Driving subscriber acquisition during the holidays

John Mahoney, VP, North America, Aptitude Software - Subscriptions

Nearly all industries use various pricing strategies during peak holiday seasons to spark demand, drive revenue and increase brand exposure. Newspaper publishers can leverage these same techniques using a flexible and customized approach to attract new customers and retain existing subscribers with holiday incentives. 

And while revenue and acquisition are the key objectives, publishers receive an equally valuable reward: data. Peak traffic and sales present a huge opportunity to harvest first-party data, which can be used for advertising targeting throughout holiday seasons, product packaging and pricing, and ultimately, drive engagement beyond the sale to maximize customer lifetime value.

Aptitude, formerly MPP Global, has been supporting publishers for 20 years with innovative ideas to identify, engage and monetize audiences. Aptitude has developed a robust subscription management platform, eSuite, which supports holiday incentives for acquisition and retention.

Examples of these tactics and incentives are contained in our latest eBook, ‘How media companies can drive subscriber acquisition during the holiday sales,’ which can be downloaded here. Some of the key topics covered in the eBook are summarized below:

Optimal trials

Since publishers will already be packaging specific holiday content to appeal to readers, there is a ready-made opportunity to cross-promote their own offers with this content as subscribers and flyovers are on the lookout for holiday deals.

 While seven-day trials are one option, it should be noted that three of the biggest and most successful service providers of this century — Netflix, Amazon Prime and Spotify Premium — offer month-long trial periods. If you want to try them out, all of them will give you 30 days to see if you want to stay, and all have around a 1-in-3 conversion rate.

Creating interesting offers and incentives

For publishers, this is also an ideal time to make their content giftable and discounted to maximize engagement from readers.  As one publisher put it, “people are in the purchase mindset and actively seeking out promotions during this period.”

While for many publishers, content is king, others are starting to diversify their offerings with physical products, merchandise, tickets to events, videos, podcasts, quizzes and memberships.  Publishers can bundle their content with alternative products to create a more enticing proposition to gift.

Know your reader — personalize

Remember that any subscription sale should include your existing subscribers. With the different bundles, you can use the holiday sales hype to upsell existing customers. 

You can also use personalization to tailor your offers to your current customers based on their likes and needs. Personalization is increasingly key when it comes to digital offers, with Google reporting that 33% of consumers expect personalized recommendations.

If you know what kind of content your customers like, you can identify opportunities to offer them a premium service that is more suited to their tastes. If they spend a little more each month to get even more value from their subscriptions, subscribers will feel like they received a bargain, and the business will gain more recurring revenue and happy customers that are less likely to churn.

The key to this personalization is to gather the right data from subscribers as they engage with your service or website and throughout the registration and payment journeys through your subscription platform.

Churn prevention — Now they’re subscribing — be sure to keep them

Sometimes, a great deal will entice customers but once the pricing reverts to the usual levels, they are at risk of churning. Here are some capabilities to reduce churn, view our infographic here.

• Predictive churn algorithms
  Machine learning techniques process active and historical subscription data to calculate a churn risk probability for each subscriber, with a precision rate of up to 98%. This identifies high-risk subscribers who are likely to churn, targeting them with campaigns to re-engage them.

• Card updater
  Every year businesses can expect around a third of customer credit/debit cards to expire which can result in losing a customer through involuntary churn.  A card updater service can report when cards will be expiring and automatically contact the Visa Account Updater and Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater to update the details within your customer’s payment wallet.

• Self-care platform
  Putting more control in the hands of subscribers makes them happier customers and less likely to churn. A self-care platform gives customers access to manage their own accounts.

• Retry rules
  When a payment fails, media businesses can attempt to retry that transaction, typically within 24 hours. However, in some cases, a custom retry schedule may be needed to keep reattempting the transaction over a specific period to increase the chances of success, for example, one, three and 14 days. This intelligence can also be applied to bank error codes. For example, if the code states insufficient funds, retry at month-end.

Conclusion

During the holidays, growing populations are looking for sales and often seeking those sales in their local newspaper. Therefore, publishers can look beyond the traditional subscription and instead package interesting offers, personalize those offers, create optimal trial periods, and then once they subscribe, keep them with churn prevention.

Aptitude’s eSuite subscription platform provides the flexibility and customization of these capabilities to grow subscriber acquisition during the holidays and throughout the year. 

To learn more about our publishing subscription management solution, visit the Aptitude website.

John Mahoney is VP, North America, Aptitude Software - Subscriptions