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good morning everyone. I'm gonna go ahead and get started. So my name is Carrie biomedical and I'm a product manager at the Enquirer here in town. As promised, this is a highly interactive session and we will be splitting out in the group so I think we'll figure out how the overflow will work at that time. But welcome to the workshop on building a pipeline of future subscribers in a world of tightening paywalls challenge that I'm sure a lot of us are facing there is a piece of paper a handout on your table that you can use for the exercise and there's also a glossary on the back for any jargon that may come up. So to begin with subscription news organizations, especially those making the digital transformation, the inquirer included have conflicting goals. On one hand, we have aggressive short term digital subscription goals to keep the lights on this requires converting lots of non subscribed users today. And then on the other hand, we have ambitious five to 10 year goals to become full fledged digital subscription businesses. And that requires introducing new users to the brand to build a pipeline for the future. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar to you to your life. So we create scarcity, tighter pay walls to generate conversions and hit these short term goals. But some users aren't ready to pay right away. The young younger users that highly valued subscriber of the future may not have money to pay for news right now they may not prioritize paying for a subscription at this point in their life and a paywall. can impede habit formation. So if a user comes to the website once or twice over a few days or your app, whatever the product may be, they can't come back for a month or more depending on your paywall, and that you know, limits development of a routine. So how do you build a pipeline of future subscribers? Well, I don't really know. The spirit of this workshop is to work through some of these challenges together to share knowledge. And we're going to use this mural board to do it. So we want to start with a challenge. A real example from folks in your group it can definitely be be paywalls. An obstacle to more engagement with non subscribed users at your organization. And we want to think about what are the behaviors we want to encourage from non subscribed users? What are those actions that we want them to take? What are the tactics we can use to encourage these behaviors to non subscribed users and how might we measure the benefit of these tactics on customer revenue longer term? How can we draw that direct line between engagement in the short term and eventual subscription? So we really need to be able to validate two hypotheses one that by doing more engagement and giving away more content in the short term, we're going to get more money in the long term, and that we're not going to hurt our short term subscription totals because people are already getting what they need for free. And that's kind of been the challenge and a lot of work. I've been doing is working with analytics to design tests that prove the case that we're not hurting ourselves now and that by doing more engagement, we will have more warm leads, so to speak, for eventual conversion and then let's talk about blockers. You know, what are the blockers to getting these tactics off the ground? And how might you address them in your organization? And let's help each other figure some things out. So you know, feel those blockers could be it could be resource constraints. It also could be misaligned incentives, you know, between departments or just general departmental misalignment in goals. So, let's think about some of those blockers. So I'm going to use a use case from the inquirer our service journalism to walk through a few examples. Service journalism, for folks who may not be familiar is news that you can use to solve problems in your life. It's a shorthand for, you know, whether it's finding a place to eat finding activities for your kids or figuring out how to get a parking permit or navigate the city. So at the Enquirer, the primary role of our user of our service journalism is to introduce a top of the funnel search audience to the Enquirer. The audience disproportionately comes from search it's young, 18 to 44, female and local. And it's for the most part subject to this a lot of the same paywall constraints as the rest of our content, though, we do have slightly looser paywalls for evergreen service content that was published over 30 days ago. And we're testing strategies for getting this largely non subscribed audience that we really want to return to the inquire after their first visit. So here's one example using our board. The behavior we want to encourage from non subscribed users, we want them to come back to the site after we introduce ourselves to them via search. We love being able to get users to register for a free account or sign up for a newsletter some way to identify them be able to reach out later connect the tactic. The tactic in this example that we're using is a test for running. I call them service snacks, but what they are are articles, snippets. Above a registration walls instead of a paywall. We are giving users snippets of content and asking them to register for the full article. And a lot of the work goes into how can we measure improve the benefit of these tactics on customer revenue longer term? Doing investigation with our analytics team around how we can prove that users who return three times a month have an increased propensity to eventually subscribe. We already have established metrics on you know the increased value of a registered user. So being able to tie registration to an increased propensity to just subscribe as a part of this. And then as far as blockers are concerned, those short term revenue demands the monthly goals we have for subscription and you know, being able to show that we we aren't hurting those those short term subscription goals while pursuing these tactics. And then data tracking always so important for these kinds of pilot tests. Another is a course newsletter that we're working on. For new Philadelphians. We want users to sign up for this newsletter and open multiple emails when they're new to Philly. So we are going to soon be launching a six week course newsletter that delivers service content to these users helping them navigate the subway helping them find places to eat, do laundry, a lots of things meet your meet your neighbors. So we're also thinking about how we can measure the benefit of these tactics on customer revenue longer term. Do the users subscribe after the course concludes? Is there a relationship between users who opened multiple emails and folks who eventually subscribed? What are other trends in the behavior of course users longer term and are they likely to continue reading the newsletter? So here are a couple other examples. I chatted with some of our peers in the industry this summer ahead of this talk. Minneapolis Star Tribune. As I'm sure a lot of folks have read, began giving free subscriptions to high school graduates. Something we're really interested in is this idea of like gift articles for The Washington Post subscribers can give up to 10 articles per month to non subscribers and then we do some Reddit AMA's with reporters so as we do the exercise you can think about tactics for engaging folks on your platform or off your platform. Okay, so Yeah, a couple of questions to discuss during today's exercise. What are major obstacles to building a non subscribed user pipeline? How can we use metrics to prove engagement with non subscribed users leads to customer revenue longer term? And how can we address these blockers? Around audiences Alright, so we got like a lot of overflow, which I didn't necessarily anticipate, but I feel like maybe everyone over here could form a group on the ground. Someone has, if you have your computers here's a Yeah, I have some pieces of paper. Hello. This is a short URL for the mirror board.
So yeah, the goal is is here, let me get through this and then I'll show the mirror board. So the goal is to share knowledge between organizations and departmental roles using examples from your work. So we're looking for folks to Yeah, it's gonna be more than five or 10 Probably, but then spend like 30 minutes on open ended conversation aided by the mirror board. We'll spend about five minutes on each section, and then come back in the last 10 minutes and appoint someone from your group to share the most compelling takeaway from your group. Like this is going to be an open ended conversation. So everyone get get a mirror board and then I have mirror boards that are named after these are themed by filly foods. So I would say your scrapple
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Oh, man, so we didn't. We did not make any cohesive notes. I'm sorry, but we did do a lot of talking about challenges. Which I'm sure everybody else did. A lot of it surrounds a lack of strategy around a paywall. If you want to feed me some stuff from the notes that we got, I'm happy to share that with the group. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So our challenges include the the sort of lack of strategy but then understanding what you know, success looks like after you convert someone. And the behaviors that we wanted to encourage people to do is obviously return we wanted them to donate we wanted them to be loyal. But again, the if the value proposition isn't clear for folks, and for a lot of it, for a lot of us, the value proposition is not clear. It's going to be hard to have returning users. We had some interesting conversations in this group to about blockers that included the editorial team which I don't know if anyone else has experienced that, but the sort of dichotomy between the high level editorial sort of strategy and then you know, folks who are doing the on the ground reporting and trying to share the work that they're doing. That was especially something that we talked about, but I'm sorry, we don't have any big takeaways of thank you so much. But we started off yeah, here are our problems. Help us fix them. Thanks, guys. Yes,
one thing I wanted to add, that we came up with that the paywall itself doesn't exist in a silo that there's so much work that you have to do before to understand your audience. And develop really good data analytics to serve them. A paywall strategy that works very well for them, but also community centric work, to get them to really buy into the value of the work so that they don't, we don't have to convince them anymore of the value of, you know, signing up for a subscription or making an annual donation or a quarterly donation.
Awesome. Does anyone have any feedback on you know that that editorial blocker or the lack of value proposition or anything that anyone wants to say about that before we move on to the next group? Okay, all right. Well, that was good roast pork.
So some of the common things that emerged in our discussion were the sense of okay, newsletters being potentially a really important or definitely being a very important part of building a pipeline of future subscribers. But then the issue of newsletter fatigue, yeah, how many newsletters are people getting in? It's not just enough to get them to sign up for your newsletter but also to like, open the newsletter getting engaged and click through other challenges that were mentioned. You know, how do you reach younger audiences who are primarily going to be off site? So they're not going to come to your website? How do you engage with them on the platforms that they do us in a meaningful way and build brand awareness and then also meaningfully engage with them there so that you can eventually convert them? brand recognition and like, another challenge being brand recognition initially at maybe like a cursory level, but then also taking it to the next level once you've reached maybe some initial primary markets and how do you kick it up a notch? And then another common theme was the issue of getting meaningful feedback when you ask, uh, for reader reader opinions or reader ideas or suggestions, you know, you're doing call outs, and then you hear crickets. How do you get those people to engage with you and deliver on what you're what you're you're hoping to find does so you know, we, we kind of had this like really wide ranging discussion and closing the feedback loop was one thing that came up and we were talking about all the different ways that you can do that whether that's an initial response, whether that is showing you know, the results of the reporting that resulted from their outreach to you and saying, Hey, this is the story that we made, or the story that we produced based on the things that you told us and how that can build trust over time, where in the future, they might turn to you again and say, Hey, like they wrote a story about this topic. I cared about and they might have answered my question directly, but I know I can go to them in the future when I do have other questions or other ideas and suggestions. Other another, some of the blockers that we talked about were you know, how do you break through departments silos between editorial and marketing or editorial and everyone else? Yeah, they're in the questions about paywalls and hard walls and when you turn off the wall, just as broader questions about decision making, and how do you determine what stories stay behind a hard wall or stay behind a paywall? Or what stories warrant having the wall turned off entirely? So just a few of our thoughts
Awesome. Yeah, so many great points there and just to pick up on one of your initial points, that challenge of brand awareness when, you know, we need to, you know, make clear that we're still relevant and we're still here, but there's also the strategy of walling yourself off for revenue and I think that's a product problem. That we can continue thinking about soft pretzels.
So we all just kind of talked about all of our challenges. We talked about all of our challenges, all of our solutions, all of our tactics that kind of support each other. Some of those challenges were getting visitors to subscribe implementing registration walls, whether those are free or should we have a paywall? Do we go deep or do we go why with our audience? What are we actually offering them what the what the value is how deep or wide are we going? And just understanding that within this sector, there's often rapidly changing metrics that make it hard to really pursue any tactic to be successful. Couple quick solutions was one not have if you didn't have a newsletter, having a newsletter and getting people to sign up for it. If you aren't had the ability to donates, being able to put a button up so people can just throw money around the idea of the solution or your organization. And the idea that it takes seven touchpoints to get people to really get buy in so trying to figure out what those touch points are, I guess that was backwards. One was doing was newsletters, things like that. So we have a lot of different behaviors with encouraging behaviors, but one in particular that I'm going to shout out are the cliffhangers response articles. Being able to we've talked about having the beat articles where it's like, day one is this idea. Come back for day two, come back for day three so that every day is building on to really get people to engage and get those touch points. The benefits, they subscribe our revenue numbers are up the time on page and pages per visit are up and we're able to track the leads a conversion, which is how many articles on what articles they read before they actually subscribes. And blockers. It really came down to capacity organizational editorial and tech. You know, do I have time to do it? Oh, I do have time. Oh your tech doesn't have the capacity to do it. Oh my boss doesn't have time to talk to me. So capacity in the patients with Stan the lack of capacity. Oh, you're
weird cliffhanger response strategy.
How are you getting people to come back? Is that like a couple of us that are in alignment.
I think it's partially newsletter and social media partially something at the end saying Come back tomorrow and then of course, you know adding a link once. Once tomorrow is today going back to the previous articles and adding links for all your readers who are coming back you know historically so sort of approaching it from different dimensions.
What was this seven touch points philosophy you mentioned that like a thing.
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to get somebody to buy something, right? So, Tori Actually, I didn't even think about it in the context of subscribing so she was as her organization applies it to their new strategy right? It takes seven touch points to get somebody to buy take seven touch points to get somebody to subscribe.
Cool. I like that. That's really interesting. Borrowing from from marketing. Alright, awesome. Would you be able to pass it to water ice back there
wants to do this. Well, I'll just say really quickly, we did not follow the assignment. Either. And I'm partially responsible for that.
did make some notes
Okay, so I'll kind of just keep this fairly collaborative because the conversation was very collaborative. We've got a wide range of folks doing new initiatives that don't have brand awareness folks who have small footprints and small teams. So generally the conversation was around. I'd say, please correct me if I'm wrong here. How do we go about identifying intent and engagement? What strategies can we deploy to bring people into a sort of subscriber fold? Am I How am I doing so far? Okay. And at the end of the day, you know, conversation really centering around being very specific about where we are in the funnel. So for anybody who's not conversant or like fluent in that marketing sort of language, where are people in terms of their awareness or brand awareness is a piece of it, where are they, you know, sort of focused in terms of their willingness to engage you and why are they engaging you? So the service journalism piece of it is definitely, you know, almost like an acquisition strategy. So to a certain extent, because it gives you a sense of intent, but then how do we start to calibrate and build systems to support that? So we've got folks who are trying to think about using social media and various channels, lacking a certain visibility into who the audience is, and you know where they're coming from and what their behaviors and intents are, and how do you actually design for that, in the absence of a lot of this knowledge? So I think that you know, we kind of centered a lot of our conversation around that. I'm gonna pass the mic to somebody on my either left or right. There you go.
Okay, sure. There was some interesting ideas like we did talk about am I very loud, okay. All right. We did talk about like the importance of of segmenting, like looking at different segments of readers, that there are groups of readers who will come back who you will develop a habit with who will never subscribe, but still have real value to your organization. So it's like, how do we also nurture them without forcing them like locking them out entirely? Also, there were some like really interesting behaviors that I thought like that we talked about a little bit at the table like not just newsletters of which of course are still important. But things like getting people to come to a community event, for example, is a behavior that like that creates a different kind of relationship, maybe a deeper relationship that might lead to subscribers. I can pass this to you because you had lots of behaviors.
So one place to start in thinking about this problem. I'm Michael Silberman, from piano software. So um, I know a lot about this stuff, but also don't necessarily feel like I'm not one of the editorial or, you know, sort of journalists folks in the room. But what I can say is, the place that we start is measuring the behaviors that lead to subscription, understanding those behaviors, and then building systems to encourage those behaviors. So one that's really well known and obvious is coming back more often, having sort of repeat visits. Obvious, obviously, anything that you can do to encourage repeat visits to get people to go from that first visit, you know, and then there's a giant Cliff before they get to the second visit in terms of the sort of share of audience. How do you get more people to make that second visit the other sort of key set of behaviors that we know about is users who have who come to your website via multiple channels. So search and social and newsletter are much much more likely to become subscribers than users. Who just come via a single channel, even if they come a lot by that single channel. And so that sort of breadth of referring types is quite important in driving subscriptions. And so thinking about what are the things that you want to do that encourage users to engage with your brand? On those multiple touch points, right. So if they're following on you on social, how do you get them to become a newsletter subscriber and start visiting you directly? Those kinds of tactics are really really valuable in building up the audience that's going to become a subscriber. What were some of the other there are some ideas specific ideas. I think we also had on the Miro board, but I don't remember what they were. Anyway. That's probably good.
Yeah, I think this this session could have an entire follow up session. That was entirely data driven. And to your point, and I think the point made in the last table as well, understanding what are the patterns and being able to quantify the patterns that are already leading to subscription and then being able to replicate those is so important, and when it comes to designing any of these tests for proving out the benefit of a tactic, just so much of the work is on the analytic side to even get the test approved. Because if you're looking for buy in from another department, like marketing, you know, they're they're going to want to see the receipts. Let's talk to Tasty Cakes
Okay, um, well, I'll try and say things that have not already been said. In the interest of time. A couple of things will one that was a little unique to our group thanks to MMA. The leap from the intro rate to the follow rate is large and I mean, like $34 to $40 a month large. We also had a hard paywall, but it's of ads. And then, in reality, like this perception that you shouldn't have to pay for news, especially among younger generations. And the fact that we have so many content competitors. A couple of things that really came up for us were the tactics we currently use, especially for marketing are so transactional, and how can we experiment more with more emotional and personal transactions? There were a couple I think that somebody said the guardian does this really well. But just like more authentic and transparent messaging with these potential subscribers, also a couple of notes on we've sort of created this idea that, you know, a couple of you mentioned events like events don't have to be this big, you know, hundreds of people event or a big panel, like they can be small coffee with the editors, brews and news, things like that, and can still be powerful if they continue to come back and continue to engage with you. And then also this idea of connecting readers with each other and building a community around them and not just having it all rely on like us to be the connectors and the connective tissue between them. When we talked about ways we might measure the benefits of these tasks or tactics, two things sort of stood out. One was doing brand affinity studies within this demographic where you're trying to grow especially the younger demographic and then I know like one thing my company looks at now is like the average rate that subscribers are revisiting the site each week by device if they subscribe to a newsletter if they did it, things like that. And then our blockers were very similar and we talked a lot about silos. And misaligned business goals within the company as well. One thing that we did talk about that sort of harkens back to what the first group said is this kind of editorial misalignment I also just think, when it comes to increasing engagement with some of our non subscribers, they want more of that personal feel and face and not that brand. And that can be incredibly uncomfortable for reporters, especially legacy media, where they wanted to kind of hide behind that byline and that was like, what they signed up for. We've sort of always fought with broadcast on that. They've always been much better at that than we have. So I think that is kind of a problem that we vented about and didn't come up with a solution. So yeah,
awesome. Alright cheesesteaks we got a couple minutes, two minutes.
Okay. All right.
Do you want to say anything down? No. Okay. Fair enough.
All right.
Well, let's wrap up then. Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it.
Oh, yes, of course. My brain. Hey, Gary, are you going to share these slides? Yeah, they're on the app, but they're not alone. So that was great. Yeah. Good deck. Yeah, it's in the app, but I'm also like, yeah, I made a couple updates since then. But
maybe I can like send a message to people who attended or something like that. Yeah. I don't either. Oh, you have a point. That's cool. I Well, my friends. Do you know Zack Stewart. You know, he used to work with me and someone who's in attendance. Back there. Yeah, yeah, take it out. Yeah.
Yeah, Yeah, it's good. it's like life, like getting
the Bitcoins or sending their client applications and just kind of gotta be on time to cover it. Right.
