L'Equipe is an emblematic French sports newspaper with a daily digital readership of 2.5 million, and over 200,000 subscribers to its paid digital offer. Romain Lhote, CMO, spoke at The Audiencers' Festival and Workshop in London this June about their retention strategy whilst increasing their subscription offer price.
Highly discounted promotional subscription offers are valuable for allowing readers to discover your product, build engagement, increase content consumption and ultimately acquire a larger audience who will hopefully remain subscribed far into the future. But, of course, you have to return your subscription price back to normal at some point…
This is what happened to the sports daily newspaper, L'Equipe (which has 1.5 billion page views a month, just to give you an idea…), when they sold thousands of subscriptions at €2.24 a month (instead of €12) in celebration of the 1000 day run-up to the Paris Olympics.
The huge discount ends this summer, just before the Olympics. And of course, the L'Équipe team is putting in the work to ensure the subscribers who notice the price change don't churn immediately.
So, how can we limit the damage? Poool's team arrived with a few ideas to orchestrate a churn-prevention strategy, that marketers at L'Équipe have now made their own.
Their goal: Set up on-site user journeys that will enable them to maximize retention rates for those “flash” offers subscribers.
1. Split the project into phases, building a retro planning of actions to be accomplished before the planned price-change date
2. Define the type of actions that maximize reader engagement & loyalty
For instance, the team at L'Equipe found that subscribers who download their mobile app, are subscribed to certain newsletters, or read a certain type of long-form content are more loyal than others.
Therefore, they decided to start with 4 simple Poool Engage widgets:
Action #1: Show on-site banners with a 1-click newsletter subscription
The display settings
| Format: | Display rules: |
| Sticky banner, top of screen | Show 10 times maximum |
| One-click newsletter subscription | Only on article pages |
| “Close” option available | Both web mobile & desktop |
> Also from The Audiencers' Festival: The Guardian: reader revenue growth & proposition development
Action #2: Suggest mobile app download
The display settings
| Format: | Display rules: |
| Sticky banner, bottom of screen | Capped to 3 times max every 7 days |
| Redirect to Apple or Android appstore | Only on article pages |
| “Ignore” option available | Only on web mobile |
Action #3: Announce which content is about the get released
The display settings
| Format: | Display rules: |
| Sticky banner, top of screen | Capped to once per day |
| Foldable | Show 10 times maximum |
| No redirection, no link | Only on home pages |
Action #4: Invite readers to join their WhatsApp channel
Because the team at L'Équipe knows that their WhatsApp members will stay subscribed for longer, they launched a pop-in promoting it, for subscribers only.
The display settings
| Format: | Display rules: |
| Toaster | Show once per week |
| “Close” option available | Only on articles pages |
| Only on web mobile |
Action #5: Warn churned users that they soon won't have access to this content
The display settings
| Format: | Display rules: |
| Sticky banner, bottom of screen | Show 10 times maximum |
| “Close” option available | Only on articles pages |
| Both web mobile & desktop |
Originally built for at-risk subscribers, these strategies have been progressively deployed for all subscriber cohorts.
