In my work on subscription sites, I’ve felt the “feeding the beast” pressure more on the editorial side where new content must constantly be planned, produced and optimized — and that’s just the content the subscriber has come to expect each day, week or month. There’s also all those ancillary products and events and how to”feed the beast” with high-quality, timely content. On the business side, it is a constant churn of getting current subscribers to renew and bringing in new prospects as well as staying up-to-date and current on technology and design. How do you decide what is most important to do right now?

A few weeks ago, I was reminded by my friend/executive coach Margarita Rozenfeld of an effective tool to decide where to spend my valuable time and where tasks might possibly be delegated. It is the time management matrix created by Stephen Covey (who by the way, has a subscription site). Take a look:

While life often requires “urgent” action, our most valuable work is done in the non-urgent, important quadrant of the matrix. If everything becomes urgent and important, we risk burn out and lower-quality work. Where do you spend your time? Could posting this matrix on your desk help you spend your time better and delegate less important tasks? I’ve printed it out and it is on my desk right now.

A customer service telephone number — and making it very visible on your site — sometimes pays off and sometimes doesn’t. The case of ExpertClick.com’s telephone customer service is a cautionary tale for those who mostly have free subscribers. And certainly plenty of sites, like Amazon.com, are high revenue and do not offer telephone customer service via phone – only email.

But there are subscription sites, like Hoovers.com, that thrive and offer customer service via phone. On the plus side, a phone number can add to credibility and help with conversions. But there is certainly a cost for this kind of customer service that must be figured into the budget.

In researching these plugins, I was surprised at how they missed a number of marketing opportunities:

• Every plugin touted the fact that it offers multiple membership levels. But guess what, most of them do – so that hardly makes any one of them special. Marketing tip for the plugin industry: Tell me something that differentiates you in terms of membership levels. I loved to see when a plugin offered a separate welcome page for each level. Great chance to upsell to a higher level of membership.
• I had to really dig (mostly by contacting the developer) to find out what the actual paywall page – the most important page on a subscription site – would look like. The sales websites would show sample sites that are using the plugin but never showed a sample of the paywall page or gave information on how much it could be customized in terms of colors, graphics, registration fields.
• None of the sites I looked at mentioned group sales. If these paywall plugins want to attract businesses selling to other businesses, the ability to make group sales is crucial and a great differentiating factor.

Subscription Site Insider’s

To encourage affiliates to do marketing, he cuts multiple checks on purpose. Davis sends an affiliate check (and he thinks checks have a larger perceived value than direct deposit) the day a sale goes through. If say, three sales go through in one week, Davis doesn’t combine the sales but rather sends three separate checks – that old perception thing.

If you would like to see the complete ExpertClick.com which includes the results of an experiment Davis did in moving his site from a paid to free model, join Insider today.

For that reason, a receipt email is a good vehicle for sharing a little more information than the standard account details, such as username & password.

Providing a few links to speed users to some of your site’s most valuable content — or reiterating the benefits-oriented language that helped you land the subscription in the first place — can reduce the chances of buyers-remorse that some subscribers inevitably feel after giving over their credit card.

But while you can modify a receipt email a little bit, don’t be tempted to use HTML templates for these messages.

Stick to text-only emails for important transactional messages, as HTML emails can result in deliverability problems – especially for new subscribers who haven’t added you to their approved sender list.

Although I’ve seen beautifully designed HTML receipt emails for some subscription sites, such as ConsumerReports.org, they tend to be used by the largest, most trusted email brands out there. ISPs make email filtering decisions based on a domain’s overall email sender reputation, compiled from the cumulative number of complaints and spam-trap hits generated over time from all their email sends.

If you’re a smaller site that might not have the bulletproof email sender reputation of a Consumer Reports, play it safe with text-only transactional emails to ensure new subscribers get their critical login information. That way, they can start using your service immediately.

But always plan a follow-up email Welcome series that makes the most of your team’s HTML design capabilities to further engage subscribers with your site and get them coming back again and again – one of the key tactics for turning new members into long-term subscribers.

I thought that was kind of strange, given how (a) incredibly hard it is to find and hire truly outstanding people (yes, even during a recession) and (b) how the Internet has made it possible to allow folks to work virtually, thus expanding your potential employee pool. Why limit yourself to just the best pros in your hometown? Especially when that town is DC with almost nil un-employment in the sectors Fastcase hires in.

CEO Edward Walters told me he considers NOT being a virtual company a critical key to their success. “There’s a real value to having a close knit team. For example, anyone on the team can pop into my office for five minutes when they have a cool idea. We did the virtual thing for a year and a half, and it was much harder and less fun. The office was better. You don’t have to reinvent everything to be successful.” I laughed when he said that and asked if he was wearing a suit. “I’m wearing jeans,” he replied.

So, aside from field sales reps and a single programmer who moved with her spouse and now works from home, everyone else at Fastcase is in the actual office.

That’s not the case here at SubscriptionSiteInsider.com. We do have an office in Newport Rhode Island that I and two other staffers work from. But Rhode Island has a very limited workforce to draw from, so we do extend offers to virtual workers. For example Editor Sean Donahue is in Portland Maine and CFO Cassandra Farrington is in Colorado. It would be cool if they could all be here. The energy in the office when folks fly in for our quarterly in-person meetings is tremendous. I guess I’m a bit jealous of Fastcase…..

In my experience, virtual team success depends on experience.  I usually only hire people for virtual work who already have experience of virtual work — because I’ve been burned by too many “I’m sure I’d love it” newbies in the past.  Also, only experienced-in-their-craft teams tend to work well.  If you are strategically building an organization that will have significant future growth with high profit margins, you may decide to staff up with a bunch of cheap inexperienced workers who your fewer, experienced staff train and manage.  That business model, with a flock of cheap newbies surrounding each experienced expensive worker, pretty much requires in-house staff.