Category Archive: 'Retention & Renewals'

How ExpertClick Increases Retention By Encouraging Member Activity

Date: April 17, 2012 Topic: Retention & Renewals Tags: , , , , ,

While membership and dating sites can be a great subscription revenue model, they have their own unique challenges as well. One of those challenges is having high user engagement on the site. After all, your members are your content creators and the reason why new members join, so if no one’s using the site, you’re sure to go under.

One way ExpertClick — a membership site that connects journalists and topical experts — motivates its members by providing them with tips for how to best use the site and succeed in their own careers. Publisher and founder Mitchel Davis says that this has been hugely influential in increasing member engagement and retention. When talking to him on the phone last week, he mentioned that a downloadable PDF is often the best format and method of delivery.

To find out how to target the right members (hint: stop trying to engage users who will renew but never be active), and other helpful tips, you’ll want to hear Davis speak at the Subscription Site Summit in San Francisco next week. Tickets are selling fast, so get yours today!

Posted by MinalB21
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Come Learn How Harvard Health Used Print Mail To Increase Online Retention

Date: February 24, 2012 Topic: Events, Retention & Renewals Tags: , ,
Helen Hoart

Helen Hoart

The other day, I was talking with Helen Hoart, the former marketing agent for Harvard Health newsletters, and she let me in on an interesting tidbit.

Helen helped Harvard Health transition from print-only newsletters to electronic PDFs. But when it came to renewals, she used a mixed-media approach.

“After testing, we settled on a combination of print and online renewals even though we were serving electronic-only subscriptions,” Helen wrote in an email recently. This is a very important lesson for online subscription marketers who might be tempted to give up direct mail or postal campaigns — there’s still nothing like a tangible reminder to get people to convert, renew or remember.

Helen also said that notifying subscribers when new issues where available was a crucial tactic to increase retention. “But a plan vanilla ‘your issue is online’ didn’t do the trick,” she confessed.  “Instead we had to create enticing notifications.”

To find out what these notifications looked like, and other effective marketing tips from Helen, sign up to attend Subscription Site Insider’s April Summit in San Francisco. Hurry–spots are going fast!

Posted by MinalB21
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Lessons From the NY Times and the Economist on Cyber Monday Promotions

Date: November 28, 2011 Topic: Retention & Renewals, Revenues Tags: , , , ,

At 7:30am ET this morning, The Economist blasted a 75% off sale for Black Monday (aka Cyber Monday) to its email list of former subscribers and top prospects.  The New York Times is also running a Black Monday sale on, offering 50% off Times Digital gift subscriptions.  The offer, featuring a great vanity url – NYTimes.com/cybermonday – ran as a full page ad in the first section of this Sunday’s print edition.

The New York Times ran a Cyber Monday promotion using minimal copy.

The New York Times ran a Cyber Monday promotion using minimal copy.

In both cases, the copy was light and repeatedly focused on the deadline: Monday, November 28th only.  As Insider readers know, this is definitely a best practice – if you’ve got a very short-term offer, just talk about that and try to convert the already half-converted.  Don’t waste time and space listing benefits and features.

However, make sure your servers can handle the influx of traffic to your site.  Unfortunately, by 9:55am ET, The Economist’s  landing page was down with the error messages “Too many connections… error querying region” and “Error connecting to database,” all of which we suspect means too much demand.

Posted by MinalB21
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Why Subscription Retention Rates Slip Over Time for Newer Paywalls

Date: November 17, 2011 Topic: Retention & Renewals Tags:

Dan Burkhart of Recurly just posted a great chart showing why it’s dangerous for paywalled publishers to forecast revenues based on their first year’s retention rates especially if your content was originally free.

Your biggest fans and long-term readers of your free content are not only more likely to convert to paying than any other audience, they are also more likely to pay for a lot longer. Old-time fan paid membership accounts tend to have fabulous lifetime values.

The new customers who discovered your site more recently, only after your paywall was erected, don’t have that same sort of brand relationship. Although they were impressed enough to convert at your paywall (although not nearly at as high a conversion rate as your older fans) and they’ll keep paying for months, their overall lifetime probably will be significantly lower than that of the old fans.

It’s perfectly normal. Dan’s chart shows an example of a subscription site where the old fans had an average lifetime value of 18 months, whereas the new folks came in at 10 months average. (BTW: 10 months is roughly double the consumer paid content site average according to our research, so it’s still perfectly respectable.)

The lesson is no publisher new to paywalls should run spreadsheet forecasts for 2012 and beyond based on sales and lifetime values of old fans. It’s unrealistic to assume that initial level of success will continue — your numbers will level off after time as a higher and higher percent of your subscriber file is composed of “new” people.

BTW: Our sister publication, Subscription Site Insider is holding a live webinar today at 1pm ET entitled “30 Retention Tips in 60 Minutes” — an instant replay recording will also be available next week. More info here if you’re interested.

Posted by Anne Holland
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44.7% of SiriusXM’s Promotionally-acquired Subscribers Keep Paying

Date: November 14, 2011 Topic: Retention & Renewals Tags:

According to data-crunching from Brad Alvarez of SeekingAlpha.com, 47.1% of new subscribers SiriusXM acquired through promotions last quarter, continued to pay for service after their promo term ended. That’s a moderately high stick rate for paid content subscriptions. The most surprising data in Brad’s report was that SiriusXM has a typical monthly churn rate of just 1.2-2%.

That’s insanely low churn. In fact, we’re not sure how that’s possible unless 100% of “involuntary churn” is backed out of the numbers. (Involuntary churn are credit cards and debit cards that go bad for a wide variety of reasons ranging from credit limits to fraud.) We’d caution anyone modeling these churn numbers that they are not normal….

Posted by Anne Holland
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