Category: Engagement

5 key findings from The State of Digital Publishing Market Report 2022

Pulling together analytics aggregated across a sample of Pugpig’s 350+ media brands and augmented with industry data, the report shares valuable insights into how readers are consuming content (particularly on mobile) and how publishers are responding to their needs. Download the full report here, and find our 5 key takeaways below.

1. Whilst most digital habits have fallen back to pre-pandemic levels, mobile use continues to grow

When designing products for mobile, phones are rightly the starting point, but it’s important to consider the other screens that may be in your readers’ hands.

Tablet usage, while still a small percentage of total usage, is still important, particularly with consumer media, so it’s vital to design both your apps and content with that in mind.

Not only that, but given the popularity of keyboards on tablets, landscape designs are also important to factor in..”

Did you know that whilst the majority of traffic is accessing your content on mobile devices, these users only make up a small percentage of user-to-subscriber conversion rates. Find our analysis and recommendations for optimizing conversion rates on mobiles in our article.

2. Time spent on apps has grown by almost an hour a day since 2019, and whilst websites still deliver the largest audiences, apps have the most engagement

Apps are super sticky, and daily newspapers are ahead of the game in engaging audiences via mobile applications.

But website visits on mobile (over apps) still deliver the largest audiences.

This higher engagement also applies to in-app subscriptions, both in terms of session duration and average sessions per month.

3. Key challenges for the media leaders interviewed include subscription, retention, rising costs and competition for talent

Growing subscriptions is the biggest challenge, but retention was a close second as publishers try to keep hold of readers who converted during the pandemic.

Recruiting talent and trust were two other key challenges for publishers interviewed:

The other challenges are about retaining talent and trust. Publishing has become much more about star talent. It’s a real pinch point for publishers because the rewards are often elsewhere… stars are the real attraction for subscribers.”

4. Two areas of innovation stand out for research participants: personalization and audio

Media leaders spoke about a number of different personalization approaches:

  • Automated recommendations and automated front pages that rely on artificial intelligence
  • Content that is tailored to specific audience segments, either on the site, in the app, via a newsletter or push notification
  • Many respondents spoke of segmented, multi-variant newsletters
  • Content that is personalized based on users’ previous activity or expressed interests

These strategies will prove hugely valuable to engagement, conversion and retention efforts.

Publishers are also making better use of audio, a format that is proving itself as a driver for audience and revenue growth through subscriptions and novel strategies such as lucrative licensing deals.

Spoken Word Audio listening is growing. In the US, there has been steady growth over the last eight years.

And there’s been a massive shift to listening on mobile.

5. Subscriptions and memberships are expected to be the top revenue growth driver in 2023

Many of the media leaders we spoke to said subscriptions were the bedrock of their businesses.

Publishers also see price increases not only as a source of growth but also as a way to address inflation, which is driving up the cost of print production and distribution.

However, we were challenged over assumptions that advertising was in decline. “We see many publishers actually growing ad revenue and hoping to accelerate this growth with new products based on first party data,” Greg Piechota, with INMA, said.”

Where in the subscription funnel is the focus on?

More than half of our publishers are focused on engagement and conversion, showing how subscription growth was still their highest priority.

And with that focus on subscriber growth, many also spoke of increasing engagement that would lead to conversion. This played prominently in their rationale behind adding personalisation features to their digital content

Those who spoke about retention said that they had seen strong subscriber growth during the pandemic and wanted to hold onto those gains.”

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

Perfect your value proposition to convert more readers into subscribers

This article wrapped up:

  • The value proposition canvas helps you define your customer’s profile and pair this with your product/service to ensure your premium offers provide value
  • The Golden Circle framework will allow you to work on your why, what and how
  • Starting with the why is how you’ll best define a value proposition that matches your audience’s needs
  • Defining your value proposition is by no means easy and yet it is THE essential preliminary step to work through before launching or re-launching a premium strategy

Quickly, what is a value proposition?

 

A value proposition is a statement that summarizes why someone should purchase your product or service. It refers to the value that you are providing to your customers should they choose to purchase from you. It’s therefore hugely important and plays a significant role in whether users will partake in any exchanges of value (e.g. subscribe or register to your site).Given this, how can you even begin to sell a product or service without first defining what it is that you’re selling and how you’re providing value to your customers?

In this article, we’ll work through Poool’s method of defining a value proposition, ensuring that you can write conversion texts, build offer pages and create promotional campaigns with ease.

Let’s break this down into 2 steps:

  • Define the content and benefits of your offer
  • Work on your why, how and what.

Define the content and benefits of your offer(s)

We propose to work from a framework initially developed by Dr. Alexander Osterwalder, The Value Proposition Canvas, built for ensuring that a product is adapted to its market.

The canvas is divided into two sections: customer profile and value proposition.

Customer profile: Always start with the customer as they’re at the center of your value as a business.

You are also likely to have different customer segments, each with their own needs, wants and interests, so it’s important to complete a unique customer profile for every segment.

  • Gains: the benefits that customers expect and need from you. These should appeal to their interests and make them more likely to embrace your value proposition
  • Job-to-be-done: this refers to the operational, social and emotional tasks that a client must carry out. It involves any problems they have to solve and what they hope to satisfy

“What social, emotional, and functional jobs does your customer do on a daily basis? They have some functional jobs that you probably know about. But you’ll also need to uncover how they do that job, how they feel, and what social qualities come into play. For instance, a parent with the job of driving a child to school may also have functional jobs of getting them there on time, ensuring they’re fed throughout the day, making sure they’re not looking like an outcast (social standing may be important), providing the feeling of being loved and appreciated, etc. Ask enough “whys” and you’ll get this info.”

Business Models Inc.

  • Pains: these are the difficulties and negative experiences faced by the customer when trying to get the job done

Value proposition: here we turn to your product or service and how it fits with the above.

  • Gain creators: how does the product or service meet the customer’s needs and how does it provide them with value?
  • Pain reliever: how does the product or service solve the pain and difficulties that a customer may encounter whilst carrying out this task?
  • Product or service: what is the product or service that creates value, solves problems and justifies the creation of value for the customer?

Once these are defined, the question comes down to how this tool can be applied to content producers. We propose…

2. Work on your why, what and how

For this second section, we’re going to work from The Golden Circle framework laid out by Simon Sinek.

If you’re unfamiliar with his work, we’d recommend having a watch of this video. Although it was posted in 2009, the concepts are still relevant and useful today given that so few businesses are aware of how to define their why, what and how.

The circle is divided into 3 parts: what, how and why.

What: What do you do? This should be very (very) easy to answer. For a magazine, for example, you publish articles, columns, surveys, etc in paper versions and digitally

How: How do you do this? With what people, tools, focus, quality, layout, etc. This, again, should be straightforward to answer and, above all, strictly defined within your team

Why: Why do you do this? A bit trickier and unfortunately not simply as a way to make money. Monetization is the result rather than the why. Instead, here is where you define what you’re going to tell your prospects so that they pay in exchange for your products or services

After the ‘why’, you should consider the following questions:

  • Why does this structure exist?
  • Why do you get up in the morning?
  • Why should people be interested in what you do?
  • Why are you useful?
  • What makes you different from others in the industry?
  • What do you bring to your reader to make them spend time with you?

Most businesses start by answering the obvious questions (on the outside of the circle) and then work their way in towards the center. This leads to simple messaging such as

“Subscriber to access all our articles!”

But, of course, you can do better.

This is why more successful companies go the other way around, starting from the center (the why) and moving outwards.

Poynter

What do they bring to the reader? An intelligent start to the day

Why should users subscribe? Information and inspiration

Followed by the what – the Poynter newsletter

Alternatives Economiques

“The media that belongs to a millionaire its employees.

Alternatives Economiques is an exception to most in the publishing industry: our cooperative belongs to its employees and readers.

By subscribing, you’re helping us to preserve this valuable independence!”

Why do they publish content? To provide independent journalism

What makes you different from others in the industry? The media’s owned by its employees and readers

How do you do what you do? Thanks to subscribers (like the reader, hopefully) and employees (this resonates with the reader who is also an employee somewhere)

The Independent

What do you bring to your reader to make them spend time with you? Insights, information and ideas/inspiration

What makes you different? The Independent perspective, a unique take on news

Note the lack of even a mention of specifically ‘what’ – the product itself, subscription.

The New Zealand Herald

Why should people be interested in what you do? Not just sharing a story, but from every angle

La diaria

“Subscribe to the diaria that depends solely on you”

Why does this structure exist? Thanks to the reader (synthetic personalization with ‘you’)

The Wall Street Journal

Why do they publish content? To provide trust-worthy journalism that solves a pain-point for readers

What makes you different from others in the industry? The reader makes decisions daily, and WSJ will help them to make more informed decisions, more easily with trustworthy journalism, implying well-researched content written by experts.

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

“Subscription growth continues, but there’s a realization that readers need to see value” insights from Media Moments 2022

2022 saw publishers working to convince customers they’re worth the money. From content bundles to exclusive newsletters and podcasts, the subscription market is having to evolve.

This is an extract from the Media Moments 2022 report, downloadable in full here or via the form below.

After a frantic couple of years, when reader revenue seemed to be the only game in town, 2022 threatened a subscriptions shakeout. As markets from heated seats to tacos introduced monthly payment offers, the threat of market saturation became very real. And with the cost of living crisis kicking in, concerns have been growing that consumers are starting to consider just which subscriptions they really need.

Early in the year, Amanda Mull suggested in the Atlantic that we had reached peak subscription. And as if anticipating her analysis, the number of UK homes that had at least one paid-for streaming service fell by 215,000 in the first quarter, the end of a 10-year growth period among popular subscription services. Underlining the trend, Netflix alone lost 1 million subscribers in the second quarter of the year, although they did return to growth in the latter half of the year.

INMA’s Subscription Benchmarking Service reported a spike in subscription cancellations. The past few quarters have seen cancellations go up 34% compared to Q1 of 2021. Recent research from Toolkits and National Research Group showed that almost 30% of consumers polled plan to reduce the number of online
subscriptions they hold.

Toolkits’ Jack Marshall acknowledged the likelihood of a downturn back in May, especially in the face of the ‘belt-tightening’ economic conditions inevitably bring. But he said this wasn’t a sign of any fundamental problem with the subscription model.

“More than anything, publishers just need to be honest with themselves about whether they really have the content and products to support subscription models sustainably in the long term.”

Focus on value

Even as some publishers are seeing cancellations, others continue to enjoy growth. AOP members reported digital subscriptions growth at almost 15% between June 2021 and June 2022.

A select few have reported record performances, with quality content and trusted brands the designated driver. Having reached more than 9 million subscribers, New York Times president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said its success was down to publishing the best content possible.

The Economist posted its most profitable year since 2016 on the back of 1.2 million subscribers and total subscription revenues accounting for more than 60% of its revenues. Referencing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflation at its highest rate for a generation, editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes described The Economist’s content as delivering “timely, mind-stretching analysis to subscribers, helping them to make sense of the world.”

The Times signed up an average of 1,000 new digital subscribers every day over the first two weeks of Russia’s attack. Times head of digital Edward Roussel told Press Gazette: “The trend that we’re seeing is that in moments of crisis, whether it’s the onset of coronavirus or Brexit, you see this shift towards trusted brands.” The two-year old sports and culture website Defector earns 95% of its revenue from subscriptions. This year, it boosted its sub‐
scriber acquisitions by making its Normal Gossip podcast – one of Nick Quah’s best podcasts of the year – paid. Building on the unique positioning of the sports rumors show, Defector saw its biggest one-week subscriber increase in a year.

AOP reported a 14.9% growth in subscriptions revenue this year

Looking ahead

Anthony Ribeiro, audience conversion consultant at Membership and Subscription Suite Poool, said success is often down to the value proposition. This applies to both subscriptions and registration walls, as he noted:

“There’s a lack of unique value being offered in exchange for registration; there needs to be something they can’t get elsewhere, just like with subscriptions. It’s really a matter of the proposition and the value you can offer. How are you different from the competition?”

Anthony Ribeiro, Audience Conversion Consultant at Poool

Seeing that subscription revenues alone might not be enough, one time ‘all-ads-are-bad’ content providers, from Netflix to The Athletic, are introducing advertising to bolster their earnings. There is even a growing consensus that, post cookies, subscription publishers will be in a better position to offer advertisers premium spots using the first-party data gathered from subscribers and registered users.

And in a market under pressure, evolution is key to the continued success of the subscription model. The bundle, embraced by the New York Times, is one way that publishers can increase value to paying audiences and increase subscriber value. With growth no longer primarily in subscriptions to news alone, the NYT is pushing an all-access offer that brings together games and cooking content with audio, exclusive newsletters, product reviews on Wirecutter and sports coverage from The Athletic.

While few publishers can afford to stump up $550 million for a brand like the Athletic or even the ‘low seven figures’ paid for Wordle, they can focus on super serving their most engaged audience members. At WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress this year, Héctor Aranda, CEO of Argentina’s Clarin, said his company gets 70% of its subscription revenue from less than 2% of its total audience.

The bottom line is that publishers looking to keep growing their reader revenues must get better at targeting their messaging, pricing and content offering to convince cash-strapped audiences that their subscription is the one worth keeping.

14% of digital news users in the US think that they will have more media subscriptions in the next year. Another 14% believe they will have fewer.

Case study: Quartz drops its paywall

Just as everyone else was trying to figure out how to gate their content, Quartz tore down its paywall18. The plan shifted from a fairly strict content lockdown to the bulk of the business site’s content being available for free.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the pivot was an admission that Quartz’s beleaguered membership offering had failed.

The four-year old program attracted just 10,000 subscribers in its first year and even after a post-management buyout plea in 2021 spiked sign ups, it was still under 30,000. Low numbers are undoubtedly a factor in the shift – no one ever tries to fix a media model that isn’t broken. But there was also another, more interesting rationale at play. CEO Zach Seward explained:

“We found that 75% of Quartz members read us primarily through email, so we’ve been putting more of our best stuff directly in their inboxes.”

The new email-first membership scheme will see paying customers get four ‘premium’ emails a week. The problems for Quartz have been blamed on its ‘mushy middle’ positioning, described by Digiday as “not quite niche
enough to be essential to a small group of readers, but not quite big enough to compete at scale”. But Seward said the problem was converting drive-by site visitors into subscribers.

“The part that hasn’t worked well is when a reader coming from Google hits our paywall, wants to read the article, but has no intent to remain a member. That has not produced enough value for Quartz or our readers to justify the downsides of the paywall in terms of reaching more people with our great journalism.”

Contrast that with the success Quartz has seen in converting loyal email readers to paying members and the move might just make sense.

This is an extract from the Media Moments 2022 report, downloadable in full via the form below below.

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

Best practices for using ChatGPT to create polls and comments to engage users

The emergence of artificial intelligence, in particular the recent advances in large language models (LLMs), has the potential to revolutionize the way media organizations produce content and engage with their communities.

ChatGPT uses machine learning techniques to generate human-like responses to inputs, allowing it to have simulated “conversations” on various topics; you type in a question or instructions, and it replies.

While we have yet to determine what the full impact of LLMs like ChatGPT will have on media organization and journalism, there are several ways that newsrooms have been experimenting with this tool to help with their daily operational activities, in ways that allow their staff to focus where their skills are best utilized.

By leveraging LLMs, journalists can generate high-level research summaries with bulleted lists of key information about the topics they are covering. This can help them get up to speed with known information quickly and help to identify sources for follow up interviews, and avenues for further research.

Newsrooms can also leverage LLMs to generate story ideas, by asking questions related to current events, to quickly identify story angles they may not have otherwise considered.

In addition, there are a number of ways that LLMs can be used to help newsrooms drive community engagement, something that is key to driving conversions, subscriptions, and retention:

Simple ways to use ChatGPT to create polls

In this case, you ask ChatGPT to create a poll and a defined number of responses on your chosen topic. The more detail you provide around your subject, the better and more relevant the output provided by ChatGPT responses will be:

Simple instructions can provide some exciting options, but there may be character count issues if you have limited space.

To address character count issues, an option is to ask essentially the same question but to define the subject, character counts, and type of response that is required:

Use ChatGPT to create a poll for an article

You can also provide context from an actual article. While some LLMs allow you to include a link to an article, ChatGPT currently does not follow URLs or read content on the web (other than its original training data). And depending on your account level and version, ChatGPT will limit prompt length to about 500 words. But using a title or a lede from an article will often be enough to produce high quality results:

Break the ice and use ChatGPT to create a Comment

First comments and conversation framing questions, especially when posted by staff, are a powerful way to engage your community within the comments, and using ChatGPT to start the conversation can be quick and easy.

By giving ChatGPT direction for tone and context for how you want the framing question or first comment to be written will help to generate high quality results. For example, by requesting a comment in a thoughtful tone, and within a reasonable character limit can provide surprisingly good results

Benefits

By utilizing our comprehensive guidelines on ChatGPT, and Viafoura’s Engagement Starter , you can seamlessly initiate a conversation with your readers.  Our customers have seen a surge in the number of registrations and an increase in the amount of time readers spend on site. This ultimately leads to a significant rise in comments, resulting in greater engagement with content and additional ad views.

If you’d like to learn more about how User Generated Content (UGC) contributors are critical to driving subscriptions, revenue, and retention we suggest you read this article published by WAN-IFRA. To learn more about how polls and comments can become a critical part of your engagement solution, visit our Engagement Starter webpage or contact Viafoura.

Paywall visibility rate: the essential KPI you should be tracking in your subscription strategy

This article wrapped up:

  • Conversion rate is a valuable metric for publishers, but it doesn’t allow you to take into consideration the all-important engagement prior to the paywall (something that’s highly important for conversions)
  • Tracking and optimizing both premium content visibility and paywall visibility rate will help move users through the funnel towards subscribing in the future
  • We recommend aiming for 10-40% premium content visibility rate and 80% paywall visibility rate, but ultimately testing is the only way to find what is optimal for your strategy

The process of converting users into subscribers involves a lot more than just clicking through the paywall and paying.

The reader needs to find your site (acquisition), become increasingly more interested (engagement), see your premium content and be frustrated enough by the paywall to decide to convert.

These final two steps involve the visibility of your premium offer, and are the often-forgotten essential steps to optimize in your subscription strategy.

So, what are these visibility metrics? Why are they important? And how can you optimize them in order to increase overall conversion rates?

There are two types of visibility rate metrics:

  • Premium content visibility 

The percentage of users on your site who visit a premium content and have the potential to be exposed to the paywall

No. of readers who visit a premium content / Total no. of visitors to your site

  • Paywall visibility rate

The percentage of users who visit premium content and also see the paywall.

No. of readers who see the paywall / Total no. of visitors to premium content

Why is visibility important?

Publishers employing a premium strategy tend to focus on conversion rates as their north star metric. Of course, the number of users who fully convert into subscribers is important, but this metric doesn’t take into account the value of engagement prior to the paywall.

In fact, conversion rate is a metric designed for the ecommerce industry, where the buying process is all about impulsive decisions. Subscriptions (in the publishing industry) however are hugely dependent on a user becoming gradually more engaged before finally making the decision to convert.

For this reason, it’s important to consider and optimize the engagement funnel prior to the paywall.

In a recent white paper, we covered the 5 key metrics to track and optimize which will accumulate to increase overall user-to-subscriber conversion rates.

The first 2 of these steps refer to visibility.

Premium content visibility

In a Poool study analyzing the content strategy of 75 digital publishers, we discovered a correlation between traffic on premium content and the reader-to-subscriber conversion rate. This correlation was true up to 40% premium content visibility (which means 40% of your visitors would be exposed to premium content).

This suggests that by increasing the visibility of premium content, and thus the number of visits to paid content, you’ll increase the number of conversions.

As this correlation seems to only be true only up to 40% visibility, we’d recommend aiming for 10-40% visibility rate and testing from these to find the best percentage for your individual case.

How do you increase the visibility of paid content? 

The assumption is that you’d need to increase the amount of premium content published. However, you can instead work on optimizing the visibility of the content already on your site:

  • Place premium content at the top of your homepage
  • Promote premium content inside other articles
  • Recommend these articles to your users (at the end of content, in email campaigns etc)
  • Place more premium content in your newsletter, on social media, etc.

For instance, on the homepage of Digiday, ELLE France and El Pais’ sites, you can clearly see that they employ a subscription strategy as premium content is given a unique tag. For many publishers, this involves a single color that’s associated with subscription. In most cases in France, this is yellow.

Paywall visibility rate

There is actually a significant loss of readers moving from visiting the premium article to actually seeing the paywall (the next step in the funnel). Of course, this step is valuable as the visibility of your paywall will correlate with the number of users who convert through this paywall (you can’t click through a paywall if you never see it!)

However, like everything in the world of conversion strategies, it’s about finding a perfect balance between frustration and engagement.

Whilst a paywall visibility rate of 100% might frustrate your reader too much and turn them away from subscribing as they never got the chance to engage, a low visibility rate won’t create enough frustration and will result in only your most engaged users subscribing.

Having said this, the ‘perfect balance’ is different for every publisher and we can see successful examples at both ends of the scale.

Le Monde, one of France’s most popular publications, has an extremely low visibility rate where it takes a good few scrolls down the article before being presented with the paywall.

On the other hand, Financial Times, Washington Post and the New York Times have 100% visibility rate with their paywall.

Financial Times presents a full-page paywall.

The Washington Post employs a pop-up hard paywall.

The New York Times blocks the full article with an anti-scroll paywall.

Whilst El Pais finds a middle ground and shows readers only  afew lines of content before blocking.

How do you increase paywall visibility rate?

It’s not necessarily about increasing here, but about finding the optimal rate for your situation. To achieve this, we’d recommend aiming for 80% visibility rate and testing from here, as well as considering segmenting audiences and employing adapted strategies for each type of audience.

You can also consider employing a metered strategy, one that offers users access to a quota of articles for free before being blocked by the paywall. This will also help reduce the risks of launching a paywall on your advertising revenue, traffic or SEO.

You can also try:

  • Employing a different wall on mobiles (where the wall is seemingly further down the page than on desktop)
  • Increase wall visibility with a full screen paywall, pop-up wall or anti-scroll wall.
  • Segment audiences based on level of engagement, employing a higher visibility rate for your most engaged users and a lower visibility rate for volatile traffic who need more engagement before being convinced to convert (p.s. You can do this on the Poool Dashboard!)
  • Segment your content and employ a different visibility rate based on the content type. For instance, more popular content could have a higher visibility rate than less popular premium content
  • Optimize the order in which scripts are called to the page to configure a wall to appear sooner in the case of bad connection

Note: depending on your paywall set-up, it’s also important to take SEO into consideration here. For instance, if you’re employing a hard paywall with a server-side blocking method, you should ensure you follow Google’s lead-in recommendations where essential text is left above the paywall to optimize search engine performance.

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

Engagement strategy benchmarks for digital content producers

There is a direct correlation between engagement and revenue – as a user becomes increasingly engaged in your content, they yield gradually more revenue to your business:

  • More page views for advertising revenue
  • More likely to create a free account, meaning you can charge more for targeted ad spots
  • Higher propensity to subscribe in the future
  • Potential to become a brand advocate who recommends you to others

Engagement is therefore essential for any publisher to track and seek to develop throughout the user journey, moving users from Volatiles (only visiting your site an average of once per month) to Fans (who visit 19+ times a month) and later subscribers.

Take inspiration from some of the most successful publishers in the business on how they engage audiences:

The Independent blocks users with a registration wall

Le Monde encourages recirculation with recommended content

The BBC News app sends push notifications

Channel 4 on demand allows registered users to save content for later

Financial Times lets users follow topics

L’Oreal’s brand publication Makeup.com includes quizzes to increase engagement and collect data

Le Drench asks users to vote in articles that are laid out as a debate

Men’s Journal asking questions to users on the home page

South China Morning Post social sharing options are placed at the side of content

The Guardian games app

The Independent’s Instagram-style video slides within articles to increase recirculation

The Sydney Morning Herald allows commenting for registered users

The Washington Post ‘The 7’ habit-forming newsletter sent at the same time every day

Best practices for increasing engagement:

  • Form habits through regularity: e.g. newsletters sent at the same time every day to either form a new habit or fit into an existing one (such as the commute to work or a morning coffee)
  • Balance frustration with engagement to increase the value of your users. Engagement is great, but you also need to monetize your content!
  • Employ strategies that encourage recirculation so that users remain on your site
  • Offer as much personalization as possible (such as for newsletters , push notifications, ect) to make sure users are only getting content that interests and engages them rather than frustrates
  • Provide value in exchange for conversion steps – for instance, registered users could be offered additional UX features, exclusive content, a lighter ad experience, etc
  • Interactive content is your new best friend! Engaging users with games, quizzes or personality tests will help to keep them on page for longer and coming more frequently, especially if there’s something to be gained from it (such as a discount, especially if you’re a brand publisher)

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

78% of consumers are loyal to brands that treat them as individuals

It’s very easy for publishers to lose sight of the fact that the readers who consume the content they produce are, in fact, individuals.

As much as publishers want to profile their readers and establish common themes or pain points that resonate with their collective tastes and interests, it’s important never to lose sight of the fact that each reader is his or her own individual.

Publishers can’t allow themselves to lose sight of those facts while collecting audience data in an effort to stimulate audience-growth strategies. Everyone wants to feel like they’re valued and that a publisher offers a user experience that’s unique to their specific preferences.

A reader who feels valued and appreciated through personalised content recommendations is far more likely to become brand loyal, which is the pathway to earning subscription revenue from loyal readers.

Majority of readers reward brands earning their loyalty

Here are some helpful facts to paint a clearer picture: According to the 2022 Digital Consumer Trends Index, as many as 78% of consumers admit to having a favourite brand because that brand rewards them for their loyalty. This could be expressed in the form of discounted subscription rates or a free month of access to premium content.

Additionally, 74% of those same consumers prefer brands that treat them as individuals. It further validates the point that every person has unique tastes and preferences. When a reader visits a Web site to engage with new content, they want to believe the content was created specifically for them. They want to feel as if the entire user experience is built to appeal to their unique interests.

Readers provide plenty of incentive for publishers to earn their loyalty. More than 70% of readers say their favourite brand is a business striving to build a relationship with them. Another 64% say their favourite brand rewards their loyalty with surprise benefits, and 58% cite their favourite brand as the one that treats them like a VIP.

Everyone wants to feel like they’re special. Publishers that know how to create those feelings among their readers earn that invaluable brand loyalty.

First-party data shines a light on how to personalise content

Here’s the truth: 90% of readers respond positively to personalised experiences. As publishers, it’s essential to speak to individual readers using messaging that appeals to their interests. It’s through this approach that publishers show the humanity behind their brand identities, effectively communicating as one individual to another.

That personalised engagement and the ability to boost reader loyalty is created through first-party data. First-party data enables publishers to learn specific details about individual buyers and monitor any change in those behaviours over time. Publishers use these insights to build rich audience profiles that develop behavioural patterns of their most avid readers.

A data-driven content strategy prioritises personalisation

Using these audience profiles, content creators produce highly personalised content across the entire Web site. Audience segmentation is one of the building blocks of a content strategy that’s informed by behavioural data.

Once you begin segmenting your readers, you can go a step further and analyse where in the subscription journey different types of readers happen to fall. Segment readers as new visitors, known readers, and subscribed loyalists to uncover richer details of how people respond to your content.

Using an audience insights solution, all of this data can be pulled into a dashboard that your creative team can review at their convenience. Creators can review the journeys taken by current subscribers to understand what types of content converted them into brand loyal readers.

With those insights in hand, a data-driven content strategy can flourish and ultimately guide more readers to cross that threshold into the realm of becoming loyal subscribers.

Profile readers, build loyalty, boost subscriptions

Rich audience profiles tell creators how individual readers will respond to freshly created content. Using those insights, your creative team can double down on creating the types of stories that foster greater reader engagement. By relying on first-party data to direct the content strategy, you successfully create those personalised experiences that foster reader loyalty.

As data-driven content strategies develop over time, it’s important to never lose sight of the fact that the audiences you depend on for first-party data, helpful insights, and subscription revenue are all made up of individuals.

Individual readers have their own tastes and preferences, but it’s incumbent on publishers to learn about those interests so readers are incentivised to provide more first-party data or, as they become fully brand loyal, subscription revenue.

This blog was originally published by INMA

From community to reader revenue: lessons to learn from The Independent and Reach PLC

In its most simplest form, there are 2 steps to convert audiences into revenue:

  1. Engagement – unlocking the revenue potential of your audience
  2. Conversion – activating this potential to gradually increase revenue

The question then turns to exactly how this can be achieved.

For Mark Zohar, President and CEO at Viafoura, one of the most effective strategies involves building a community of increasingly more engaged and loyal users, whilst continuously moving them through a funnel of value exchanges and direct interactions to increase revenue.

Why should publishers build a community?

When audiences aren’t on your site, they’re spending a great deal of time on social media, growing accustomed to certain experiences and features that keep them coming back for more. In particular, these users feel part of a community. They can…

  • Interact with content
  • Comment
  • See other user’s opinions and contributions
  • Join events
  • Like and share content
  • Follow topics and authors that match their interests

These experiences have become user expectations, making traditional digital publisher sites seem passive with very little direct interaction.

As Mark puts it, we’re social beings who want to react and have human experiences – and it’s this that makes community so powerful.

“Publishers need to build a bridge between user expectations and experiences on publisher’s sites.” 

Another important reason why publishers should build a community is because content is a commodity – it’s easy to find any content at any time, especially for big news stories.

Community, on the other hand, is not a commodity. It’s an asset. Something that feeds into your brand value, that a user will come back for and that will make you different from other publishers producing similar content.

How engaging your community will drive value

All publishers with a reader revenue strategy aim to register or subscribe their audience. The problem, however, is when they try to go from 0 to 100 – from unengaged to a loyal subscriber.

Mark compares it to dating – you wouldn’t immediately ask someone to marry you (unless maybe if you’re on ‘Married at first sight’!), you’d ask them to dinner first.

Community helps to provide these intermediary steps, building engagement before trying to get value from your audience.

I.e. Community-led conversion.

For Reach PLC, this involves a 4-step model: Discover, Engage, Connect & Commit.

The key here, according to Mark, is to ungate the community but lock the content, reserving it for registered members or subscribers only. Readers will see the comments and feedback, building enough intrigue and interest to make them want to unlock the article.

Their ‘In Your Area’ postcode services & community, for instance, have led to 3 million registered users and a 35% increase in page-views per visitor since 2019.

On Reach’s “Devon Live” brand, commenting is reserved for registered users only, with messaging framing the action as a conversation that a reader can either be excluded or included in (“join”).

I’d add here that it’s also essential to highlight that registration is free. Although it benefits both you and the reader, it won’t cost them a penny and can be a brilliant way to monetize the large portion of your audience who may never pay to subscribe.

The Independent is another publisher who has made the most of community to register users, increasing engagement and collecting first-party data. To achieve this, they’ve put the focus on their audience, understanding and engaging with them in various forms across the site:

  • Q&A sessions with online experts covering a range of topics
  • Connecting journalists with their readers
  • Personalization features, such as the ability to follow topics, comment on articles and automated personalization based on data

Many of these community experiences are reserved for registered members who have proven to be 11x more engaged than anonymous users. 

And the funnel doesn’t stop there. Even after creating an account, registered users may still be blocked when trying to access premium features, such as bookmarking content, which are reserved for paying subscribers.

These conversion steps gradually move users through a funnel, collecting first-party data, increasing engagement and, importantly, revenue.

Subscribers have proven to be 62x more engaged than anonymous visitors

Best practices for building & gaining value from community

1) Reward your best contributors for their loyalty and participation

“Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one, whilst increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits from 25-95%”.

Retention should therefore be a priority, and rewarding highly engaged community members can play a valuable role in ensuring these users keep coming back.

  • Exclusive access for highly engaged users
  • Social proof – provide them with a subscriber badge or ‘super engaged user’ tag by their name (think of Twitter’s blue tick system)
  • Referral bonus/reward for inviting a new user to join the community
  • Feature their comments somewhere publicly, giving them a sense of fame
  • Reply to these users, establishing a more direct relationship with your publication

2) Highlight the best of your community

The benefits of this are two fold:

Firstly, you forefront the best comments to entice non-members to unlock content and comment so as to not miss out on this conversation. Any comments that add insight but also open up the discussion are particularly valuable here.

Secondly, you give the writers of these featured comments a sense of fame and inclusion as they’re placed directly below the article, encouraging them to comment more frequently.

3) Think bigger than just comments

As Mark put it, you can’t just slap on a comment section and hope for the best. You have to develop a whole community experience from the moment a user lands on your site and do so through a variety of formats.

Some of the most successful community-building techniques involve direct interaction between the newsroom and your audience. This could be as simple as journalists leaving an open ended question to users once a week, but it’s a small investment that your newsroom has to make to develop a strong, loyal community that brings business value.

4) Once you’ve collected data, put it to use

Identifying interests, propensities, etc is great, but this needs to circle back to improve the experience offered to users. Even personalizing a user’s home screen or content recommendations can have a big impact on engagement and revenue.

5) Moderation is crucial

Investing in a solution, whether AI or human, is the only way to ensure that your community is moderated enough to keep control whilst also allowing for free reign.

Mark recommends creating community guidelines and finding a solution that allows you to ban someone entirely, ghost ban someone (the user doesn’t know they’re banned – they can still comment, but no one else will see it) or even give some community members moderation status, gaining value from these users and increasing their loyalty as they feel more involved in the community.

Thank you to Mark Zohar, President and CEO at Viafoura, for speaking to me about this topic!

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

From anonymous to first-party: How to turn visitors into registered users and subscribers

It’s an age-old problem for publishers. How do you get casual readers to become loyal subscribers? Let’s first consider how publications strayed from reader engagement to understand the answer to this question. Fastener interviewed Mark Zohar at Viafoura to learn more about the history of audience engagement in digital publishing.

The Outsourcing Stop-gap

Before the internet, the number of publications remained constrained by labor and paper costs, forcing subscriptions on a local level and limiting competition. Yahoo opened the web in 1995, and in 2004, Web 2.0, followed by smartphones in 2007, delivered instant gratification, community and interactivity online. Shortly thereafter, web publications began to outsource their customer service, feedback and commenting abilities, allowing third parties to determine their fate, popularity and ultimately their content through clicks, likes, reviews, tweets and TikToks.

Publishers began validating vanity interactions rather than synergy with their readers. At the time, this was logical. Bots, spam and guerilla postings by malcontents required constant monitoring. Customer Management Systems (CMS) were expensive and required teams of marketing and tech experts to administer. Social media was free (sort of — publishers paid by relinquishing control, privacy and data) and increasingly the preferred method of communication between the business world and its customers. The time and cost of managing engagement, “who needs it!” proffered conventional wisdom.

Opportunity Cost

The cost of relying on third parties — the loss of business and customer intelligence, control and interaction — became apparent as time passed. Third parties, including social media, understood more about an organization’s customers than they did. After all, these outside entities communicated with their customers, collected data, directed them, entertained, and serviced them. These entities engaged and profited from the publisher’s work.

Consider the following facts:

  • Engaged visitors stay longer, go deeper and generate 4x more advertising opportunities.
  • They are 2x more likely to click on an ad.
  • Viafoura’s engaged users are 51x more likely to register.
  • And registered visitors are 45x more likely to subscribe than casual visitors to your digital properties.

Publishers that engage their readers monetize their properties. Engaging digitally means communication, and communication begins with taking power back to parlay and maintaining control of the wealth of first-party data each exchange produces.

Because publishers outsourced engagement, the vast majority of their visitors remained anonymous, with only a minute percentage registering or subscribing. Publishers continued living in the eighties but are trying to do business in the twenty-twenties, relying on third-party research to understand their readers.

How anonymous users become subscribers

Leading readers through the subscriber journey is relatively painless with the right tools. The Viafoura Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provides the interactivity and immediacy of social media while maintaining control on the publisher’s property of the data, opportunities and experience.

Viafoura’s DXP anonymous-to-subscriber strategy involves four levels: Engagement Suite, Personalization, Moderation, and Data.

Engagement suite

Creating loyal subscribers from anonymous readers begins with on-site engagement on publishers’ owned and operated digital properties. Readers who feel listened to return more often and dive deeper into your publication. Viafoura deploys various solutions to make readers feel at home, including social sharing, chat, Q&As and conversations. And then there is the ultimate VIP ticket, the live blogging platform coupled with Viafoura’s Conversations. Together or solo, each creates an immersive experience between a publication and its reader community, resulting in an average 600 percent lift in subscriptions.

Personalization

Nobody wants to be an unknown number when engaging with a publication. Therefore, personalization is the next step in making anonymous readers cherished subscribers. Personalization includes capturing and using more than a person’s name. It means having options that craft an experience unique to each reader, including alerts, notifications, follow options, recommendations, and curated feeds. Readers feel like family when content is personalized to their needs, likes and wants. It is a mesmerizing experience that keeps them coming back. Viafoura’s DPX puts personalization under the publisher’s control.

Moderation

Without comment moderation, the trolls take over, and suddenly a pleasant interaction becomes a toxic mix of vitriol, hurting the publication and the user experience. On average, a publisher will lose 80 percent of its anonymous readers due to a hostile environment. However, well-moderated engagement increases registrations and subscriptions by an average of 400 percent within six months. Viafoura’s DXP uses multiple strategies to streamline moderation and reduce the number of people needed to keep it going by customizing parameters to each publication’s policies across all properties and social media. Artificial intelligence combined with human expertise and easy-to-read dashboards take on the trolls and temper the tantrums to ensure engagement on its client’s publications remains civil, pleasurable and informative.

Data

Data is worth more than gold in the digital world. It determines content, direction, strategy, partners, advertising, marketing, corporate expenditures, budgets, pricing, new products and investments—data is behind every informed decision. Yet many publishers give away their primary data by outsourcing engagement. Controlling all aspects of the publishing ecosystem delivers unprecedented intelligence that allows a publication to improve its content, better service its readers and strategically plan for the future. Viafoura’s DXP delivers far more than the 83 average metrics. Its digital engagement platform provides over 200 data points, vital information that elevates customer experience, value, and loyalty, which translates to subscribers.

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Viafoura’s unique approach boosts on-site engagement, increasing user registrations and subscriptions. Additionally, it produces internet gold, the ultra-valuable first-party data that creates unique personas and insights exclusive to the publication. Detailed information permits publishers to fine-tune their content, increasing its value to their readers while simultaneously lifting advertising revenues and engagement. Happy readers become loyal readers. Loyal readers become subscribers—leading us back to the original question. How do digital publishers turn visitors into registered users and subscribers while improving their publications? They invest in engagement tools, and Viafoura’s DXP is the leader.

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