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5 essentials to launch a subscription model risk-free

Although there is of course a lot to master when launching your digital  model, these are our top 5 in terms of the  journey itself. 

Below, you'll find slides with a brief description of each point, plus links to additional articles to dive deeper on The Audiencers.
  1. Soft steps. Increasing gradually over time, moving readers through “soft conversion steps”, such as newsletter sign up and , before asking for subscription can reduce the risk of a reader turning away when blocked by the paywall. We can consider this in increasingly more valuable conversion loops, whereby a reader is engaged through content, on-site features, etc. before being asked to partake in a value exchange.
  2. Launch on only a small percentage of your audience. To avoid putting ad revenue or audience acquisition/engagement at risk, block only your most engaged readers to begin with. This gives you the space to test, analyze and optimize to master the conversion journey and build engagement amongst other users.
  3. Check the impact of your paywall on . Clue up on how the paywall blocking method will impact SEO, user experience and bypassing, putting our search recommendations into place to ensure you're not putting SEO at risk. TL;DR: paywalls in and of themselves are not harmful to SEO, and search engines like Google are actually putting measures into place to support digital subscription models. But it's still important to research the options and optimize your paywall and paywalled content for search.
  4. Test, test and test again. The best strategy to ensure you're continuously optimizing!
  5. Think of from day 1. Too many acquisition and retention teams launched with separate KPIs that don't work together. If you're acquiring as many subscribers as possible on a low offer, for instance, you'll likely suffer from high churn rates and this won't prove valuable to your business model in the long term. Instead, align acquisition and retention teams and aim to think about retention from before a reader even subscribes.

The slides

This piece has been written by Madeleine White