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You're reading The Audiencers' newsletter #31, sent out on February 7th, 2023. To receive future newsletters straight to your inbox every two weeks, sign up here.
2024 mean's business
With events being planned left right and center, I'm so excited to meet increasingly more of you around the world this year, and hopefully find a way to work together.
On this note, I want to open the door to more conversations! If you've got ambitious reader revenue goals for 2024 and would like to discuss them with me, I'd love to plan a call! You can tell me about your current context and targets, and I'll share ideas for moving towards these goals and potential ways that we can work together to achieve them 🔥
> Just find a slot on my calendar adding some info about the call topic
In today's newsletter
- 8 tips for acing your pricing strategy: when it comes to settling on a price for your subscription products, don't just copy competitors or trust your guy feeling
- Forget Glastonbury or Coachella, The Audiencers' Festival is the place to be
- Science Po's Tech Stack Study: 2023's edition is out, revealing top solutions used by French publishers
- Semafor and AI: introducing Semafor Signals
- Content to add to your reading list
8 tips for acing your pricing strategy
Price is the biggest lever for any subscription company, but most companies don't have a pricing strategy… At least that's what Florian Bauer says who, with his consulting company Vocatus, has been helping companies find the right prices and packages for 25 years. Instead, decision-makers often trust their gut feeling, copy their competitors' prices or add a percentage to their costs.
Lennart Schneider shares 8 tips from his conversation with Florian, explaining why none of these are good ideas and how you can do it better.
Be careful with discounts when canceling:
Many providers offer significant discounts in the cancellation process, but Florian advises against rewarding customers for cancelling.
In the short term, these measures are usually very successful and reduce churn, but in the long term they encourage customers to cancel regularly, and it weakens price acceptance.
Communicate weekly rather than monthly prices
Whether a subscription costs €5 per week or €20 per month makes a difference. Florian sees three reasons for this:
- Weekly prices seem more flexible, giving a subscriber the impression they can cancel anytime
- €5 is a more of an everyday amount for which people have more comparable values in everyday life (a cappuccino with oat milk in a fancy coffee shop, for example)
- And lastly, it's also an inconspicuous price increase, after all 53 x €5 = 265 € per year compared to 12 x €20 = €240
Customers don't have a willingness to pay, but rather an acceptance of the price – and that can be trained
Florian likes to talk about a muscle that can be trained. You can see this difference in the comparison between Spotify and Netflix. While Netflix increases its prices in small increments almost every year, Spotify remained stable for years, making the price increase much more noticeable to customers.
He therefore recommends regular price increases; an annual increase of one euro is more acceptable than an increase of three euros after three years.
> Find all 8 tips on The Audiencers
Forget Glastonbury or Coachella, The Audiencers' Festival is the place to be!
🇪🇸 Madrid: 20th February, Espacio Bertelsmann -> Registration open! Regístrese aquí
🇺🇸 New York: 15th March, The New York Times Building (!!) -> seats were filled in 24hrs…🤯 but we're responding to ticket requests this week (and filtering out non-publishers) so registration is still open in case a spot opens up, it's here
🇨🇦 Toronto: 22nd March, El Mocambo (sharing the stage with the likes of The Rolling Stones!) -> Registration here (if you hoped to join NY, you're welcome to come to Toronto instead, and this is a full day event)
Science Po's Tech Stack Study reveals top solutions used by French publishers
The majority of publishers are fairly reserved when it comes to revealing the solutions in their tech stack…
Despite many also finding it difficult to choose between tech, with so many factors at play
Add in the wide range of solutions on the market
And the huge impact that this decision can have on a publisher's success…
In short: choosing your tech stack is no mean feat
Which is why Paris' renowned university Sciences Po launched the Tech Stack Study in 2022, asking French publishers to anonymously share their chosen tech, from CMS and DMPs to paywalls and analytics.
> We shared some of the key tools cited on The Audiencers and link the full report to download
Semafor and AI
“Semafor is launching a new, global multi-source breaking news feed called Signals, in which journalists, using tools from Microsoft and Open AI, offer readers diverse, sophisticated perspectives and insights on the biggest stories in the world as they develop.”
A very interesting approach – instead of fighting the fact that AI is collecting information from across the web, Semafor is making this part of their value proposition.
“No news organization has a monopoly on the facts or the smartest analysis — no matter what any of them claim. There's great journalism and insight everywhere, even if it can sometimes be hard to find. Signal is Semafor's answer to that simple fact: We'll bring you the best of the world's reporting, succinctly summarized and clearly organized.”
And the feature is in partnership with Microsoft, a promising sign that the tech giant is helping journalists work with generative AI to grow audiences, streamline tasks in the newsroom and build sustainable business models, rather than trying to replace them.
“Microsoft said that collaboration with these organisations will help them responsibly use AI in their news gathering and business practices by identifying and refining procedures and policies.”
On the topic of AI:
ReddePeriodistas.com, a digital media outlet specializing in publishing news to help you develop audiences, is a media partner of The Audiencer's Festival in Madrid! As part of this partnership, Red de Periodistas invites you to discover GPT Pro, an AI assistant trained to boost audiences on Google Discover!
Content to add to your reading list:
- WAN-IFRA's latest report is out: Using audience needs to unlock digital transformation
- Traffic, Engagement, and Loyalty Trends from 2023: Chartbeat's latest white paper analyzes traffic, engagement, referral sources, loyalty, and device types across their network of global publishers to uncover five major trends that will inform audience engagement strategies this year
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