You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #412 sent out on July 10th, 2024. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
Learn from the best
Hit the beach, park or simply your sofa this summer with these not-to-miss articles sharing inspiring stories & strategies from publishers around the world.
The Economist: Stand out with an onboarding pack, increasing new subscriber engagement by 3.5%
The context: educating new subscribers about what they now have access to is crucial for successful onboarding. A targeted email welcome series can help, but inboxes are crowded and email engagement rates are declining.
The solution: a printed booklet introducing subscribers to their benefits and addressing pain points raised in customer surveys, such as needing to understand the breadth of the publishers newsletter coverage. The idea was that this might work particularly well for The Economist's average subscriber (older and affluent).
The results: this pack led to an engagement uplift of 3.5%, measured at The Economist by the number of pieces of content consumed within a month.
> Full story to dive into here
The Wall Street Journal: How to develop long term relationships with young audiences
The context: younger readers aren't avoiding the news – they're already inundated with news from all angles and simply search different formats, often short-form and visual, sharing new angles. But how do you do this as a legacy publisher focused on business and finance?
The solution: get the whole company on board with new formats and their success.
Julia Munslow, Senior Platform Editor at WSJ, makes sure to train and coach journalists across the newsroom, making it as accessible as possible for everyone to be involved. Journalists are made aware of the social work that Julia's team are doing, the places where they can step in and how to do this effectively (scripting, filming, hosting, fact checking, etc.).
The results: alongside smart creation and taking action post-publication, this strategy has led to significant engagement across the WSJ's social platforms. Importantly, however, success is measured in a variety of ways, not just video views, including number of new followers following a post, completion rate and conversations in the comments section.
> Read the full article, including 4 case study examples of this in practice, here
L'Équipe: Limiting churn when increasing the price from a highly discounted introductory offer
The context: allowing readers to discover your premium offer, increase engagement and build subscriber numbers through highly discounted packages is a common strategy. But work then needs to be put into retaining these subscribers in the long term.
The solution: a series of actions with clearly defined display conditions to increase loyalty, both in the build up to the planned price change date and following it
In practice:
- Newsletter pop-up
- Suggest mobile app download
- Announce which content is soon to be released to continue to show value
- Invite readers to join the WhatsApp channel
- Warn churning users that they soon won't have access to subscriber-only content
> More details on The Audiencers, results to come!
The Times: Building a thriving community whilst avoiding toxicity
The context: When it comes to community building & commenting, toxicity is a key challenge, in particular when users hide behind fake names. At The Times, although commenting is reserved for subscribers, only 37% were using their real name.
The solution: enforcing real-name commenting! Subscribers were told early on that they needed to use their real name, and there was a 3-step process to do this.
The results: today, 98% of subscribers are using their real name. But, importantly, toxicity has gone down – it's a safer, more welcoming community, and attacks on writers is down 25% – and an increase in the number of comments. People who don't use a real name stick out for a bad reason – they're now blocked and then become compliant.
> Find the full article here, alongside community building stories from The Telegraph
Other media houses we're talking about:
- Clarín's “Decisive notes”: defining the articles that convert
- The Guardian: reader revenue growth & proposition development
- Listening to articles at Le Monde: using a synthetic voice to better engage audiences
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