Capturing new readers and turning them into subscribers is all very well and good. But keeping them over the long term is even better. Actually, it's essential. Thankfully, publishers have understood this. While the last few years have been all about acquisition, it's now time to focus on retention.
Catching the weak signals of potential churn is a real art, and settling on how to retain subscribers can't be decided in a single meeting (although I know we'd all like to!).
At The Audiencers Festival in Paris, Romain Lhote from L'Équipe joined Lise Benamou and Camille Douay from Les Echos – Le Parisien to share their retention strategies developed over 2024 – operations, tests, results and lessons learned.
The context of our two media brands featured in the session?
- L'Équipe: the newspaper (inevitably) took advantage of the momentum of the Paris Olympics to launch a monthly subscription offer at €2.24 for 36 months in the 1000 day run up to the Games. Never-before-seen for L'Équipe over such a long period, and an exciting opportunity to acquire and engage. But a super discount also means potential super churn. But, spoiler, 75% of those who subscribed to this highly reduced offer are still active today (the end of November 2024).
- Les Echos – Le Parisien: acquiring new subscribers was THE priority for the group. But the teams realized that, while welcoming new customers, they were sometimes forgetting to take the time to get to know them properly – so as not to let them slip away.
So what lessons did these two huge names in the French Media landscape have to share on retaining subscribers?
The best-of retention strategies from The Audiencers' Festival Paris in 4 steps!
Step #1 : Define engagement
How do you define and measure engagement to be able to effectively use it in subscription models?
For L'Équipe, the aim is to define a score for each subscriber, enabling them to be classified according to a RFV index: Recency, Frequency, Volume. They chose to measure 4 criteria corresponding to this index:
- Number. of visits
- Volume of unique content consumed
- Frequency of visit
- How long the reader has been a subscriber
To these criteria, L'Équipe adds a weighting according to the content formats most followed: a subscriber who visits long-form documentaries twice a week, for example, obtains a higher RFV score than one who visits the web every day only for live content.
For Les Echos – Le Parisien, the challenge was to measure engagement using simple, readable data that could be accessed in real time. First of all, the group collected its readers' browsing data over a one-week period:
- Number of devices
- Number of visits
- Number of days when the reader visited the site at least once
- Number of articles consumed
This criteria enabled them to distinguish 3 reader segments and define a decision tree to detect weak or positive engagement signals. The result: data that is sorted, ordered and, above all, immediately usable.
> To read next: How we measure audience engagement at DER SPIEGEL
Step #2 : Segment audiences
For L'Équipe, the D-1000 offer for the Paris 2024 Olympics gave them the opportunity to test scenarios on their subscribers, using a bit of what they knew but also experimenting with hypothesis:
- What they already knew: ex-subscribers are 18x more likely to subscribe than readers who have never subscribed before
- What they learnt: there's a “promophile” audience who's addicted to good deals! And this requires a very specific retention strategy. If it's well thought out, it can lead to an even better re-subscription
To reach profiles with lower RFV scores, multidisciplinary teams tested over 300 different messages in one year. Verdict in 2024: L'Équipe has identified 15 segments, with specific offers and messages for each.
At Les Echos – Le Parisien, to address paying customers – and thus generate additional sales – they segmented subscribers into 3 categories:
1 – Subscribers who haven't logged in for a while, who don't seem to visit anymore (with a high churn propensity)
2 – Subscribers with a falling level of engagement (who need to be re-engaged)
3 – Engaged subscribers (who should be converted into brand ambassadors)
Recurring actions have been set up for each of these identified populations, with different triggers when engagement decreases or increases.
Step #3 : Prioritize
As we said at last year's Festival, keeping up with 4,000 KPIs at a time is a fail-safe way of losing track of what's important. It's all a question of focus and prioritization.
At L'Equipe, certain projects have been prioritized for long-term retention:
- Previews of upcoming releases in newsletters: +9% clicks and +12% email opens. And, according to a study conducted by the publisher, subscribers report consuming more content thanks to this feature.
- More interactivity between readers: with over 150,000 comments per month, the publisher has chosen to redesign this key space with new functionalities. Subscribers can now find all their comments in one place, click on other subscribers' profiles, add emojis or ask an AI to summarize all the comments on an article.
- Closer to the media brand: the aim here is to bring journalists and readers closer together, to develop a sense of belonging. How do they achieve this? With a WhatsApp channel gathering 195K followers (+6.3 CTR) or with words signed by the editorial team directly inserted in the weekend debrief newsletter (+16% RFV).
These examples have been materialized in a time matrix that defines which actions are activated throughout the lifecycle. Including for churned subscribers, during their grace period, and to promote re-subscription.
For Les Echos – Le Parisien, this began with the prioritization of 4 major KPIs to measure the actions implemented:
1 – Churn rate
2 – Email performance
3 – Subscriber evolution by offer development
4 – Follow-up of unsubscribers after 1 week, following a retention action
Some of the projects introduced by the group, according to their different types of subscribers:
- For sleeper subscribers: the publisher has chosen to completely stop sending emails to 20% of this group as a test.
- For those with declining engagement: more personalized content and an invitation to join the ‘Club Les Echos Débats', the debating feature for Les Echos' subscribers
- For those already engaged: communication focused on services and features (as opposed to content) and news previews.
> Unsubscription journeys on top publisher sites
Step #4 : Takeaways to apply elsewhere
What can you takeaway from L'Équipe and Les Echos – Le Parisien's strategies?
- Retention and engagement strategies are a team effort. Not just marketing. It's a tasty blend of talents in data, CRM, distribution and, of course marketing. Several publishers also made a special mention to customer service, an essential aid to re-engaging ex-subscribers.
- Measure, classify, simplify, prioritize: when it comes to your engagement strategy, it's tempting to go off in all directions. But at the end of the day, there's only one objective: to produce data that's simple, readable for everyone, accessible in real time, and that implies precise actions to be taken.
- 70% of re-subscribers do so within 7 days of the end of their access (the rate is even higher for new arrivals during a promotional period!). The actions to be taken before and during these first post-subscription days clearly depend on the subscriber's profile and the weak signals of their commitment.
- Test, test, test. In addition to the duration and price of the subscription, many other metrics can be tested: the introductory price, tagline, design, email content, recurrence of notifications and pushes, etc. As the tests progress, the relevance of the tests is refined until the most impactful ones are defined.
