At the Audiencers’ Festival Montréal, Corinne Osnos, VP of Subscriptions and Marketing at Foreign Policy, shared three low-effort, high-impact tactics her team uses to bring in readers despite running one of the strictest paywalls in media.
Key takeaways to copy & share
With a hard paywall leaving practically zero articles for free, Foreign Policy prioritizes low-effort, high-impact tactics, three of which were shared at Audiencers' Festival Montréal: > Build one segmented "win-back" email, targeting lapsed-but-recent visitors > Test an exit-intent registration wall instead of loosening your paywall > Turn your best columnist into a short email course for readers who aren't ready to subscribe yet
Foreign Policy was founded in 1970 at Harvard by two professors, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, originally as a forum for views on US foreign policy that weren’t getting airtime elsewhere. Today it covers geopolitics globally rather than just American foreign policy, and its subscribers reflect that: about 60% US, 40% international, with Canada as its second-largest market.
