we providing that commercial value and that editorial value? How much how many resources have we committed to this newsletter or project and sort of see where you land? It could be helpful to have a spreadsheet where you lay out that value and see where you stand. You know, we do have newsletters that have low commercial value, but have high editorial value we have newsletters that have high commercial value. So it value it varies, but we're always having those discussions openly. And the the key thing is that we're all working toward a common goal of you know, high quality content for our audience, building a loyal readership and also building that revenue because we're not going to be able to continue to provide that high quality content to our audience if we're not able to fund it. So

yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think I've been to a couple different conferences. I've had sessions specifically about this, like this firewall that is in between the newsroom and revenue, whether it be sponsorship or development or marketing. Because you need that balance, like you said, and there's that fear that revenue could start driving content decisions in a negative way. And so I think it's Samantha you mentioned as a new convention is to but like we are trying to go towards a common goal and we're right now kind of working toward working through the sensitivities. So we're, we're about to bout to start sharing conversions data with the newsroom with chatbots tool, basically showing like the the newsletter signups that are associated with content consumption. And so if we just like hand that to them, there might be a concern that we're now evaluating their stories based on how many conversions that produce which is not the case. Whether it be newsletter signups or donations. I think of it as like a tool to help them understand that it did resonate with users because the view is just a view, maybe time on the engaged time also shows that they want to read more on the story. The conversion indicates like I want more of this in my inbox, right because that great or a donation would be you know, I appreciate this so much. I want to say thank you or I want to support this so I'm here can continue to make that coverage. So I think like Laney said with open communication, it's it's not just giving them that data but meeting talking about it talking about as newsroom leadership so they can talk about what their staff and understand that it's a it's a tool. It's not an evaluative or punitive type thing.

For the record, I did not tell her to shamelessly plug Chartbeat conversion tool in that but I do appreciate

um, yeah, I think that it's like kind of great to have a subscription based revenue model or consumer revenue model. Because we're we are on the same page with our revenue folks, right? They know that's the way that we want to get our money and it works. And the thing that we love about LA Times is that our most successful stories when it comes to conversions are also at literally just like our best content. It's the investigations. It's the local reporting. It's the local arts reporting that no one else can do are literally like the most important stories to someone who's like purely in this republic service. Are the things that get the most subscribers. So I'm sure that's true for most newsrooms, and it kind of puts everyone on the same page and on the same team, which is really great. How do I see the relationship evolving? We're starting to really staff up teams to sort of exist between sort of the more traditional business side and the newsroom so that there's an easier way to say, hey, we're looking, you know, there's opportunity to add ad revenue to this thing that you're already doing that is built around driving subscriptions. So yeah, I think it's slowly getting better.

It's good news. For sure. All right, my friends, I am empowering all of you to now ask any questions that you might have for our panelists about anything conversion related advice about strategies that you may want opinions on, anything that you have considered in the past that you're interested in asking do you have one to start?

Life after cookies? How does that affect your strategy and how are you planning for it?

No, newsletters I don't know.

I can start. Again because we don't have people necessarily always logging in or no website. We do rely on cookies. And so it's going to be kind of taking some hints from websites that do have paywalls and getting people to log in. We don't have a strategy around that. We haven't made any decisions but we do recognize that we're going to have to start collecting first party own data where the users are giving us that data. So basically opting in to login and let us track them through their login instead of rely on cookies and it's going to be it's going to take a while. If a lot of resources have to go into that. But I think once we can kind of like I think everyone's on the same page that that that is such a need and that it's only going to get worse in terms of that visibility. Like we are ready to have way less visibility than we did four years ago. That those resources will go into it. We'll be able to make that happen.

I would say similarly, because the bulk of newsletter subscribers come from registration, we have a lot of that first party data. So I think looking for opportunities where you can ask the audience for that data is important moving forward. And we do it in other places as well beyond registration and a little bit in their surveys. Not a whole lot because you don't want you want them to get through their survey but but yeah, you're gonna have to start asking for that first party data. And going from there

are these conversations that you guys are having pretty frequently in your newsroom like about what life will look like after cookies and strategies around it? Or is it kind of just to learn as we go type of thing?

I don't think we talked about it that often. To be honest with you. I mean, I think you know, California how to I forget even what the name of that law was GDPR Yeah, GDPR laws, kind of, we just like gave up like two years ago. So we're like, Yeah, whatever. Let's not even build any new strategies around it and start to collect first party data. Yeah. Shout out Kelsey. Thank you.

There's a question back there.

Hi, thank you so much for sharing these insights. I feel like I always learn a lot at OMA and especially from you all. I guess my question is, you know, thinking about the range of organizations that are represented here at oh Na, and, you know, the great work that you all are doing at your respective organizations. What's one like key recommendation that you would share for everybody that could be really scalable, from you know, the one person newsroom to like smaller and mid sized newsrooms to anything as big as Reuters or the LA Times or NPR? Thanks.

I mean, I think you have to make contact with the other side of the business and just learn about them. I think just like the the only thing that's applicable to everybody is that you just have to understand the language that either your newsroom uses or your business team uses because you really do have to collaborate if you're going to have a subscription strategy. And literally, it is a different language. different terminology. So that's, that's where I would start I mean, the other cop out answer sorry, Vicki is experiment. Because it's not one size fits all.

It kind of goes back then to that bridging the divide between, you know, the commercial side, the revenue side and the news side, then

yeah, and I mean, it really does come down to you like, not taking orders from each other, but like being okay, great example. So we started up sort of a project like two years ago, where we pick one piece of content or per day 123 pieces of content per day. Slap on like a hard, hard paywall, and then do as much as we can to promote it across the board. We needed significant buy in from the business team to help us just with, like the ability to do that and to market it and to talk about it and to scale it up, as well as the product team. And that's us driving the strategy that's the newsroom driving this strategy. And it's like one of the most successful conversion projects that we've rolled out. So yeah, I mean, and we learned a lot from them. They learned a lot from us. And it comes from talking about what are your goals and what are our goals and how can you help us right, it doesn't have to be one side pushing the other around. It's just a matter of being on the same page.

So I would say to start with a smartly crafted signup process that focuses on relevancy and ease. And from there, you want to also determine the goal of your newsletter or the behavior that you want the user to take. Preferably before lunch, but again, even if you don't have that discussion for you for lunch, like you need to constantly be evolving and iterating as you go and learning from the audience listening to them. That's important. And testing again, a B tests everything that you can to really learn before you take action. And I think one thing about newsletters that I've really learned is that it's like a puzzle and if one piece of the puzzle suffers, the rest does as well. So you have to ask a lot of questions along the way. Why are people doorman not opening or clicking ever? Why are people becoming disengaged? Why aren't new people signing up? You know, naturally, some people are going to drop off. But why is that happening? Or why aren't we able to offset that with new signups? All of these things are connected, and you need to sort of work that puzzle out and fit the pieces together. And you really can't slack in one area because if you do, the rest of may suffer and your engagement may suffer, those conversions may suffer. So yeah, evolve and iterate I would say it's probably the most important to just pay close attention and evaluate the work that you're doing.

Yeah, I don't have a lot to add. Because what I'd say is very similar. I'll just give like an example where, you know, I think some that like legacy organizations, older organizations, can maybe be stuck in certain ways or assumptions about how things should be done. So for example, the longest time we didn't want to put up any we don't have any, we don't want to have a pop ups of any sort. We thought they're really annoying. They disrupted the reading, experience all of that. But we finally decided to do it with donations. And I mean, our donations like I don't remember what the numbers were. But it was amazing the amount that people decide to donate just because we asked them like much more aggressively than we ever had before. And so that obviously takes by and that takes experimentation as you said so just always questioning, especially as everything's changing in the digital world. Yeah,

I think that's a great point. And it's good to remember that your newsroom is not your audience. Like tell yourself that every step of the way. We have the same thing from the like, LA Times reporters are like super users of the website, so they get popups constantly and they're like readers hate this. Readers hate that. They can't find a simple example. This has readers hate this. And in fact, we do actual reader surveys, 90 days after people become subscribers, and most of our subscribers come via those pop ups. And they never mentioned anything about it because they're not seeing it. As often as we are right so just remember that like you got to talk to like your actual audience and don't listen to your that's new for the newsroom. You should explain things to them and get their feedback but remember that they're they're not your target audience.

Hi. So I'm launching a newsletter that's similar to the Latin X Files. We Yeah, I would. I would love to pick your brain. But um, we can do that offline. But I was wondering if so it's just me. I don't have a product team. I have different teams that I'm working with across the state that I work in, but I'm wondering if you have any advice for me, and also, if you can talk a little bit about how the Latin X Files has, what it's done for the LA Times in terms of like, audience acquisition and retention.

Yeah, and maybe clarify for people who don't know what that is.

On the Latin X Files is a joke about X Files in the name you are getting it correct. It's a newsletter once a week newsletter written by Fidel Martinez. Who was an engagement I always like to remind people he was on my staff when he started that newsletter. It's it's about and for Latin X millennials and just this kind of a culture take very, it's very sort of commentary driven. It's very casual. It's very fun and funny. So my advice is to like have a voice and stick with the voice. I think that's the strength of Latin X Files. And I think also you have to remember that like I don't know what organization you work for, but like the LA Times, does not have a great reputation with Latino audiences for very, very many good reasons. And so it's important to know that like, just because we started a newsletter aimed at a certain audience, because we hadn't neglected and mistreated them they didn't. Like they're not going to like sign up right away. So Fidel works really, really hard to explain and promote for literally, I mean, he's still doing it, but he went really hard. expanding it beyond the newsletter itself. For other platforms and audiences to kind of like vouch for it constantly. It was like half marketing and how frightening the newsletter in an organic non like cheesy way. What is it done for us? I mean, we started a whole new vertical around the newsletter. So we constantly get feedback. I mean, we're here to talk about talking about subscription strategy and like anyway about the newsletter. So that's what it's done. For for us as a newsroom. It's really built a lot of trust and because that newsletter is so good and true to the Latinx experience across the country. We have people who want to come work for us on those kinds of projects who read the other things like give us a chance with other content because they trusted us to do that newsletter. So it's only done great, thanks. We don't see like any abnormal rates of conversions for the newsletter or for related content. But it's I mean, we're thrilled that it's like on par you know, so

I think Carla had a question.

High as two parter was good feedback. One, you guys mentioned earlier about the metrics that matter. What are some sort of smoke and mirror metrics and maybe vanity metrics that you've run into that may give you false insights and or some like, you know, data, illusions? And the second part is, then how do you best or do you have any recommendations for communicating? Good, you know, the metrics that matter to your newsroom? And effectively and what that cadence might look like?

Yeah, those are both pretty big question. I mean, okay, so for the first one, especially if you're working on a new project, or a new approach on something, there's a lot of new data and it's really easy to like paint, whatever picture you want to, especially if you want to paint a good picture to support you know, be like you guys did great or whatever. For I like there's, here's a specific one. We have a metric that tracks kind of just someone who is indicating a desire to donate because they kind of, they either land on our donation form or they click donate or something like that. And that number can fluctuate a lot based on what's going on in the news that day, or just general audience trends. And so, you know, you don't want to freak out when that number drops you don't want to be overly excited when it goes up. Because at the end of the day, the conversion rate is also going to kind of shift with that and donations are going to kind of follow more of what we expect, based on campaigns based on the time of year etc. But just generally being really, really inquisitive with the data so that you're not making conclusions, especially ones that look a little bit too exciting. For that you sometimes need dedicated analysts or at least someone who's really interested to really look at every facet, break down the data as much as you can. I'd be happy to talk more about this too after in terms of communicating the data that's it can be hard because there are people who are in doubt of the data. There are people who think they already understand data and they find it themselves. And make their own conclusions. You really have to know your audience at this time your audience are your stakeholders, whoever in the organization you're talking to, and their communication styles. You know, I think it's different if you're talking to the people who are directly affected like the people running the newsletters or campaigns versus Talking to your board. Right. So there's different levels of simplification. Maybe that sometimes you want to show as much as many charts as you want because they need proof. Right? Sometimes you don't want to show anything because they trust you and you really don't want to overcomplicate things and distract them with numbers. And so yeah, and then and then just making finding allies. So like let's say, there's a team maybe like in the leadership in the newsroom or whatever it may be that you're having a hard time connecting with and sharing that data with you know, finding at least one person in that group that you know, is data savvy, at least interested in data. You have a relationship with in some sort, share that with them ahead of time, they can help you anticipate what might be triggering. What might not really translate properly, and then there'll be in that meeting too and can help kind of facilitate if something does go wrong, and they can advocate for you. When you're sharing that.

That's That's very nice. I pick them the main people who are definitely going to think that I'm wrong and want to root against the whole strategy and just go like what is the sound like to you and get that feedback? I think you yourself have to be the most skeptical person about the data we had. We'd like rehearse this, as you can tell. And we were gonna go down a rabbit hole about attribution models, which is basically like how do you count what a conversion is and everyone's got a different way to do it. So like, find out what that is and know every detail of it before you talk to anybody else about it, because they'll catch you if you are kind of fudging it. And yeah, I think like if you're if you're talking to a newsroom, you have to tie it back to like their work. You have to ask yourself what you want them to do with the information before you start to talk about it. Do you want them to act differently to create different types of content that write better headlines like what is it and tailor your messaging around that rather than like, we're getting money unless they get a cut of it? That's not really helpful to them, right? So again, know your audience. Absolutely.

Any other questions from you have one touched on a little bit

as you kind of talked about pop ups and rate of return. But is there things that you don't get captured by the data? Maybe some of the negative externalities and how does some how do you, you know, decide what not to do and what dark patterns don't get in there, even though they might juke your stats?

Yeah, what don't we know? A lot of things. I mean, we have a pretty consistent churn rate. So we kind of think that people don't really unsubscribe for any other reason that they just don't re up, if that makes sense. But that's hard to track and that's hard to know. What's total mystery to us is like, what exactly spurs people to buy a subscription because we have some people who literally interact with LA Times content for two years, on various platforms for various reasons and then buy a subscription and we're like, what made you do it this time? And then you have other people who kind of impulse buy who see an article for the first time ever, and they're like, I have to read this. I want to buy it now. So so that's a huge like, there actually is so much we don't know about like why someone makes that decision when they do. And then sort of like when do people make decision not to renew one thing I would love to and this is maybe answers your earlier question about how we hope this all evolves. But this is a hard sell for a newsroom. So don't tell my newsroom and I said this, but we at the LA Times have like a six month special. It's $1 for six months for the first six months of your subscription which controversial we can all have opinions about that. But what I would love is like okay, well when we see a big cohort subscribe, you know, a couple 1000 people subscribing one day for one article, what are we doing at that six month mark to keep them going or did we need to do it at three months or did we need to do it at five months and how do we time those things to remind them why they signed up in the first place? If we think that's actually why they signed up. So those are things that I wish we had more insight into.

You said $1 subscription for the first six months is controversial. Why?

I mean, it's like it's so funny. It's controversial in our newsroom again, because there's like language barrier and because they don't, they're like I'm here to serve the public. Like I don't care about your money, except for when I want to raise just, you know, fair. So it's so funny because sometimes like $1 for six months when we want to put a hardball on someone's story. They're like, No, no, but then people can't read it. And we're like, it's $1. What are you talking about? And then other times, it's like, I worked so hard on this story. And the New York Times subscription is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like there's always so much comparison. So it really depends on people's mood or kind of what they cover honestly, but I tell her for six months is like not a lot of not a lot of money. And in fact, $4 A week after that is also not that much money. Unless it is right. Another thing to know is that so many of our like subscribers and you were talking a lot about propensity models. One of the biggest parts of that is like our people subscribed to other news outlets, we tend to all be going after the same people. So that's an interesting struggle too, which is why not all of us can have the exact same price point.

That's super interesting. Yeah, I think for us, there's a couple things. One is that we don't just talking about the audience funnel. We don't truly understand that funnel because we can't see first of all cookies, but also we don't have a lot of cross platform visibility. And so we kind of have to make some assumptions based on data right? We have we don't just have digital data. We also have survey data to understand the full picture of someone's journey. And part of that that's also really difficult to understand is like, or if you're familiar with like the halo effect. So like there might be something that does contribute to someone's final desire to convert, but there's nothing that indicates that that happened. Like there might have been some sort of copy on some, I don't know, asks that they saw at some, like some marketing campaign somewhere and like they just saw it, and it's not like they took any action at that point that we could point to. Or at NPR, we know we have state we have member stations and we put their logos. If you're localized to that station, they're up there next to our logo and people who are localized to that I I believe there's a halo effect where they start to understand the business model that there are stations that when you donate donations go to stations, but again, we have no way to track that. And so yeah, it requires different types of research. It requires us putting ourselves in the audience's shoes but yeah, ultimately but don't know.

And with newsletters, I would say and I think most people that work in newsletters would agree that data is pretty limited. And it can be pretty challenging. We work with the sell through data data that we get. We use Google Analytics, we do what we can but there's definitely gaps and a lot of questions and in particular we have some new that newsletters that specifically drive to the site. And then we have others that could be consumed just in the inbox. And there's not a great way to measure the success of a newsletter that's going to be consumed in the inbox. We can't measure Pete page squirrel or like death. We can't like how do you mean we have discussions about we believe that those people are loyal and highly engaged, but how do we prove that? So I think all you can really do is like I mean, you could you could do surveys to answer questions, of course, but like all you could do is really the best that you can with the data that you have and continue to strive to answer these questions and find ways and work with teams in your, in your company to answer those questions and really share as much of the story as you can like going back to your question with newsletters, totals if you only share total subscriptions, you're missing the point. You're not sharing with the author's anything about engagement and what they can do to improve that or to change whatever they can do. So, so yeah, you need to just have a full story to tell and present to the teams that you're working with and try to get where you need to be.

Yeah, I think like subscribers are so confusing, honestly, like, just something to think through depending on what type of organization you work for. Like LA Times Research shows that people subscribe. And one of the main reasons that they tell us that they subscribe is for our foreign coverage. But I can see the readership. It's not matching. Right, which suggests that people are subscribing for some sort of public service motivation. Right? They're like, Oh, no, we want you to like be there and pay attention to it, but I'm not gonna read it every day. Like that's stress, you know, whatever. So I so I think it's it also presents challenges for the newsroom, right? Like, okay, well, hold on people say they're interested in is there's a way to rethink this so that it connects more so we can win on both angles, but you just really have to think through like what are what are you really seeing and question every every part of it for sure.

It's not that that data is not valuable in some shape or form. It still is. But if it's just removed and you have no context, then what are you doing and also open rates with newsletters after MMP? They're not as accurate. But that doesn't mean that you abandon it entirely. But you also you pay attention to it while also shifting to click through rate, which is ultimately more valuable because you're driving back to the site to so again, you just really need to look at everything holistically.

And now we're winding down here. Are there any last questions from the crowd or the audience? Is there one back there? Sorry, I've got a color that I may not be able to see you.

Thank you so much. I love what Samantha said earlier about know your audience and from a newsroom as our audience base heavily coming from social media and also I know that all of your newsrooms have established like a media presence, a social media presence. So my question is because a lot of news consumer now gravitating towards, away from reading the news and more towards getting the news through social media, especially video and photo content. So do you have any recommendations for any alternative strategies to invite people to subscribe and donate via social media? Or maybe like an effective ways to like engage this audience that's becoming less and less inclined to read to subscribe to your traditional newsletter?

I mean, I think you have to figure out what's connected what what they're connecting with on social and try it on your site. Like why would they come if like, if you're gonna watch a tick tock, and you're gonna love that tick tock? Why would you come to the website where they have like, the 17,000 character breakdown on it, like, you know what I mean, it's like you're not offering them the thing that they came to social for, are they they follow you on social force? So think about that. Of course, we haven't done that. That's just an idea. And I also think you have to, like be okay with the fact that sometimes your social is just there for social. Like, I think that's freeing a storytelling. It's not bad, right? That's why people come to work here. They want to get the word out. They don't. Again, they don't get a cut. Right. So that's fine. Um, I also think that there's different ways to engage or whatever if you want to be like crass about it. I guess I want to be crass about it if you want to, like make some money off your social following. There's other ways to do that. People buy stuff from Tik Tok people click through on the links from Instagram, there's these apps have shopping mechanisms. People are not not spending money there. So there's, you know, there's a way to do that depending on what you cover.

Awesome. I think we're just about out of time, if I'm not mistaken. Thank you all so much for attending. Thank you to our fantastic panelists, for giving us so many good insights. I think a few of us will probably stick around after this. If anybody wants to come up with individual questions not to volunteer you all on the spot, but I'm sure they would be happy to answer some of those. Thank you, everybody. I was you

have your phone number

data or

anything like that. dashboards that something's like story and like every day it's updated. It's like, I'm trying to like be is engage time and it kind of translate that data for

them. So basically, like highly

engaged and then based

on just the time but also the workout. Under that, like where people came from

so yeah, so

it also brings in the better data.

So I think that's more for the day to day

and email, emails to go out to different schools. So like, it'd be like the switch to get like a daily like podcasts. Email. So

they don't have to like dashboard or ask for design.

But and there will be like, points

or like attempts to try

to like you know, certain desks are working their team someone like this is a hard

lesson. Yeah.

Ethics is your thing. I remember this and these conversations are like that. Like, we're talking like a special some people like

they want to lie

just generally Yeah. You guys.

Charlie, just so frustrating. nights ago like yeah

yeah, also Yeah. I mean, it was so so yeah, so I'm the deputy editor there. Good. Insights to pass on, specifically to Metro stations. Because I know sometimes showcase