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How UGC Contributors Boost Retention And Registrations

There’s an old marketing rule of thumb that successful companies emulate. It costs 5x more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. Companies that heavily invest in retention strategies increase the customer lifetime value (CLTV) of their customers, which translates into heavy cost savings as it requires less money to be spent on net new acquisition campaigns.

In the digital publishing industry, the model is very similar. Some studies suggest that converting unknown readers into new subscribers generates, on average, between a 5% to 20% success rate. On the other hand, converting registered or known users into subscribers is far more effective with success stories in a range of 60% to 70%.

How to build audiences: foster fast-paced communities

When you have communities of engaged readers, you’re more likely to create a lively forum. People love to express their opinions on a topic, especially if an argument has been so articulately laid out by a subject matter expert in a written article. A healthy commenting platform allows readers to share their own thoughts on the subject and open up a lively debate.

These UGC contributors demonstrate their affinity for your content by leaving their comments and engaging in lively discussions with other readers. This shows an active willingness on their part to increase their CLTV for your business.

On top of that, your UGC contributors can actively help you attract new readers at no additional cost. According to AdWeek, nearly half of millennials and over 35% of baby boomers trust UGC content over branded content. This means your commenting section can be one of your top acquisition channels. You just need to invest in a solid retention strategy to get your active UGC contributors to engage with the content.

Use first-party data to profile your most avid commenters

First-party data is fully consented data. At a time when consumer privacy is paramount and third-party cookies will be eliminated, first-party data has become the most valuable resource to help publishers gain a deeper understanding of their most avid consumers.

If a user creates an account on your site to read or comment on your content, that action is an example of first-party data. Each action that user takes from that point onward is a first-party data touchpoint that you can use to build a rich audience profile. Using a first-party data strategy, you can gain consent from audiences to:

Send more personalized notifications to your active readers
Develop segmented audience experiences based on user preferences
Boost community engagement by monitoring audience behavioral metrics
Deploy data-informed push notifications to increase engagement with premium content

Deploy content recommendation modules to boost audience engagement

Once you have data-driven audience profiles, you can start personalizing the experience on your website. Using your first-party data, you can identify common themes, topics, writers, keywords, and other commonalities that motivate your UGC contributors to leave a comment.

With those insights in hand, use your content recommendation modules to tailor the articles that appear for those users. Studies have shown that personalized content recommendations will boost paywall impression rates by at least 10% and conversion rates by 30%. You can motivate more readers to go beyond the paywall so that they can post their own thoughts and engage in healthy discussions with like-minded participants.

Encouraging UGC commenting and healthy discussions is a growth strategy that can prove to be very effective. The Independent, one of the world’s leading publications, used this exact commenting and conversion-based experience strategy. Over the course of 12 months, the Independent was able to add 2,000 new website registrations with comments.

Grow your community and encourage real-time conversation

As you profile highly engaged users, you can use your automated moderation tools to create a healthy digital community for your UGC contributors. Automated moderation tools are designed to keep communities engaged, prevent toxic or harassing comments, and reward meaningful contributors with special labels to elevate their status on the forum.

Creating a safe and healthy community for discussion is essential to boosting audience engagement. Studies have shown that 4 out of 10 news comment readers refuse to publish their own thoughts or opinions due to toxic or argumentative communities.

Remember that nearly half of all millennials and over one third of baby boomers trust UGC contributors over branded content. Audience engagement and UGC contributions are essential to create that vibrant community and encourage new readers to register their own rights to comment on your content.

If you’re not creating a healthy community to facilitate lively UGC discussions, you don’t have an effective retention and engagement strategy. And without an audience retention and engagement strategy, you can’t rely on your commenting section to help grow your business. Ultimately, you’re leaving a viable path for growth untouched on the table.

The New Daily drives engagement, first-party data, and revenue diversification with Viafoura.

The New Daily is an online, non-paywalled, Australian digital news site that was founded in 2013. It features content such as breaking news, politics, finance, entertainment, lifestyle, sports, and weather from Australia and around the World.

Like many publishers, The New Daily is keen to provide its readers with the opportunity to contribute their unique viewpoints to a vibrant and safe community. Ingrid von Bibra, Publisher, at The New Daily says they are “excited to increase user engagement whilst also providing their editorial team with valuable feedback and user insights”.

By implementing Viafoura’s Conversations, Live Blogs, Community Chat, Trending Articles, Topic Follows, and Moderation solutions, The New Daily is driving their first-party data strategy forward at an accelerated rate. With data generation now in hyperdrive, the team has access not only to traditional information such as PVs, Dwell Time, and RFV values, but extensive insight on user sentiment, interests, propensity, and community participation as well.

Viafoura is excited to be working with The New Daily. “The energy that The New Daily has brought to this initiative is palpable! We’re delighted to be their chosen partner for reimagining the audience experience and unlocking a new first-party data strategy” says Dalia Vainer,Director, Customer Experience.

As The New Daily continues to reap the rewards of Viafoura’s turn-keysolutions, nothing but positive outlooks remain for continued audiencegrowth, engagement wins, and revenue diversification.

Behind the Data: 78% Of Consumers Give Their Loyalty 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 personalized content recommendations is far more likely to become brand loyal, which is the pathway to earning subscription revenue from loyal readers.

Majorities of readers reward brands that earn 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 favorite 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 website to engage with new content, they want to believe that 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. Over 70% of readers say their favorite brand is a business that strives to build a relationship with them. Another 64% say their favorite brand rewards their loyalty with surprise benefits, and 58% cite their favorite 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 personalize content

Here’s the truth: 90% of readers respond positively to personalized 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.

First-party data is how to create that personalized engagement and boost reader loyalty. First-party data enables publishers to learn specific details about individual buyers and monitor any change in those behaviors over time. Publishers use these insights to build rich audience profiles to develop behavioral patterns of their most avid readers.

A data-driven content strategy prioritizes personalization

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

Once you begin segmenting your readers, you can go a step further and analyze where in the subscription journey different types of readers happen to fall. Segment readers between new visitors, known readers, and subscribed loyalists to build 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 personalized 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 that 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 that readers are incentivized to provide more first-party data or, as they become fully brand loyal, subscription revenue.

Loyalty Plays: The Next Era Of Retention

There’s an old saying in marketing that “it costs more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.” Some studies have shown it can cost up to five times more to focus solely on customer acquisition at the disservice of customer retention.

Publishers who focus solely on registration and pumping out as much content as possible often neglect relationships with existing readers. By taking stock of current relationships and finding new ways to reward subscribed readers for brand loyalty, publishers are far more likely to improve customer retention rates.

Don’t devalue retention: it’s more profitable than you know

There’s money to be made in retention, even with a slight move of the needle in the right direction. According to a Harvard Business School study, improving customer retention rates by as little as 5% can improve profitability by 25%. In some cases, profits can rise up to 95%.

Those findings are similar to research conducted by Gartner, which determined that 80% of business profits come from 20% of existing customers. Additionally, the success rate of converting an existing reader into a paying subscriber ranges between a 60% to 70% success rate. Conversely, the success rate of converting a new reader into a subscriber ranges between 5% and 20%.

The bottom line is that there’s plenty of value to be found in reader retention. Publishers just need the right approach and the right resources to engage with existing readers to convert them into brand loyal subscribers.

Personalization fosters loyalty and retention

Communicating with your existing readers using personalized content experiences is the best way to earn reader loyalty. What and how you communicate with your readers makes all the difference between retaining their business and losing their interest.

For example, if you were to publish generic content week after week, it’s hard for readers to see the value in the experience. Instead, the audience sentiment will be that you’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. The content loses all of your brand’s personality that first resonated with readers, increasing the likelihood that they churn and never return to your site.

On the other hand, personalized content that appeals to specific reader interests is far more engaging to your audience. By demonstrating that your creative team understands their readers, and chooses to publish content that adds greater value to their experience with your website, you have a winning formula to improve retention rates and, hopefully, subscription rates.

Collect first-party data to gain those audience insights

One of the best ways to boost audience engagement and increase the value that readers experience from your publication is to encourage their engagement with your community. Encourage your authors to add the first comment to freshly produced content in an effort to kickstart a conversation with your readers. Encourage your audience to post their thoughts and use a commenting moderation tool to analyze the sentiment shared by your readers.

As more comments are submitted, you automatically build a wealth of first-party data that you can leverage to gain more insight into your reader tastes and preferences. You can pick up on things like what themes within the content people react towards, and you can measure the preference for one type of author over another.

Once you collect enough first-party data to really understand your audience, you can revamp your content strategy into a data-driven initiative. Focus the subject matter of your content around the themes, topics, and interests that your data informs you is what matters most to your readers. Show your avid community that you listen to their responses by producing more of the content they’ve indicated is what they want. This is how you build a loyal following that is likely to provide customer lifetime value for years to come.

Incentivize readers to act with special recognitions

To encourage further debate around your content, you can assign badges to comments that generate responses from other readers. Show your most valuable readers and/or subscribers that you recognize their contributions to the discussion, proving to them that they’re considered VIPs among your reading audience. Earn that reader loyalty and reap the fruits of those labors!

La Voz del Interior is driving enhanced engagement experiences and improved subscription volumes with Viafoura’s solutions

La Voz del Interior is a daily Spanish language newspaper edited and published in Córdoba, Argentina. La Voz is the leading daily in Córdoba, and one of the most significant in Argentina outside of Buenos Aires.

La Voz is focused on providing its readers with an exceptional, personalized experience while also increasing their subscription volumes. With Viafoura’s Conversations, Live Blogs, Community Chat, and Moderation solutions, La Voz will be able to drive engagement across its audience while collecting significant volumes of first party data – enabling personalization and deep reader insight.

“The goal is to use the data to deliver content in line with each reader’s preferences” said Alan Porcel, Digital Platforms. But, it’s not just about personalization for La Voz, says Lisandro Guzman, General Editor and Multiplatform Chief: “We want to create a robust community of readers who contribute their point of view, engage in lively but civil conversations, and interact with our editorial team. We are excited to move forward and we know that with a growing, engaged community, and the data insights we’ll have, we will be driving readers through the funnel into subscriptions more easily.”

“We’re excited to welcome another LATAM publication into the Viafoura customer community,” said Dalia Vainer, Director, Customer Experience. “We know that access to first-party data is a top priority for the folks at La Voz del Interior, and can’t wait to see how the team leverages the data supplied by Viafoura to drive business strategy.”

Funnel Functionality: Maximize Conversions From The Top Down

It’s a publisher’s dream to view the analytics on recently published content, especially when the data shows a healthy volume of pageviews and reader engagement. The data validates that the topic was a strategic win for your publication as it brings readers onto your website where you can monetize their interest in your content.

One of the challenges that publishers can run into is reader retainment. The initial influx of traffic is great for morale, but it’s hard to maintain that positive outlook if bounce rates are high and pages per session are low.

Hope can still be preserved in these situations. By creating a vibrant community of passionately engaged readers, you lay the groundwork to guide more people through your subscription funnel. When you have enough readers willfully contributing their own comments to topical discussions, they’re more engaged in your site experience. This is the key to earning that customer loyalty.

Featured Comments From The Journalists Kick Off Lively Discussions

PostMedia is a media conglomerate with multiple publishing sites. They implemented what was known as the first comment initiative, a plan that incentivized content creators to leave the first comment on their published stories. It was an initiative implemented across 15 publications, and it worked like a charm. Over the span of three months, PostMedia reported a 380% increase in total average comments, and a 55% increase in registrations per news article.

An editorial commenting strategy kickstarts the debate around the published topic, which incentivizes more readers to participate. Over 60% of news commenters or comment readers prefer when journalists participate in community discussions. By inspiring your own creators to open the doors to commenting and community participation, you can convert more passive readers into active commenters.

This is a great way to build vibrant community forums that inspire more readers to share their thoughts and opinions about the content. You want more readers to think this way because each instance of participation is a valuable piece of first-party data that you can leverage. You’ll learn about your readers’ interests and passions, which you can use to engage with them again in the future. Use those insights to personalize future content experiences so that you guide them further down the funnel towards becoming a paying subscriber.

Featured Comments Seamlessly Increase User Registrations

Sportsnet is the leading sports media brand in Canada and, like PostMedia, they saw an opportunity to guide readers through the funnel using the comments section on posted content. Traditionally, Sportsnet posts included a “load comments” button that readers would have to click to open the comments section.

The Sportsnet team suspected this button was disrupting the reader experience and discouraging engagement. As a pilot program, Sportsnet removed the button and replaced it with the top featured user comments that had the most reader engagement. Using Viafoura’s audience engagement solution, the test results showed a 262% increase in the number of comments from readers, and an 80% increase in time spent on page by those commenters.

Most importantly, Sportsnet was able to insert registration forms for readers to participate in community discussions. This resulted in a 14% increase in registrations per million pageviews, a massive ROI for their efforts. Registered users have a conversion rate that’s 45 times higher than non-registered users, making this a crucial piece of the subscription revenue model.

Use Insights From Existing Commenters To Guide More Readers Through The Funnel

Once users are registered, you can categorize them as “known” readers. This means you have enough first-party data from their engagement with your website to build rich audience profiles.

You can look at comments left on existing content to gain a better understanding of reader tastes, preferences, and sensibilities. You can also work backwards from those comments and identify what pages registered users viewed that ultimately led them to engage with a particular piece of content. Using an audience insights tool, you can determine how much time registered users spend on pages, how many pages they viewed, and other key pieces of data.

With these profiles, you now have a clearer understanding of what inspires readers to register so they can participate in community discussions. Now, you can use those insights to feed your content recommendation modules, and create highly personalized experiences for new readers.

Make sure you show featured comments on each new article so more new readers feel inspired to add their own opinion to the discussion. This is how you can guide more qualified readers to journey through the funnel on your website towards the path of registration.

HotNewHipHop focuses on showcasing artists and driving audience engagement with Viafoura

HotNewHipHop (HNHH) is an online publication that covers daily news about hip hop and pop culture, including streetwear, sports, and sneakers. In addition to its editorial news content, HotNewHipHop also produces original features and many video series. The site has been nominated multiple times for the BET Hip Hop Awards in the category, “The best Hip Hop Platform.”

HNHH empowers artists by letting them showcase their music to real hip hop fans while its members enjoy the latest and hottest in hip hop singles, mixtapes, videos and news. Saro Derbedrossian, CEO says that “HotNewHipHop is partnering with Viafoura so we can focus on providing our highly engaged community with a platform for lively discussions and civilized discourse, while also driving registrations and unlocking first party data. Our members will get an unparalleled personalized experience that will ensure they register, keep coming back and spend more time on our site.”

With the use of Viafoura’s full suite of services and features including Conversations, Custom Badging, AMA, Engagement Starter, and Automated Moderation, HotNewHipHop’s users will be able to build their identity on the HNHH platform. Whether it’s through sharing their opinions on the latest news, rating songs or album releases, the opportunities for registered users are endless.

“We’re very excited to partner with HotNewHipHop to bring a new layer of engagement and civility to their site,” says Dalia Vainer, Director of Customer Success. With their eclectic, unique and highly-engaged community, we’re looking forward to unlocking brand new first party data to feed back to their editorial, product and commercial teams! We’re also very proud to welcome another Canadian customer to our collective!”

New Data: 40% of Your Subscribers Are Sleeping On Your Content

Let’s say you’ve effectively done all of the right things to acquire new subscribers. You’ve created really interesting content and pushed it out for your readers to consume. Before you know it, you’ve monetized your efforts with a new batch of converted paid subscribers.

That’s the good news, and an accomplishment that your publishing team should be proud to hold up as a gold medal. The journey doesn’t end when readers agree to subscribe, though. Once you have new subscribers, you need to monitor how actively engaged those subscribers are with the content on your website.

Who Are The Active Subscribers And Who Are The Sleeping Subscribers?

You want to organize your subscribers into different tiers based on their level of engagement with the website. Bucket users into labels of active subscribers, who are the ones that visit and engage the site on a near daily basis, and sleeping subscribers, which describes people who seldom return to the site after they become subscribers.

Your active subscribers are your highest valued customers with the greatest potential customer lifetime value (CLTV). These subscribers visit your site daily or weekly to consume fresh content, and they’ll often engage in community activities, such as commenting or participating in lively discussions with other readers. When the time comes for the subscription to renew, there’s little chance that a churn will occur instead.

On the other end of the spectrum are your “sleeping subscribers.” These subscribers have paid for a subscription, which is a good thing. According to your audience insights and analytics platforms, they haven’t visited the website since they completed the subscription form.

Studies have shown that sleeping subscribers make up approximately 40% of a publisher’s subscription base. Sleeping subscribers have the highest probability to churn before the subscription renewal, so it’s vitally important to re-engage and retain as many of those subscriptions as feasibly possible.

Remind Sleeping Subscribers Their Journey With Your Publication Has Only Begun

There’s an old saying in the publishing space that 80% of recurring revenue comes from 20% of paid subscribers. Essentially, this means that subscribers who are the most active and the most engaged with your content are responsible for providing the bulk of subscription revenue to your publication.

The driving reason for this challenge is that up to half of your existing subscriber base is not motivated to come back to the site. Once they complete the subscription, they feel their journey with your website has come to an end. As a successful publishing business, your job is to remind them that the journey has only begun.

According to the American Press Institute, only 31% of publishers target low-engagement subscribers with re-engagement campaigns before their subscription renewal dates come up. That means your business can be one of the three out of ten that forms a successful re-engagement strategy to convert the sleepers into active users.

Re-engagement is the most important step in this process. If subscribers are not engaged with your content, they’re likely to balk when the renewal charge comes up on their bank statements. A churn is likely to occur… Unless you can win them back over and remind them why they subscribed to your website in the first place.

First-Party Data Is The Alarm To Wake Sleeping Subscribers

Using an audience insights platform to collect first-party data, you have the necessary touchpoints to form rich audience profiles of your subscribers. Build those profiles so that you can gain a better understanding of how to wake up the sleepers.

You can view the articles they consumed that led them to go beyond the paywall. You can identify topics that resonated to drive the subscription in the first place. You can see what authors they followed, or community discussions they participated in that really shone a light on their passion for a subject.

All of these touchpoints are examples of first-party data that tell you what motivated your sleeping subscribers to pay for your content in the first place. Use that knowledge to build highly personalized emails and activate re-engagement campaigns to awaken those sleepers and guide them back to your publishing experience.

Send Personalized Emails To Shake The Sleepers Awake

Since you’ve collected the audience data and built out the profiles, you already know the best way to re-engage with your sleeping subscribers. Now, you just need to create the messaging to facilitate that re-engagement strategy.

Use your content recommendation module to pull out the articles that align with the topics which led your sleepers to initially subscribe for your content. Once the recommendation engine feeds you the suggestions, drop the links into highly personalized newsletter email templates. Create messaging that triggers the same passion as the articles that led the sleepers on their initial journey with your site to reinvoke those same feelings.

By reminding them of that experience, the sleepers will wake up and they’ll follow those links back to your site. This is when you can create a whole new personalized experience to convert sleeping subscribers into active subscribers with the highest CLTV potential.

Data Is King: Personal Experiences Boost Conversions By 30%

What’s your preferred experience with published content? Would you prefer a site that feeds you generic articles, or a publisher that knows how to personalize the content you see? The obvious answer is the second option. A personalized website is far more enjoyable as it provides the topics, opinions, and commentary that speak directly to your unique set of interests.

Some publications are better at personalization than others. These publications know how to identify if an article, or even a headline, will encourage readers to spend more time on the site. Their content is informative and capable of adding value to the reader’s experience so they feel compelled to consume the story. They also know how to use highly targeted links within the articles to drive up clickthrough rates.

By adopting personalization as part of an overarching content strategy, publishers remain connected to readers who are very protective of what they consume. There’s a rising trend of “selective news avoidance” all over the world. According to CNN, only 23% of people get their news from news websites. Young people, in particular, are more likely to use social media for news updates.

Can Personalized Content Trump News Avoidance?

Reuters Institute commissioned their annual Digital News Report. The study analyzed a YouGov survey of 93,000 participants from 46 different countries. Among the key findings was a growing lack of trust in newsworthy content, a problem with its strongest foothold in the United States. Only 26% of US respondents say they trust the news, a three point decline from 2021, and the lowest positive sentiment among all surveyed nations.

Common reasons cited for selective news avoidance have to do with growing polarization, perceived media bias, and a sense of too much politics in the news. But a senior Reuters executive, who helped commission the Digital News Report, says the issue goes much deeper.

“A large number of those who selectively avoid the news say the news has a negative effect on their mood,” says Rasmus K. Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Click-Bait Headlines Or Insightful Titles: Which Is The Best Approach?

What are the primary causes for news avoidance? According to the International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad (IIIT-H), one of the reasons could be that some publishers rely too frequently on “click-bait headlines.”

In a research study entitled “Clickbait’s Impact On Visual Attention-An Eye Tracker Study,” IIIT-H studied gaze-fixation from 60 participants to measure the amount of visual attention paid by readers to different articles. One group of articles had click-bait headlines, while the other group used educational titles. The results found that click-bait headlines received far less visual attention from readers than articles with non-click-bait headlines.

Click-bait headlines promote a misleading title separate from the crux and context of the article content. According to IIIT-H, people feel duped by misleading headlines, feeling a disconnection between the promoted title and the body of the article. They abandon the page rather than continue the experience, reducing total engagement rates.

Instead of creating false headlines to trigger quick clickthrough rates, successful publishers create thought provoking titles, encouraging readers to consume the entire article. The best way to create headlines that generate engagement is to develop a deeper understanding of what resonates with the intended reading audience. To gain those audience insights, you can use the power of first-party data to align engagement strategies with audience preferences.

First-Party Data Is The Intersection For Creators And Readers

Two of the best examples of first-party data are pageviews and time on-site. You can rest assured that people are intrigued by your content if both of these numbers are trending in the upward direction.

Aim to develop a deeper understanding of what best resonates with your readers. You can identify commonalities in things like the tone of the articles, the positioning of the headlines, common topical themes, and certain keywords that appear in articles with the highest amount of reader engagement.

Your creative team can access these findings in your audience insights platform dashboard to view the results for themselves. They can view the data and clearly identify which articles earn the most engagement from readers. This will help them pivot the content strategy to focus on future stories that support greater audience engagement.

Profile, Personalize, Perform: The Power Of First-Party Data

There’s a lot of power to be wielded with first-party data, which gives your publication a leg up on competitors. Your audience insights platform stores demographic details about your readers, including variables like age, location, backgrounds, and past consumption behaviors on your website. Pool these insights together into rich audience profiles that tell your creators how different types of readers are likely to engage with the content.

You can also segment your audience into different buckets: new readers, known readers, and subscribed readers. The difference in each audience category is measured by their degree of engagement with your website. New readers are fresh to the site, which means there’s very little behavioral data to profile. Known readers are people who have provided at least one example of first-party demographic data that you can use to start building your profiles. Subscribed readers are those who have fully converted and actively paid for premium access to your best content.

As you build your audience profiles, focus intently on the subscribed audience. Look back at the patterns that led people on the journey to fill out the subscription form. What were the articles they read? What common topics or themes were prevalent in those stories? Where did they spend the most time on your site?

Using these enriched profiles, coupled with the data you have on your top performing content, you have all of the necessary information to personalize what readers experience the next time they visit your site. You can deploy highly segmented examples of content that appeal to different readers at each stage in the consumption journey with your website.

Focus on creating personalized content that enables those deep journeys, which should help boost subscription conversion rates by 30%. Watch those pageview and time on-site metrics shoot through the roof by deploying this strategic approach!