The Web seems to be burdened by the same excessive wordiness that plagued newspapers back at the turn of the last century (that’s 1900, not 2000). Look at how little copy is needed nowadays to market the same product:

The same is true when it comes to designing your call-to-action buttons on your site. Make it one button with two choices. That’s it. The last thing you want to do is make your visitors suffer from decision fatigue. Fresh tilled soil has some great examples on their site, including the remake of MobileMe into iCloud. Note how the iCloud design is able to maintain the Apple design elements (gray, curved box) while minimizing the design into a two-option choice. Easy, peasy. (For users. Your design team may need some time.)

To be clear, The Guardian does have a subscription service — users of its iPhone app can access three free articles per day before being asked to subscribe monthly. But the iPad app will start charging existing users (now receiving content under a free promotion with Channel 4 in the UK) for any content. New users will be allowed a seven-day trial before being facing a hard paywall asking for the monthly £9.99 subscription.

Meanwhile, the NY Times and People are giving new subscribers a discounted Nook, courtesy of Barnes & Noble. As yesterday’s post details, gadget tie-ins are tricky. This one might fare better because the publications are requiring payment, not offering a free trial or looking for opt-ins. And every subscriber will get a Nook at a discounted price, instead of just a chance to win one.

Hopefully we’ll be able to see their retention rates in a year and determine whether gadgets and subs go well together. But I remain doubtful.

It’s a nice way to get B2B referrals and opt-ins for your list. The problem may be in retention. Sweepstakes hounds, like extreme coupon clippers, will be willing to sign up for a free trial of anything and then cancel their subscription after the drawing.

A more savvy approach might be to offer the sweepstakes for people who pay for a reduced price trial period — say$1 for 2 weeks? That way you’ve jumped over the pay hurdle and begun cultivating a relationship with people more likely to be genuinely interested in your content. When it comes to opt-ins, numbers count, but so does the quality of your leads.

Most television companies start a video upon opening a page, an annoying tactic that has shown to causes viewers to leave a page. But PBS not only delays the viewing of their Season 2 teaser, but actually forces viewers to “like” their page before being able to view it.

Loyal Paywall Times readers already know that social media is not an incredibly effective way to get opt-ins or conversions. But, for organizations and companies that rely even partly on either advertising or fundraising, having more social media fans/followers/likes is a great way to show your product’s appeal and popularity.

Have you been able to improve upon the standard Facebook fan page (or whatever it’s called by the time this is published)? If so, we’d love to hear about it.

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Valentine’s Day promotions are not just for dating sites! If you’re membership site isn’t very romantic, consider partnering with one that is to boost your opt-in or conversion rates. For example, how about one free month of gaming for guys who buy their sweethearts flowers?
• While women tend to dominate online shopping, guys reign supreme around Valentine’s Day. Plus, most guys hate malls, so they’ll be searching for an online option. Make sure you search advertising and SEO is up to snuff. Include a “Valentine’s Day” keyword in recently updated content.
• Most ecommerce happens the week before Valentine’s Day and top online sales in 2010 were February 5-6. So make sure your email blasts and promos are ready by the first week of February.
• Don’t forget to show some love to your current members. A free giveaway to a limited number of respondents is a great way to foster that community spirit that so many membership sites thrive on.

And if January is a slow month for you, put all your ducks in a row so you can test your opt-in and conversation rates with whatever promo you choose! You’re bottom line will thank you for it.

But did you know that each SSL certificate requires its own static IP. This means that if you have two sites sharing a hosting account, you can only run secure transactions through one site.

This may not be a problem if one site is a subsidiary of another and your branding makes that clear. For example, Consumer Reports can easily run charges for its On Health or Money Adviser publications through its main site, ConsumerReports.org, without confusing consumers. But if you have sites with different content, say two different and unrelated types of video games, consumers may abort their transactions if redirected to another site.

Sites that share the same hosting account often have the same static IP. Therefore, if you’re planning two different sites and need to run secure transactions on each, separate hosting accounts will likely improve your conversions.

In an oldie-but-goodie TED talk video, Duke professor Dan Ariel discussed how he showed 100 MIT students pricing options as presented on The Economist’s online subscription form. The first version had three prices, but out of 100 students, no one chose the middle option.

Ariel wondered why a subscription marketer would promote a pricing option that no one would pick. Circulation marketing pros, of course, have known the answer for eons, which is that using one price to emphasize the value of another ultimately sells more of a higher priced product. Ariel then proved that point by showing 100 students a version of the offer with just two prices.

By the way, our sister Site Subscription Site Insider has published both an on-demand video and a report on pricing psychology for membership and subscription sites.  Check them out if you’re interested!

However, most of the existing data rates social networking platforms pretty low when it comes to conversion. Search and email still work best. And it’s unclear whether sites that link to a social media platform gain access to user’s email accounts and if that’s a valid opt-in to start emailing them directly. However, as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites battle it out, it’s possible that they will begin to sell user’s data to merchants you use their platform (so far Facebook seems to have the most advanced user stats, but their ethical use of such information is also under heavy scrutiny.)

But social logins may be a good idea for sites with leaky paywalls and mixed business models. Having non-paying users sign in will definitely give you a better sense of who your readers are and some basic demographics (location, age, etc.). Even if you can’t convert them to paying users, you can definitely tailor your ad sales to advertisers looking to target your heaviest users. And editorial can always benefit from knowing their audience more, which in turn allows you to better serve your audience and grow your subscription rates.

If you’ve had a social login success or failure that you”d like to share, contact us… we always prefer real-life lessons to theory!

Sadly, the links I embedded in the blog post were not only not working by Tuesday, but went to dead pages.

While’s it’s definitely a best practice to take down any time-sensitive promotion as soon as a deadline has passed, you don’t want to discourage leads who may want to visit the site later. While it took the New York Times a few days, they finally re-directed their Cyber Monday vanity URL to their normal subscription sign-up page. The Economist’s Cyber Monday page seems to have vanished.

How did your Cyber Monday promotion go? Any lessons learned?

In 2006, Helsingen Sanomat decided to offer a “Combo” subscription package that bundled access to both print and digital versions of the paper, according to Poynter’s Rick Edmonds. They’ve seen some success with this strategy, with bundled subscriptions accounting for a third, or 120,000, of their 360,000 subscriptions. This allows them to keep readers loyal to their brand across multiple platforms — print, digital and mobile (which is increasingly important as mobile users are expected to near 6 billion this year — just 1 billion short of the total world population).

However, they’re clearly not maximizing their bundled offer with their pricing strategy. The 1 euro charge per article is a nice feature for visitors that avoids a leaky paywall, but it would be better if they presented their 30-day, 90-day, 180-day and 365-day billing periods and monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual rates. Why force people to make another purchase decision a month or year later?