Le Figaro has pulled off a tour de force: halving the time it takes to take out a subscription, from 50 to 25 seconds. Behind this substantial improvement lies a mammoth project dubbed "AMEX" ("Amélioration de l'Expérience Utilisateur" - Improving the User Experience), launched four years ago to internalize and modernize the entire subscription conversion process. We spoke to Valentin Jubert, Director of Digital Subscriptions, and Benjamin Lupu, Product Manager, Reader and Subscriber Experience.
A structured project driven by an in-house culture
The AMEX project was born in 2021 from a clear desire on the part of Le Figaro to modernize and control its subscription infrastructure.
In figures, AMEX means :
- 2 years of preparation
- 2 years of implementation
- 100 people from Le Figaro team
Historically, subscription management was entirely outsourced to GLI with Le Figaro’s Loggia tool, the print service provider. Not sufficiently adapted to digital needs, Le Figaro thus outsourced a central element of its business model, incurring a number of unnecessary and slowing-down frictions.
“Marketing had to wait weeks for each new operation. For the product and tech teams, this was an unjustifiable waste of time.”
The goal was clear: empower teams, simplify the user experience and modernize processes.
A three-pronged organization
From the outset, the project was structured around a strong trio: Product, Tech and Marketing.
“The success of this project was due to a close collaboration between the three of us: Valentin Jubert (Marketing), Benjamin Lupu (Product) and Sandrine Crozat (Technical). No one was simply a customer of another team: we designed the tool for ourselves,” explains Benjamin Lupu, Product Manager Readers and Subscriber Experience.
Involving senior management was also decisive in this. “Management teams, including Marc Feuillée (CEO of Le Figaro), were committed sponsors and followed the project on a weekly basis. That makes all the difference,” he adds.
Project goals
This project pursued several major ambitions:
- Reduce dependence on service providers and internalize strategic knowledge
- Modernize subscription funnels, both for users and for product and marketing teams
- Make marketing teams autonomous in launching offers and campaigns
- Harmonize customer spaces across the group’s various brands (Le Figaro, Gala, Le Particulier). From now on, a single “My Account” space will group all profile information together
- Overhaul and improve data flows to make them reliable and distribute them to all internal systems
Experimentation and tech-stack choices
One of the underlying building blocks of this major project was, of course, to change the platform used to manage digital subscriptions. The final choice – Chargebee – was only made after several POCs:
- An internal POC to see if it was possible to develop everything in-house
- A POC to test Stripe Billing, which turned out to be too limited for Le Figaro’s needs
- In-depth discussions were also held with Zuora, with whom it was not possible to carry out a POC
- Chargebee, chosen after a three-month POC, offering the right balance between functional richness and agility
“Functionally rich, Chargebee has also been very transparent about what they can and can’t do. Our technical team was thrilled. We set up a Slack channel between us, which has been great for efficiency! Their technical support team is in India, but we never felt the jet lag, they seemed to be available 24-hours for us – for really reasonable prices,” explains Valentin Jubert.
“On the other hand, everyone’s knowledge of our data model and our businesses was limited. We had to do a lot of the translation work from GLI to Chargebee on our own,” adds Benjamin Lupu.
A total revamp in a few steps
The AMEX project was carried out in several phases:
1. Redesign of subscriber account space: total overhaul of the “My account” space, unifying six different spaces (print + digital from the group’s three titles: Le Figaro, Gala and Le Particulier) into a single one – October 2024
2. New acquisition tunnels: tested on a part of the audience in November 2024 before generalization in December
3. Migration of digital subscribers: gradual switch to Chargebee, replacing GLI for B2C digital subscribers in early 2025
4. Integration of a new customer service tool: late but essential integration of Salesforce in five months, with an MVP “on the bone” to meet the December 2024 deadline
5. Overhaul of accounting and data flows: upgrade of accounting flows and synchronization of data with a future group CDP project (Treasure Data).
Drastic choices to simplify the user experience
Le Figaro has made radical choices to enhance the user experience:
- Mobile first: 80% of visits are made on mobile, so priority has been given to ultra-optimized design
- Fewer offers, greater clarity: rather than inundating the user with choice, a single offer is highlighted, with a price variation based on different criteria
Three clear offers:
- Access (€10-12): digital content + the digital version of the daily newspaper (PDF) + sharing an article + the ability to comment on articles
- Premium (€15-17): + 2 additional accounts + digital versions of Figaro Magazine and Madame Figaro (PDF) + Figaro Jeux and Figaro Cuisine applications
- Premium+ (€20-22): 2 additional accounts and digital versions of Figaro Histoire, Figaro Hors-série, Figaro Santé, Gala and Le Particulier magazines.
Positioning has been optimized to favor Premium and Premium+ subscriptions, which represent 65% of the portfolio and maximize ARPU.
- Payment rethink: change of payment gateway from HiPay to Stripe, with solutions to reduce involuntary churn, such as the ability to update expired blue cards
A mammoth subscriber migration
“Subscriber migration is the toughest part of the job,” confides Benjamin Lupu. Unlike redesigning tunnels, where corrections can be made after the fact, migration leaves no room for error.
First, we had to map the existing system to understand the thousands of use cases. Then, three blank migrations were carried out before the big leap. “We had only one chance to succeed. We checked every subscriber and every invoice.”
Another challenge was the transition period. Between December 10 – the date of the “Go migration” – and the final migration on January 31, no more new bankcard tokens could be taken on the Hipay and GLI side. “We implemented workarounds to avoid losing subscribers, but it required a huge amount of manual work from customer services, which was exceptional.”
What would you do differently?
- Anticipate the management of customer service and accounting flows: “We took them on too late, which was a mistake,” admits Benjamin Lupu. “Don’t underestimate the complexity of accounting: get help from experts. For our part, we worked with Advolis and Marc Duveau.”
- Better anticipate the need for a robust process: “We had to rebuild our entire Q&A process, with hundreds of use cases to test.”
The results: considerable time and efficiency savings
Today, the benefits are clear:
- Subscription time halved: 25 seconds instead of 50 to take out a subscription
- Transformation rate increased from 0.7% to 0.9%
- Launch of an offer in a few hours, compared with several weeks previously
- A flexible subscription tunnel: allowing upsell, cross-sell and the addition of new payment methods on the fly
- More efficient customer service: it previously took three weeks of training and three months to build the skills of a new advisor. Now, thanks to the new unified interface, a call center agent is up and running in just two days
All in all, “AMEX” has enabled Le Figaro to regain control of the implementation of its digital strategy.
“This project has given us a clear roadmap for the years to come,” concludes Valentin Valentin Jubert.
