Be nimble, relevant with subscription messaging
When the coronavirus pandemic first started to ramp up in Colorado, I remember reading this “Trust Tips” newsletter about COVID-19.
“Does your audience know about your goals for coverage of this huge, global story? … We want to help our audience make decisions. We want to inform people, not scare them. But have you said it outside the newsroom, to the people who matter most?”
It stopped me in my tracks. Beyond explaining that the coverage from the Fort Collins Coloradoan was free as a matter of public safety, we really hadn’t talked about our approach to covering the global pandemic.
And we needed to. Right away.
We were already in the middle of an experiment. For the past year, we’ve been explaining our “why.” We’ve had our journalists introduce themselves to our audience and then in their own words ask the community to support our work through a digital subscription.
The next iteration of this was to explain our “how” — how our journalism isn’t free; how we are funded; how we approach coverage of certain topics. Now, we have a real-life opportunity to expand that experiment as we’ve shifted our coverage to tell the story of the biggest public health crisis of our lifetimes.
To do this we are being more strategic about where we add subscription asks and thinking carefully about the following:
- Who is the audience for each story and at what stage of the audience funnel is the story targeted?
- How does that audience interact with our coverage?
- How often are we using each subscription ask?
- Should we alter or refresh our messaging?
We saw success telling the story of our ‘why’
When we first introduced the personalized subscription asks last year, we were placing them on every story.
We’ve since refined that approach. Now, these messages are included in the stories we think have the highest conversion potential — a group of our stories we’ve defined as “middle of the funnel.”
Because we’ve analyzed how our users interact with our stories, we know that our viral, breaking and statewide coverage often brings in a new audience. While we welcome these new readers, they are not familiar with our work and do not yet have brand affinity. It’s too soon to ask them to subscribe, so it wouldn’t make sense to add a personalized subscription ask to these stories.
Instead, we focus on getting them to come back and consume other content by linking to other stories of interest, asking them to subscribe to our newsletters, download our app and follow us on social media, or sharing explainer columns about our reporting process.
We also know that our in-depth, investigative and enterprise work is often hyperlocal and targeted toward a loyal audience. Much of this content we now make exclusive to our subscribers. As such, we’ve changed our approach on these stories to thank our readers for their support.
The “middle of the funnel” audience group is where we focus targeting of our subscription messaging. We’ve analyzed our content and have an understanding of what topics and types of stories lead to the most subscriptions. These stories draw in an audience that has likely been to our website at least a few times per week. We still encourage them to sign up for newsletters, download our app and visit other content, but this is where we ask them to subscribe and explain why that’s important to our business model.
This targeted placement of subscription asks has yielded success. Year to date, the personalized subscription asks have directly lead to nearly 1,000 page views to our offer pages and more than two dozen subscriptions.
A disclaimer: The measurement of these efforts is a little squishy. Unless someone clicks on the ask, goes to the offer page, and makes an order right then, it won’t show up in this tracking. But we know that the persistent targeted messaging is having more of an impact than only those direct orders as evidenced by large growth in order page visits and a nearly 30% growth in digital subscribers in 2019.
One of our biggest worries with these personal subscription asks was reader fatigue. We all know how easy it is to gloss over something, especially something you have seen before. So, we wanted to vary our messaging and do something more.
Introducing topic-based subscription asks
One of the biggest questions we see from naysayers on social media is “why should I have to pay for this?” That question is especially prevalent on breaking news and crime stories.
In my replies, I started explaining how doing journalism costs money. One example: We spend hundreds of dollars each month on public records alone (criminal background checks are $5 to $7 each, court records and arrest documents cost 25 cents per page and mugshots are $1.50 each).
It was a good first step to start to explain those costs publicly on social media, but we also needed to do that on our stories. So, we created a subscription ask based on those costs to add to crime stories:
“Stories like this cost us about $10 each to write in public records alone. This excludes the cost of journalist salaries, pens, computers and supplies. For less than that, you could get a month of unlimited access to all our journalism with a subscription to the Coloradoan.”
Next, we came up with a list of other topical subscription asks we could include on stories.
We also created an ask that is specific to our funding model, which reads:
“About 60% of our revenue comes from advertising. The other 40% comes from subscriptions. To sustain the future of local news in Northern Colorado, we are dependent upon support from readers like you. Find out how you can support our work.”
We had just started utilizing these topic-specific subscription asks when our world (along with everyone else's) was turned upside down in March. But early results were promising. People are clicking on the asks, it’s just too soon to determine definitively which ones are working and which aren’t.
But there is one exception. As our coverage shifted, something became clear in the data: Timely, topical asks for support were making a significant and urgent impact on reader revenue.
Timely, topical subscription asks work
By far, topical subscription asks that are the most successful are those placed on stories that have a direct impact on our readers’ lives.
Weather, elections and coronavirus coverage drove most of the success from our topical subscription asks, which have generated more than twice the order page traffic as the reporter asks thus far in 2020.
The election-related messaging saw a spike in the weeks leading up to Super Tuesday. We anticipate the same will be true around the primary in June and Election Day in November.
It’s a pattern that is continuing from what we saw in 2019. As a bomb cyclone blew into our state in March of last year, subscriptions from weather-related messaging surged. Throughout last year, weather topic messaging drove more than 1,000 visits to our order pages and at least 20 new subscriptions.
One weather-based subscription ask read:
Editor’s note: This Fort Collins weather story has been made free for everyone to view as a public service. To support the work of the Coloradoan and to ensure we can keep providing this service in the future, subscribe today.
There’s always a delicate balance between providing our journalism for free due to public health and safety concerns and valuing our work enough to keep it metered or behind the paywall.
At the Coloradoan, we have a strategy: If content is marked free, it will contain hard subscription asks throughout. We have seen this strategy pay dividends. Even though the content is free, targeted messaging containing our newsroom value proposition does make an impact and convert readers into subscribers at a high rate.
That’s why as traffic to our coronavirus coverage reached unprecedented highs, the Trusting News newsletter stopped me in my tracks.
We were missing our moment.
It wasn’t enough to say that we were making our journalism free as a public service. We needed to articulate our goals and our mission, and re-emphasize our importance to our community.
It’s one of the longer topical explainer notes we’ve used to date, but it now accompanies all of the Coloradoan’s coronavirus coverage:
Editor’s note: As the coronavirus outbreak continues to evolve, we don’t want you to panic. In fact, quite the opposite. That’s why the Coloradoan is committed to providing you with accurate, up-to-date information so you can make informed decisions on issues affecting you and the people you love. As such, this story, and many others, are being provided free for all to read. Help us continue this important work by subscribing to the Coloradoan.
As the situation evolved, so too did our messaging. At the beginning of the outbreak, everything was breaking news and the updates were constant. As time passed, we moved to go more in-depth with our work. We also felt we had a responsibility to find the bright spots and share the good news to help bring our community together. That type of journalism is also vital to public health and safety.
But it did mean we had to tweak our messaging:
Editor’s note: We are committed to bringing you accurate, up-to-date information on coronavirus in Colorado. But we also want to share the good things happening in our community during this trying time. As such, this story, and many others, are being provided free for all to read. Help us continue this important work by subscribing to the Coloradoan.
In just a few short weeks, our coronavirus stories have some of the highest conversion rates of all our content. The messaging itself has lead to nearly 2,000 order page views and 26 direct subscriptions.
In addition to those metrics, we also pay attention to what we call “paths to subscribe.” In other words: What stories did a new subscriber view in roughly the 30 minutes before placing their order.
That number isn’t a direct correlation to the number of new subscriptions, but it helps us gauge what is driving loyalty and subscriber behavior.
Of all our journalism in the past six months, coronavirus stories have driven the most paths to subscribe compared to any other content on our website. And most of that content was created in the past month.
In addition, we’ve seen weekly new subscription starts double in the past four weeks compared with an average week earlier in the year.
OK, but hopefully we don’t have another pandemic. How do we push this forward?
Recent events have taught me that just as we need to be timely, relevant and nimble with our news coverage, so too do we need to be with our marketing and subscription messaging.
We have to remember:
- There is no one-size-fits-all model. Readers will fatigue and grow weary of the same asks. If something is working, we need to be creative in how it evolves.
- We need to be more consistent. Another thing our topical asks have in common is the consistency in which they were implemented. Every weather story, every election story, every coronavirus story has consistent messaging. And every journalist in our newsroom knows what that messaging is and is committed to including it in their work.
Consistency can be hard, though. Knowing what messaging to use and when while already juggling a million things is difficult. In the chaos of breaking news or while responding to commenters, I’m recommitting to finding a moment to pause and ask myself and our newsroom the following:
- Have we explained this to our audience?
- Do they know how hard we are working?
- Have we admitted where we can do better?
- Have we described what our goals and values are for this coverage?
- And finally: Have we worked into our process relevant messaging that explains these values and encourages our audience to support our work?
Because I think that’s the key to ensuring we are here to serve our community for many decades to come.
Jennifer Hefty is a regional content strategist for the Fort Collins Coloradoan, Sioux Falls Argus-Leader and St. Cloud Times, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK.
Trusting News, staffed by Joy Mayer and Lynn Walsh, is designed to demystify the issue of trust in journalism. We research how people decide what news is credible, then turn that knowledge into actionable strategies for journalists. We’re funded by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the American Press Institute, Democracy Fund and the Knight Foundation.
