We’re all aware by now of the value of registration for collecting first-party data, boosting engagement and personalizing the user experience, not to mention supporting both ad and subscription revenue streams. And one of the most effective ways of converting anonymous visitors into logged members is through a registration wall. Content is blocked and a reader is asked to create an account in exchange for access to the article and other benefits.

What’s often overlooked, however, is the user conversion journey and their first few minutes as a new member. Just like subscription, this is your moment to:

• Collect data but not too much to cause friction
• Make sure a reader is aware of the value gained from registering
• Offer a variety of account creation options (e.g. sign in with Google or email)
• Personalize the user experience (e.g. choose content topics to personalize their home page)
• Increase engagement (e.g. form a habit through newsletters)
• Promote subscription to increase reader revenue
• Provide value from the moment the account has been created

To give you some inspiration, here are 5 benchmark examples of each step in the registration wall journey:

South China Morning Post

What we like in particular with this journey: the onboarding journey which includes personalization features and a step promoting subscription.

You’ll also like: How launching a registration wall led to higher LTV amongst subscribers at Alternatives Economiques.

Bloomberg

What we like in particular with this journey: we’re never redirected – everything is completed on the article we were hoping to read. Plus we’re offered a special subscription offer immediately after registering

The Economist

What we like in particular with this journey: the double wall (paywall and registration) plus a very simple onboarding but one that always gives us the option of going back to the article we were hoping to read before being blocked

20minutes

What we like in particular with this journey: we’re redirected straight back to the article we were originally accessing

The Washington Post

What we like in particular with this journey: personalizing in the onboarding journey impacts the newsletters presented in step 3, meaning content is immediately adapted to our interests, supporting engagement

Registration wall journey best practices:

• Onboard newly registered users just as you would subscribers, considering which engagement actions often lead to high LTV
• Make sure to connect registration with subscription, if you employ a premium model
• Bring the reader back to the article they were hoping to access in the first place
• Offer real value in exchange for registration, making sure to emphasize this value at each step in the journey – find 10 ideas here
• Reduce friction and only ask for the information you need
• Welcome the reader, either onsite or via email
• Consider offering the option to register with an existing social account, such as Google, Facebook or Apple
• Don’t forget about the registration experience on mobile, perhaps offing app download as one of the onboarding steps

The post Registration wall: benchmarking publishers’ account creation journey appeared first on Audiencers.

Finding the best paywall strategy for your titles is no mean feat. At Alternatives Economiques, we've worked towards a model similar to that of the New York Times: based on account creation and a metered paywall. Here's how.

Freemium, free trial, metered, soft paywall, hard paywall, dynamic, hybrid… a whole world of possibilities, the combinations are almost infinite. And, of course, you can mix models together, with increasing complexity…

“We do freemium with 90% of content behind a soft paywall, which becomes hard above a certain level of engagement, currently A/B testing with micropayments”.

Freemium, metered, hard, oh my

If we look at daily publishers in France, freemium is by far the most popular (Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro). I can’t remember the last time I was able to read a substantial article in Le Monde without being a paying subscriber (which brings us closer to the hard paywall model), while Libération, for example, has more content available to non-subscribers, without asking for anything from its readers.

As for pure players, the majority opt for a hard model. But the label is misleading here too – Mediapart’s paywall, for instance, is a fortress, unpassable, but its flagship video content is available to all…

Also noteworthy is the donation-based model (StreetPress, Reporterre, Blast), and the absence of micropayment models, where readers pay-per-article. For the latter, if you still believe in it, you’re now alone with Elon Musk, and the chances of success are about the same as colonizing Mars.

At Alternatives Economiques, we defend the pay-for-journalism model, financed by subscriptions. Nevertheless, and particularly as a general-interest medium, we’re convinced that we can’t ask new readers to get out their credit card from the get go. 

Soft conversion: from newsletters to registration

From a generous metered system, we quickly switched to a newsletter wall in 2019, seeing unequivocally higher conversion rates (subscriptions/visitors).

It was a real catalyst in the development of our subscription strategy for over 2 years, enabling us to go from 7,000 to 20,000 subscribers to our digital product. The large number of email addresses collected not only enabled us to increase conversion rates to subscription, but also contributed to the success of our latest major acquisition campaigns.

But now, with the end of third-party cookies on the horizon, we’ve moved to a more developed value exchange, one that requires account creation. The Registration Wall.

However, the unlock rate from this new wall was almost half of the newsletter wall, and the extra friction puts the brakes on more than just one reader…

Nevertheless, it’s a step forward. We’re learning a lot more about the reader journey that leads to subscription and we’re able to experiment within this – how many visits, how often, where they come from, how many articles are consulted before converting. All this thanks to the fact that readers are identifiable on all devices and browsers. 

Also worth noting is that, with newsletter walls, unidentified readers were often seeing the wall multiple times even after completion, meaning the conversion rate results were deceptive.

> You’ll also enjoy: How Reuters and The New York Times use newsletters to drive loyalty, subscriptions, and revenue

“But this article is really great! Shouldn’t we put it behind a paywall?!”

We’re pretty satisfied with this situation, but we can always develop! And we were wondering, shouldn’t certain articles be available to subscribers only? 

In a quest to answer this, we ran a test for 6 months, reserving a selection of articles for subscribers only, those that were directly generating the most subscribers. We compared the results with other articles, which could be unlocked via our registration wall.

Here are the results: 

Note the figures have been changed slightly but the ratios are accurate.

This suggested that we’re 3.5 times more likely to convert a reader to a subscriber if we reserve the article for subscribers only! 

However…

• This surplus of subscriptions represents only a small percentage of our total subscription flow: we’re far from the martingale
• We barely got any registrations
• This will actually lead to a future loss of income – albeit converting the reader into a subscriber a little later, the value of this reader in the long term is greater

In short, it’s clear that even though closing more articles with a paywall led to a 3.5 times higher subscription conversion rate, it’s more valuable to our business model to let visitors discover our publication without requiring them to subscribe straight away.

Does this mean that all media should implement this strategy?

My hunch is yes, for most situations anyway. But several factors should influence this decision: your reliance on advertising, the conversion rate from the first paywall hit, the list goes on.

What’s more, our experiment has its limits. For instance, there’s nothing to indicate that among the readers stopped by the wall, some didn’t come back and subscribe in the near future. What’s more, this is not a pure A/B test: the “all things being equal” conditions aren’t completely met (different articles and contexts).

In any case, this test has made our lives simpler: no more headaches about free vs. paid articles. And goals are now clear – we need to get email addresses, via registration!

The post Keep calm, carry on, and launch a registration wall appeared first on Audiencers.

“Our paywall conversion rates have increased by an impressive 40%”

Digital publishers today face numerous challenges in finding new, innovative ways to build a sustainable business model. For some, this involves alternative engagement and conversion strategies that step out of the traditional box of simply blocking content with a paywall. 

One example is Alternatives Economiques, the French print and digital news publisher who have developed a unique engagement strategy involving newsletter inscriptions and registration walls to boost ARPU and de-anonymize audiences. 

Newsletter Wall as a soft conversion step

Despite a hard paywall strategy proving successful for premium publishers such as The Wall Street Journal, Economist and Financial Times, it’s not optimal for every business model because, typically, users require more time to engage and interact with content before deciding to subscribe or not. 

Alternatives Economiques approach is to first present users with a Newsletter Wall, blocking content and asking them to sign up to the weekly newsletter in exchange for access to one article for free. 

Instead of employing a hard wall strategy that blocks non-subscribers, this soft conversion step allows for content discovery, increased engagement, and the development of strong, lasting relationships that all support AE’s subscription conversion rates.

The Alternatives Economiques team has been able to A/B test their Newsletter Wall on the Poool Dashboard, the solution employed for all their audience conversion strategies, giving them insights into what is the most effective strategy for their specialist audience. Through these tests, they found: 

• The wording on their call-to-action button impacted click-through rates on the wall, with ‘finish reading’ proving more successful than ‘continue reading’. Fréderic Desiles, Head of Strategy and Marketing at Alternatives Economiques, puts this down to the terminality of this phrase, emphasising to users that passing through this will give them access to the entire feature. 
• Simple designs were the most effective, with minimal text, large spacing between aspects of the wall and a button colour that matches the brand.
• Unsurprisingly, forefronting the ‘free’ aspect of newsletter inscription was a big factor in persuading users to convert, moving it from the subtitle on the wall to the heading. Poool’s consultancy team believe this is down to a user’s experience of paywalls which typically require payment to pass through. However, as AE’s tests proved, simple wording can change this perception and support conversions in other forms, including newsletter inscription.

Thanks in large part to this Newsletter Wall, Alternatives Economiques has gone from 200k newsletter registrants in late 2020 to 360k today, forming habits in their users’ lives to increase engagement and, ultimately, encourage subscriptions in the future.

Not only have we significantly increased our newsletter base, but we’ve gained precious insights into where users see value on our site. With hundreds of article-unlocks each day via the newsletter wall, we now understand the types of content that interest our audience, informing our freemium strategy to benefit the more ‘hard’ conversion steps such as registration and subscription.

Fréderic Desiles, Head of Strategy and Marketing at Alternatives Economiques

The limitations of a Newsletter Wall strategy

However, as with many things, Newsletter Walls have their limitations. 

Firstly, it’s impossible to track users who have already passed through the wall on a previous visit, meaning users may be presented with the wall even if they already receive the newsletter. 

Second, Desiles notes that there’s a large time gap between a user passing through the Newsletter Wall and the point at which they decide to subscribe (if at all). 

So, although this strategy has been hugely successful in building the foundations of AE’s engagement and premium strategy, the publisher has subsequently decided to take a step further by integrating a Registration Wall into their soft conversion journey. 

The goal here is to convert anonymous visitors into free account holders, allowing the publisher to collect custom reader IDs and first-party data to understand their audience, providing personalized journeys that gradually increase engagement, and lead the user to subscribe at some point in the future. 

Registration supports both advertising and subscription revenue models through increasing engagement – i.e. frequency, recency and volume of visits. Additional ad revenue through targeting, higher page views and more ad inventory, whilst simultaneously increasing a user’s propensity to click-through the paywall and subscribe. Registration therefore directly impacts revenues – Poool’s research has found that registered members have an ARPU up to 10 times greater than anonymous visitors.

Stéphane Père, CRO at Poool

The next step in the funnel

On the Alternatives Economiques website, after having unlocked an article, users are blocked again on the following content by a paywall. 

This has been a successful strategy for the publisher in encouraging subscriptions, but the team wanted to work on improving ‘impulse’ conversions – ones where a user is both frustrated and engaged enough that they decide to subscribe in the minute that they’re presented with the wall so that they can access the content. 

To achieve this goal, the team decided to integrate payment into the wall itself. Thanks to Poool’s integration with Stripe and code-free design features, the AE paywall collects all payment details before the user has even clicked through, not only simplifying the process, but also reducing a step in the conversion funnel and collecting this all-important information early on. 

We had an intuition that the number of impulse subscriptions could be improved, so we acted on it by developing this wall that allows for conversion in a single click. Since putting this strategy in place, our paywall conversion rates have increased by an impressive 40%.

Fréderic Desiles, Head of Strategy and Marketing at Alternatives Economiques

Innovation and soft conversion

Overall, although Newsletter Walls have their limitations, they’ve built the foundations for a registration strategy on the Alternatives Economiques website, which comes with a whole host of benefits for the publisher. 

This is also a clear example of innovation paying off – integrating payment into the paywall is rarely used as a technique to increase conversion rates, but it’s proved hugely advantageous for this publisher and highlights the potential gains in trying something different.

The Audiencers’ newsletter: from professionals to professionals

Sign up to our newsletter – real-life examples, expert points of view and inspirations from publishers around the world to help you do your job better. Sent every two weeks.

The post Newsletter Walls: How a French publisher is innovating to increase its subscriber base appeared first on Audiencers.