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“Re-invest in quality journalism, because only journalism will save journalism”

This week’s overheard is from Juan Señor, President at Innovation Media Consulting, who hits the nail on the head here, coming back to the real reason why audiences come to your site in the first place, why they continue to visit on a regular basis and why they choose to subscribe. 

And studies have supported this. Albeit being a bit dated now, Rosenstiel and Mitchell’s 2004 study found that investing more in quality journalism overtime appears to have a more powerful association to growing revenues than investing in advertising or circulation. 

In The Audiencers’ Newsletter #7:

• Operations: How the customer centre at Bonnier News became a source of insight – and the tools we used to achieve this 
• Inspirations: Increase engagement with these on-article UX features from Pink News, the LA Times & others
• Decisions: Exclusive data demonstrating how to increase conversion rates by +46% with a new framework for tracking & optimizing
• Recommendations to add to your reading list: from The Audiencers and friends

Operations

Charlotte Lundqvist, communications specialist & brand developer at Bonnier News, shares how they’ve turned their customer care center into a source of insight.

What would your boss say if you suggested a customer survey with a few thousand respondents who were given a month to talk freely about what was on their minds? Too resource-intensive? Impossible?

Not if you start with the daily contact that you already have with customers.

In recent months, the customer center at the Nordics’ largest media company, Bonnier News, has started to build a growing knowledge base that includes both reading behavior and suggestions for concrete changes. The starting point is the thousands of phone calls employees receive every month and a simple set up in Slack Workspace.

• The first step was to create a ‘customer insights’ slack channel
• By clicking on the lightning bolt, employees can open a form to record customer comments, adding in the subscriber’s age & subscription package
• Comments are also transferred to a Google Spreadsheet to make it easier to draw conclusions from the comments
• Once a month, as a communicator, Charlotte summarize the flow of comments in a What are customers saying? report with a list of topics that have been that most discussed
• They’ve also added an action list where reader suggestions are prioritized based on the effort required to implement them and their potential impact on customer satisfaction

For Bonnier’s customer center staff, this means that they can tell callers “I’ll take your comments on board” and know that there is someone out there in the organization who is really listening.

Whilst for product and revenue teams, this feedback helps to better understand the customer and deliver what will really make a difference. 

Find Charlotte’s full article here.

Inspirations

Increase engagement with on-article UX features

Half-way between product and tech, the features you offer readers are crucial to increase engagement, frequency of visits and facilitate content consumption.

• Follow topics/authors

The Globe and Mail is my personal favorite example here, being one of the first to encourage visitors to follow authors and topics related to the article they’re currently reading, building their ‘personal news feed’. Of course, in order to benefit from this feature, you have to create a free account:

• Vote or debate on something 

A unique strategy to get readers involved in the story and make them feel part of a community of others who are also voting. 

Pink News ask “How did this story make you feel” with emoji icons pulling us in to click:

Whilst Le Drench asks readers to vote before and after reading an article: 

• Make your content interactive

The LA Times has built a brilliant crossover between an article and Google maps, allowing us to look through the descriptions of the best LA restaurants whilst also seeing where they are in the city thanks to the map that moves with our scroll:

Or, more simply, integrate a quiz or test into the article (making sure it’s relevant to the topic being discussed) like Men’s Journal: 

Added bonus: this strategy also allows you to collect valuable data points to inform your strategy and personalize the user experience. 

Find more inspiration to increase frequency of visits in our guide.

How to increase conversion rates by more than 46%

As presented in our article, Poool’s consultancy team has devised a replacement for the traditional conversion rate metric. 

In fact, ‘conversion rate’ as a single metric was originally designed for the e-commerce industry, where the buying process is a lot more impulsive. 

For publishers, however, the reader needs to be engaged over time, gradually being made aware of subscription and the value that this offers. 

To reflect this, we split the single metric into 4 smaller conversion steps. The idea is that lots of small optimizations will culminate into significant improvements to your overall user-to-subscriber conversion rates. 

To put this conversion framework into context, below is some benchmark data from a regional press group:

• Step 1 is your total audience (100%) 
• Step 2 refers to the amount of traffic on premium content – content where a user has the possibility to be blocked by the wall (32% of total traffic in this example)
• Step 3 is the % of users who visit premium content and actually see the paywall (28%) – note that conversion rate between step 2 & 3 is at 90%, meaning the paywall is high up on the page. Some publishers such as WP and Financial Times have 100% here thanks to a pop-up or full page wall, although this isn’t always optimal
• Step 4 is the paywall CTR (0.13%) 
• And step 5 is your overall conversion rate (0.006%) 

The key here is to track and optimize each of the 4 conversion rates between these 5 steps. 

For instance, if we employ some of the techniques detailed in our article and successfully improve each step by just 10%, then we’ll increase CTRs by 33% and overall conversion rates by 46%. I.e. conversion rates would increase to 0.00876%. 

It also gives you the chance to really dissect conversion on your site, discovering which steps are performing the most successfully and where needs work. You might, for example, have high CTRs but realize that you’re limiting yourself by not leading enough of your traffic onto premium content where they’ll have the possibility to click-though. 

Dive deeper into this important topic and how you can optimize each conversion step in our article on The Audiencers.

In-house content to read…

• Benchmarking Digital Subscriptions: An improved framework based on subscriptions per 1,000 visits
• How to reduce the risks of launching a subscription strategy
• Newsletter walls: how a French publisher is innovating to increase its subscriber base

…and recommendations from elsewhere

• Publishers: steal these member and subscriber onboarding ideas
• WAN-IFRA’s Table Stakes Europe Report free download – Building and engaging specific audiences
• Focus on value instead of reach – ideas for metrics to use in your newsroom

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The post #7. Turning the customer care center into a source of insights appeared first on Audiencers.

Charlotte Lundqvist works as a communications specialist and brand developer at the Nordics' largest media company Bonnier News, reaching more than 6 million customers in Sweden, every day. 

What would your boss say if you suggested a customer survey with a few thousand respondents who were given a month to talk freely about what was on their minds? Too resource-intensive? Impossible?

Not if you start with the daily contact that you already have with customers.

In recent months, our customer centre in Örebro has started to build a growing knowledge base that includes both reading behavior and suggestions for concrete changes. The starting point is the thousands of phone calls employees receive every month and a simple set up in Slack Workspace.

> Recommended read: Audience research at The Atlantic, the questions that data can’t answer

Capturing customer feedback

Sometimes the need to vent about the reading experience is the very reason why subscribers to our 45 local newspapers call in to the customer centre in Örebro. In other cases it may be a sidetrack chat after a billing issue has been resolved. But until now, the main challenge has been how best to capture this feedback and present it in an actionable way to the organization.

When the customer centre management team and I started discussing how we could work with customer insights in a structured way, the aim was to find a working method that would not add an additional stress factor during busy periods.

We needed a tool that was easy to use and quick to get started with.

Following advice from DN’s customer service, we chose to start with Slack, a collaboration and communication tool that our employees already used. Using Slack’s Workflow Builder, we were then able to create an automated flow that met our needs.

How it works

We started by creating a channel for customer insights in Slack.

By clicking on the lightning bolt in the message box, employees can then choose to open a form to record customer comments. In addition to free text, the form includes parameters for the title of the comment, the age of the subscriber and their current subscription package. Just like when you post a regular post on Slack, the content becomes instantly visible to everyone who follows the channel. The flow provides a snapshot of what’s being discussed at the customer centre for everyone in the organization to see.

Comments are also transferred to a Google Spreadsheet to make it easier to draw conclusions from the comments received. For example, if a publisher only wants to read what has been written about his or her magazine, or only what customers of a certain age think, this can be easily filtered out.

After just two months, the spreadsheet has developed into a growing knowledge base and the habit of recording comments is taking hold. It is not done after every call, but requires a certain dexterity on the part of staff to be able to determine what others in the company could benefit from knowing.

From customer feedback to product development and innovation

Once a month, as a communicator, I summarize the flow of comments in the What are customers saying? report with a list of topics that have been that most topical. This makes it easier to understand how readers take to the newspapers and our services.

The better we get to know our customers, the better we can deliver where it really makes a difference, whether it’s the broader focus of the content or the font size used on our stock market page.

Some requests we solve immediately, others require more thought. Using softer language on our invoice reminder communications was a quickly-fixed request that will hopefully reduce customer stress.

Another thing you learn from reading customer comments is that everyone is different. If a reader calls in to say they love business news but hate reading about jubilees, the next conversation may be just the opposite.

But my hope for the future of this project is that these insights can collectively become an engine for both product development and innovation.

That’s why we’ve also added an action list where reader suggestions are prioritized based on the effort required to implement them and their potential impact on customer satisfaction.

For our customer centre staff, this means that when talking to customers, they can say “I’ll take your comments on board” and know that there is someone out there in the organization who is really listening.

The post How the customer centre at Bonnier News became a source of insight – and the tools we used to achieve this appeared first on Audiencers.