76% of consumers say they’re more likely to subscribe if a free trial is offered. Over the past 2-3 years, news media subscription leaders like the NYT and Die Zeit have extolled the importance of these types of offers in expanding their subscriber bases.
This capability had been on the Scientific American “wish list” since 2020, but had previously been impossible because of the limitations with our ecommerce platform. After upgrading our platform and building our own capabilities, in April 2023, we finally had the infrastructure to support promotional offers like “30 days for free” and “$1 for 90 days.”
This presented an opportunity for us to rapidly grow subscriptions. Developing this program required new payment constructs within our subscriber management and payment systems, updating all of our engagement marketing, and placing logic in the dynamic areas of our site and on the paywall.
Launching our first trial offer
To launch our first trial offer was no small task, and required cross-functional collaboration. The product and technology, marketing and data analytics teams worked together to configure new campaign creatives, new landing pages, terms and offers, analytics tracking and more to ensure the foundation was set prior to launch. We had to be innovative and nimble in our approach to get this offer off the ground in just a few months after transitioning to a new ecommerce platform.
This is an example of a successful cross-team collaboration across product, technology, marketing, creative, and data analytics. We first needed the product framework to power these offers; then we needed a creative vision for promotion; marketing distributed this offer via all channels; data analytics had to measure the impact of these efforts. The ability to track the cohort of users that took these offers was key in our ability to continuously monitor and assess performance.
> L’Équipe: limiting churn when increasing the price from a highly discounted subscription offer
The impact of adding introductory offers
The effort has proven to be worthwhile. We’ve seen 4 months of consecutive digital subscription growth after a fairly flat 2023.
Close to 60% of our first trial cohorts converted to full priced subs and while we’ve seen that number settle a few points in subsequent months; the trials have positively impacted Scientific American’s digital subscription growth. In April 2024, our digital subscriber volume was up +25% from April 2023. Year to date, promotional offers have been the source of 41% of our total digital ecommerce production.
We lose 35%-40% of promotion subscribers that disable auto renewal in their account before their renewal date, when they’d start paying a full price annual digital subscription.
We’re now testing $1 for 60 days of digital access on our paywall and trying to answer questions like how do we optimize our ongoing use of trials to fuel growth and long term retention.
