Subscriptions Online - summary points and Q&A

Sean Donohue, Marketing Sherpa summarised some of his takeaways from the 2 days

Adapt to changing subscription business models

• Continually rebalance mix of paid and free - continuous analysis required - monthly or at least quarterly. New content, different user/subscriber types
• Sell service as well as content - filter and aggregate data, save time, offer analysis
• Exploit your niches

Make Web2 work for you

• Find a technology or platform that is a good fit
• View it as a long term strategy

Optimise your marketing mix

• Measure, monitor and track your marketing spend
• Paid search -
  • If CPC is rising explore long tail terms
  • Look at second and third tier search engines
  • Focus on the profits that are being generated by each click stream

Defend against the economic downturn

• Plug your leaky payments bucket
• Focus on customer retention and cross-sell/upsell opportunities
• Repurpose content for additional revenues
  • Elsevier (scientific and technology book publisher) digitised 4,000 books for the subscription based sciencedirect.com platform.
  • marketed through free trial and volume discount
  • Signed up 2000 customers for free trial
  • Converted enough to make material impact on their annual turnover

Target tests for maximum potential value

• Identify your major pain or biggest subscription driver and try
  
  • Upselling to higher sub package
  • Trial registration path
  • Feature/service that gets visitors over the hump
• Form a hypothesis and test it

Comment during discussion on offering a free trial or not - person from FT.com said that they dropped free trials a while ago and offered a money back guarantee only. She said this has not proved as effective as the free trial. A free trial allows you to continuously market to the potential subscriber - but should always be done having taken their credit card details first.

Suggestion on subscription renewals or conversions from free trials to subscribers - watch usage patterns and prepare a specific marketing message or offer to people who are low users or who have not used the service coming up to renewal or conversion deadline.

Another attendee brought this a stage further and suggested segmenting active customers with different services and communications for each. Reward highly active users/subscribers.

keith