How we launched three member growth campaigns in two months

Launching a new product, even when you do the research, use design thinking principles, and work in an agile way, can kind of feel like throwing a party and wondering if anyone will attend. Thankfully readers showed up when we launched a new membership product this year. When we did a fresh round of user research in early summer, we learned new members were satisfied with the good feeling that comes with supporting their fave local newsletter and used some of the perks and participation opportunities we offer especially for them.

With a strong foundation for the minimum viable product, it was time to turn our attention to new member growth and start iterating. We had questions like:

• How can we grow our baseline conversion rate?
• How much recurring reader revenue can we expect from membership?
• What incentivizes readers to become members? What doesn’t?

To begin answering these questions, we ran different new member campaigns in two months for three of our city brands, The Evergrey, Bridgeliner, and The Incline. Here’s how we did it and what we’ve learned so far.

Building three campaigns in two months

The Evergrey in Seattle tested a birthday celebration campaign around their third birthday in October. In November, Bridgeliner in Portland tested an idea that users may be more likely to pay for membership if they knew their dollars were directly supporting an editorial project. The Incline in Pittsburgh used Facebook Membership Accelerator grant funds to test a New Member November campaign with weekly incentives for joining.

For all three campaigns, we outlined the campaign theme, goals, budget, timeline, and stakeholders. We then secured additional incentives to use during the campaign. For example, The Incline gave new members the chance to win one of these four experiences:

Bridgeliner tied incentives directly to content by pitching to readers a contributor network concept that would get funded if we gained enough new members:

Once our core message was solidified for each campaign, we created a messaging plan, tagged in our illustrator to design visuals, and made a lot of marketing content — enough to distribute on all of the platforms we publish on for a month. This step took the most time. But once our messages were crafted, we were ready to launch.

Each week we reviewed our distribution strategy and content to track what generated the most conversion of new members, then we’d tweak the next week’s plan based on what we were learning. For example, when The Evergrey sent a direct email appeal to users asking them to become members during their birthday campaign, they saw a significant spike in new member growth. We repeated the direct email appeal approach with a direct ask later in the campaign to produce similar results.

At the end of each campaign, we announced results to users and thanked them for participating, fulfilled incentives for new members, compiled data on new member growth and qualitative feedback we received throughout the campaign, then hosted a retro meeting where stakeholders review what worked, what didn’t, and discussed next steps.

What we learned

We are still learning how to grow direct reader revenue with our MVP membership product, and it was exciting to see these campaigns make a big impact. The Evergrey saw a 21% increase in members during their three-week campaign. The Incline and Bridgeliner ran four-week campaigns, and increased new members by 32% and 31%, respectively. Here are some of our key lessons learned:

Ask often and directly, and you shall receive. Even though we’re a for-profit business, we can communicate to our users the costs of producing journalism that they value. One direct email appeal read, “Your membership makes our work possible. It’s no secret that local media is a tough biz these days, but a small investment now can go a long way to making Bridgeliner sustainable for the years to come.” Sending direct email appeals targeted to our most engaged readers and community partners led to the most new member growth.

Mission-aligned incentives work. Many of our users support our mission to help curious locals live like you live here, so our conversion-driving incentives included a staycation package and a tote bag featuring a meme that was popular on our Instagram feed. And as for incentives that didn’t work so well? A chance to be our newsletter editor for the day wasn’t a big hit in driving new members. But we did get positive feedback from some existing members who thought it could be a delightful perk that we could offer to members once a month.

Members don’t mind the additional messaging. We used audience segmentation while sending campaign messaging, yet inevitably our active members saw some asks to become a member. We were upfront with them about our campaign goals, excluded them when possible, and didn’t hear more than a few complaints.

The mid-campaign slump is real. The campaign launch is shiny and new. The final countdown urges readers to join on a deadline. But the middle is, well, the middle. We tested saving our best incentives for the middle of the campaign and increasing the messaging frequency on some channels, like social media, and it helped minimize the slump. But the first and final weeks of the campaign remained the strongest in new member growth.

To party or not to party? Members have shown varying levels of interest in attending free meetup-style events. (More focused events like our Setting the Table series and Who’s Next celebrations are much more popular with members.) But we wanted to test a celebration of sorts alongside our campaigns. The Evergrey hosted a low-key birthday bash during the first week of their campaign, a fun opportunity to make an ask and a handful of readers joined on the spot.

The Incline hosted a brewery get-together after their campaign — a dozen members attended to meet one another (and write haikus!). Half of the attendees had just joined during the campaign and were already looking for more ways to participate in the membership program.

Bridgeliner plans to meet with members in January to host a conversation about the contributor network content they helped to fund. We don’t have great answers on members-only events strategy yet, but we got some good new data to understand the ROI on these activities.

What’s next

Using lessons learned from these three campaigns, our central team created templates so that any of our local city brands can more easily run similar member campaigns in the future. Our brands The New Tropic in Miami and Pulptown in Orlando are stress-testing our templates now while running their first campaigns. (The New Tropic turns 5 in January!)

Alexandra Smith is the director of growth at WhereBy.Us. This post is part of a series on how WhereBy.Us works in an effort to share what we’re learning, and to learn from others across the industry. Thanks to Evergrey Director Caitlin Moran, Incline Director Rossilynne Culgan, and Bridgeliner Director Ben DeJarnette for experimenting and to WhereBy.Us COO Rebekah Monson for editing. What are you learning about reader revenue in local media? Let’s chat!

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The Evergrey
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Pulptown
The Incline