Subscription Site Insider’snewest exclusive Case Study includes many simple yet powerful marketing strategies from master subscription marketer Mitchell Davis of ExpertClick.com. Here’s how Davis, who says affiliate sales account for 15% of his subscription revenue, keeps his affiliates motivated:
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.
The first email you send to new subscribers after they join your paywall site typically generates much higher open rates and clickthrough rates than your typical broadcast messages.
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.
We just published a new exclusive Case Study in Fastcase. I was lucky enough to conduct the interview myself as Insider’s normal editor Sean Donahue was out on paternity leave (congrats Sean!) One neat thing you won’t find in the Case Study is the fact that this subscription site with more than 500,000 paid online users requires that nearly all 20 staff members work out of its offices in downtown DC.
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…..
According to a survey run on the SIPA site for the past 70 days, the 81 respondents mainly broke into two distinctive clumps. 30% of respondents work for a publishing company that’s mainly virtual with 75-100% of staff working outside formal offices. 55% of respondents said their company is not virtual with 0-24% of staff working outside the main offices. The vast majority – nearly 100% – of SIPA members have a primarily subscription-based business model.
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.
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Subscription Site Insider’s newest exclusive Case Study includes many simple yet powerful marketing strategies from master subscription marketer Mitchell Davis of ExpertClick.com. Here’s how Davis, who says affiliate sales account for 15% of his subscription revenue, keeps his affiliates motivated:
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