#59. Le Parisien’s new onboarding journey

The Audiencers' Newsletter The Audiencers' Newsletter
You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #59 sent out on March 19th, 2025. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.

In today’s newsletter:

  • Insights from INMA – Aftenposten’s impressive work on better understanding and serving each type of reader
  • Le Parisien’s new onboarding journey – retaining readers on-site in the first seconds post-payment
  • Adapting user needs to your audience – how are different publishers adapting user needs to their audience?
  • 🔗 Links links links – articles to add to your reading list

Aftenposten’s impressive work on better serving different readers

At INMA’s subscriptions summit, the team at Aftenposten shared their work on redefining their target audience, with the goal of overcoming 3 challenges: 

  • Our product experience and curation is optimized for the engaged minority
  • Measuring the average subscriber rather than our key growth segments
  • Fragmentation of efforts across departments, reducing speed & impact

Whilst they’d already established the main drivers of a profitable position for Afenposten in the market, they lacked a clear definition of key audiences and their needs. 

Redefined target audience

Through combining quali and quanti research, the team identified 4 distinct segments, unified by certain attitudes, needs and preferences. However, there were of course variations, particularly around age and gender. 

This was then translated into 4 distinct User Types

Aftenposten's impressive work on better serving different readers

These insights about user needs have been applied throughout the customer journey, with each team and department having clear objectives to grow in prioritized segments. 

Some of the initiatives include: 

  • A strengthened podcast-offering and text-to-speed functionality to engage lighter and younger readers
  • Launching a morning briefing for ‘Surfers’ with FOMO
  • Personalized homepage based on user interests (helping to increase subscriber clickthrough rates on articles on the front page by 25% in less than a year)
  • Telling more stories about how people’s lives are affected by events, not only the macro picture, to resonate with younger and more female audiences

Importantly, as Eirik Hammersmark Winsnes said, “You don’t need to grow one segment at the detriment of another”, it’s about better understanding user needs, allocating resources in the right places and serving audiences with the right content at the right time. 

And this work is paying of…

For instance, creating journalism with clear user needs in mind has contributed to a strong development over the last six months.

Aftenposten's impressive work on better serving different readers

> For more on adapting user needs to your audience, check out this article on The Audiencers, and find out more about Aftenposten’s presentation here.

Le Parisien’s new on-site onboarding journey

The leading French daily, Le Parisien, has launched an engaging 4-step subscriber onboarding journey with Poool to increase retention and collect valuable data points in the first minutes after conversion.

First things first – confirmation of purchase, an essential step to reassure the new subscriber.

Le Parisien's new on-site onboarding journey with Poool

Step 2, newsletter sign up

Incase you need reminding of the value of newsletters: 

  • El Confidencial: readers who are registered for a newsletter have a 15% greater chance of renewing their subscription
  • La Vanguardia: churn is reduced by 50% when a subscriber is signed up to the newsletter
  • Financial Times: research has proven that 18% of engaged subscribers would be disengaged if it wasn’t for the newsletters

Promoting some of their most popular newsletters was therefore the most valuable first step for Le Parisien when building this onboarding experience.

Users can click “Subscribe” to any newsletter directly on this page. Once subscribed, or if a user is already subscribed, the button changes to blue.

Le Parisien's new on-site onboarding journey with Poool

Step 3, download the app

Apps are super sticky in terms of time spent and frequency of visits, key engagement metrics that correlate with high retention.

Le Parisien asks for a subscribers phone number to be able to send a link to download the app, a great way to collect another data point whilst delivering value simultaneously.

Le Parisien's new on-site onboarding journey with Poool

Step 4, data collection


Given that the payment has already been made and subscription confirmed, this is a great moment to collect data without causing too much friction.

Le Parisien's new on-site onboarding journey with Poool

Congratulations to Lise Benamou, Sophie Cassam and the team for this launch!

Read more on their new onboarding journey and general best practices for high retention on The Audiencers

How are publishers adapting user needs to their audience?

“User Needs models always come from your audience” – words spoken by the User Needs man himself, Dmitry Shishkin, are definitely worth bearing in mind.

Given that each publishers’ audience is unique, this suggests the model should be adapted to ensure content matches and satisfies your user’s needs, not the other way round.

And that’s exactly what publishers around the world have done, as summarized in this matrix, placing each user need variation into the ‘fact-context-emotion-action’ structure. 

user needs variations

And in this article (perhaps one of my favorites on The Audiencers to date!) we look at each of the User Needs model’s individually, shared by a variety of publishers from around to world, helping you be inspired to build your own version! 

Recommendations to add to your reading list

See you in two weeks for the next newsletter,

Madeleine