Finding the right price for a subscription product requires a two-pronged approach: understanding the criteria that make it a “good price” (for readers and for you), and presenting it in the best possible way to your audience.
At Paris 2024 edition of The Audiencers’ Festival, Lou Grasser, Chief Digital Operation Officer at Le Monde, presented their pricing strategy and the numerous tests they’ve run to perfectly balance the two essentials above.
Key takeaways to copy & share
> Le Monde's digital subscription went from 18 euros a month in 2019 down to 9.90 and back up to 12.99. Getting there took a full-time pricing analyst and a predictive model forecasting three years out > Cheap acquisition followed by incremental rises looked good and was not profitable. The lower tier cannibalised the more expensive one and total sales fell, which is the trap most publishers are still in > Aggressive promotions turned out to work for retention, not acquisition. A five euro monthly offer was pulled after two months, while reworking how customer service handles leavers lifted retention by up to 50% > Listing every benefit was counter-productive: desktop readers took in the first four, mobile readers only two. Meanwhile the barely promoted student and teacher offers were clicked seven times more than anything else > Subscribing through Google at half price now accounts for around 30% of new subscribers, but those readers retain noticeably worse than people who sign up directly
