How do we (try to) measure and track user engagement ?

I’d already heard about RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) as an indicator from the Financial Times, and our version synthesizes subscriber and member activity, considering regularity and consumption.

Given L’Équipe’s years-long focus on a membership-driven strategy, we now have over 2 million active monthly members and subscribers, along with a significant amount of behavioral data for analysis.

The most complex phase of implementing this project wasn’t developing the formula but rather the iterative testing phase. This allowed us to refine the metric, replacing “Recency” with “Regularity.”

One of the initial conclusions (unsurprisingly!) was a clear correlation between customer lifetime value and engagement level.

The more we increase customer engagement levels, the more subscriber lifetime extends and the more members convert to subscribers

Why is this metric more accurate than page views or time spent?

It takes into account the regularity, frequency, and volume of content consumed, while adding a weighting based on the “importance” of the content: the greater the “value” of a piece of content in terms of editorial significance, revenue generation, and the time spent producing it, the higher its weight will be.

• Regularity, frequency, and content volume: factors in the weight of consumed content—giving more weight to editorially and financially valuable content.
• Frequency of visits: How often a user returns to the platform (both web and apps)
• Content diversity: The range of distinct content consumed
• Tenure: How long someone has been a member or subscriber
• Interaction with content: With higher weighting for Flagship content

For instance, a user who primarily reads “live match” content with low consumption of premium or flagship content will get a lower RFV than someone consuming more higher-value articles or documentaries.

Triple objectives to boost engagement (and of course retention!):

1. Increase recurrence
2. Improve frequency
3. Encourage consumption of high-value editorial content

Key insights from RFV analysis and actions taken:

#1 Correlation between app downloads and high RFV

We developed, in partnership with POOOL, various formats to promote app downloads.

#2 Email openers have higher RFV

We launched a newsletter project targeting subscribers with a low RFV (less than 25) —particularly those with weaker weekend engagement— to provide a weekend news summary and insights from our editorial team.

#3 Consuming Flagship content drives high RFV

Although we defined the content weighting in our algorithm, our initial analysis emphasized the importance of ‘original’ content in customer lifetime value.

By ‘flagship content,’ I mean the very best of L’Équipe — the finest work from our journalists, whether in the form of videos, podcasts, written pieces, or documentaries.

One of the challenges for a media organization is ensuring its content thrives on the homepage of the site. News moves quickly, one story replaces another, and an incredible piece can fail to reach its audience because it was showcased for too short a time, paired with an unclear image, or given a misunderstood headline.

To address this, we adopted an idea suggested by our subscribers: releasing a monthly preview of upcoming content, similar to how platforms present their programming schedules.

Both on site:

And in the newsletter:

These campaigns resulted in notable RFV increases:

• +9% for platform clickers
• +12% for email clickers

> Subscriber (re)engagement strategies from L’Équipe and Les Echos-Le Parisien

#4 Interactive features do have an impact on RFV (Especially for members)

We aimed to foster interactivity among readers. With over 500K monthly comments, the “comments” section on the platform is essential. So to maximize its value, the first step was to update the space with a redesign and new features, such as emoji reactions, AI-generated comment summaries, etc.

Our second objective was to foster greater proximity between audiences and the brand: bringing journalists and readers closer together to develop a sense of belonging. As part of the Olympic Games, we introduced several types of content, including Q&A sessions, which we plan to gradually roll out across our platforms.

> Going further with interactive engagement: DER SPIEGEL’s debating feature

Priority #2: Targeted retention and re-subscription offers in an marketing automated cycle

Prioritizing former subscribers in your strategy, especially reaching out to them within the first few days after they cancel, is crucial:

• 70% of re-subscribers re-engage within seven days of cancellation.Former subscribers acquired during promotions are particularly responsive to targeted relaunches with attractive pricing.
• On average, former subscribers are 18 times more likely to re-subscribe than members, while members are 18 times more likely to subscribe than anonymous users.

Retention and re-subscription scenarios:

We identified two main phases, each divided into distinct analysis periods:

Retention Period: The client has made his cancellation request but still has access and is informed of its impending end.

Re-Subscription Period: The client loses access, prompting relaunches during key periods:

• Day 0–7
• Day 8–30
• Day 30+

We deployed cycles of retention and re-subscription across all customer touchpoints:

• Cancellation form (called in France “loi MUPA”)
• Service-client cancellation confirmation
• Promotional messages on digital platforms
• Apps, push notifications, in-app messages
• Paid media

To achieve the highest possible results, we first implemented offers (initially the same for all users) across all customer touchpoints.

Spoiler alert: doing this across all channels and levers has a MASSIVE impact!

All this communication is coordinated using audiences created within our CDP, which are then shared with all our third-party tools.

A culture of testing as a growth driver

Over the past 18 months, we tried a growth marketing approach, which, in our terms, means ultra-personalization and precise targeting of our subscription messages, starting with our retention and re-subscription offers.

A multidisciplinary team (data, acquisition, and CRM) was formed to define targeting strategies and, more importantly, activate them across our platforms. Each step is tested, analyzed, and then optimized.

Among the initiatives:

• Over 300 campaigns tested annually, featuring variations on:
  • Marketing angles (what are the benefits? Content? Which words should we use to define the benefits?)
  • Pricing approach
  • Trial period and its price

In 2024, enhanced automation of campaigns enabled us to manage around 15 specific segments with tailored offers and messages. The primary advantage of this automation is its ability to significantly improve our conversion rates.

Key learnings from these tests:

• We discovered that a significant portion of former subscribers are quite receptive to retention offers at higher price with commitments that do not negatively impact our ARPU but instead come with a one-year commitment.
• This approach meaningfully increases the LTV of our subscribers and, by extension, boosts our margins.

Thanks to these strategies, 75% of customers who reached the -100 days mark of their promotional offer period are still subscribers as of November 2024.

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.

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.

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.

Romain L'hote is Marketing Director of L'Équipe, the emblematic French sports newspaper with a daily digital readership of 2.5 million, and over 190,000 subscribers to its paid digital offer. Subscriber acquisition is, as it is for many, at the heart of its monetization strategy. Today, Romain shares how, by trial and error, his team managed to halve acquisition costs on advertising platforms, while increasing both attribution and last-click subscriptions.

Over the past 3 years, our subscriber portfolio has grown significantly, thanks to a number of strategic choices, notably the shift from mass marketing to more precise reader targeting.

But, despite the power of our own channels (site, app and CRM, which account for the lion’s share of our subscriber recruitment), we continue to invest in paid to support our strategy. In 2023, 90% of our media investments were made on Google and Meta, with an almost even split. We are also combining this with other, less well developed, types of spending (X, TikTok, Twitch, influence).

Changing the way we do paid

Halving our subscriber acquisition costs didn’t happen overnight, of course. It took us two years to make significant progress on our two main KPIs:

• Conversion & cost of acquisition platform attribution (at 7 and 30 days)
• Conversion & last-click acquisition cost

There are several methodological biases in the measurements we use, not least because we don’t have an attribution tool:

• We don’t capture information on non-consenting audiences
• We have to rely on platform figures and their notion of post-click and post-view consent (7 days post-click, 1 day post-view for Meta, up to 30 day post-click for Google)
• With possible data duplication between different platforms…

However, our work on paid acquisition has been structured around three axes: 

• Firstly, segmenting audiences as finely as possible
• Secondly, to restructure our accounts on advertising platforms
• Finally, testing and personalizing our creative messages

1- Segment audiences as finely as possible

Generally speaking, the trend in paid marketing is to work broadly, i.e. with large audiences regardless of specific criteria. 

But we’re a special case. Thanks to our strong audience, and therefore large data flow, segmenting our audiences seemed a crucial first step. 

Historically, targeting was based on a readers’ favorite sports, but the results were rather uneven. We therefore chose to segment users in two ways: 

• According to a reader’s status: anonymous, member, former subscriber, etc; 
• According to their content consumption habits: volatile direct users, readers who remain on free articles, paid articles, videos…

Going from a segmentation with a myriad of divisions, often with very narrow targeting, we instead opted for 3 campaigns based on level of interest, each broken down into only 4 or 5 segments, in addition to a few one-off campaigns.

Given the human resources allocated to the subject (1.5 FTEs), our primary goal was to have something controllable and measurable; without having to micro-pilot segments of 500 people, which may perhaps have a competitive CPA but will ultimately generate few conversions.

Of course, not all groups have the same volume, profile or propensity to subscribe… 

You’ll also enjoy: The Risk of Personalization: do people want and trust it?

2. Restructuring our accounts on advertising platforms

In order to implement our targeting strategy, a lot of behind-the-scenes work went into structuring accounts around our 3 main target audience families, 3 “campaigns” in the platform sense.

We structured accounts using the TOF-MOF-BOF method, a funnel-based targeting system based on third-party and proprietary data: 

TOF (Top of Funnel) audience: 

The TOF audience refers to people whose understanding of our paid product, and the value it provides, is not determined. These readers are generally presented with subscription awareness ads. 

Trigger: third-party data, mainly based on centers of interest, possibly non-qualified visits (visits to our home page and direct mail).

MOF (Middle of Funnel) audience: 

The MOF audience has already shown some interest in the L’Équipe brand and is aware of our paid subscription. 

Trigger: these are logged-in members, and/or browsers on specific pages such as our live match commentary.

BOF (Bottom of Funnel) audience: 

The BOF audience is made up of people who are already interested in our premium offer, are highly engaged and are close to converting. 

Trigger: visit to our subscription landing page, tunnel entry, ex-subscribers, etc.

Our Google Ads campaign page

The data is captured from our platforms and from our CDP. We’ve also created a bridge between these and subscription management tools to be able to send ‘ex-subscriber’, ‘subscriber to X offer’ information.

Example of a campaign for a BOF (Bottom of funnel) user

Trigger: a user has seen our subscription landing page:

This reader is then targeted by a “BOF” advertisement:

Example of a campaign for a MOF (Middle of funnel) logged member: 

Example of a campaign for a BOF (Bottom of funnel) ex-subscriber: 

3. Personalizing messages

After structuring our audiences, it was time to think about how to personalize our messages. Visuals, pricing, offers, testing every word… it’s been a long, whole year of testing to find the right hook for the right customer! And of course… we don’t have the perfect combination.

Here’s an example of message personalization: contextualized offers for the Tour de France and the Rugby World Cup. 

We tested very regularly… Here are three things we’ve learned, some of which are counter-intuitive:

#1 Stop pushing sponsored articles 

Betting money on a specific “paywall” article, in the hope that it will convert readers into subscribers, is no longer a strategy we follow: the acquisition costs are too high in attribution, and in last-click. What’s more, their lifespan is too short to promote them long enough, and native posts already bring enough audience.

#2 Set up awareness campaigns to generate subscriptions

On very small targets, we sometimes found it difficult to distribute our campaigns. So, in order to improve our conversion volume, we tested converting on awareness campaigns… and it works!

The notoriety campaigns enabled us to distribute our campaign more widely, but also to maintain an acquisition cost similar to that of a classic conversion campaign.

#3 Don’t mess with the algorithm

This has become our biggest fear. 

In the case of any big promotional campaigns, we could always increase our investment very sharply for the first few days. But now, for each campaign, we try to scale gradually to avoid upsetting the algorithms and maintain stability on our account and our performance.

Paid strategy 2.0: the results

Thanks to our new strategy, we have substantially increased both attribution and last-click subscriptions, with a 2-fold reduction in acquisition costs in both cases.

Cost per acquisition (attribution) 

Of course, not everything has been a success, and there have been a few flops, particularly with our paid influencer campaigns, where the ROI has never been proven. 

Example of a failed influencer campaign to promote the L’EQUIPE gift card for Christmas 2023, with… 1 conversion 

Now what?

Our projects for 2024: 

• Continue testing, in a rapidly changing ecosystem with the end of third-party cookies, and with deadlines this summer that are likely to shuffle the deck a little on targeting, performance and metrics

• Develop video formats where we’re not particularly ahead of the game, and in certain verticals with an offbeat creative focus for TikTok to support one of the pillars of our overall brand strategy: reaching young people. At the same time, we want to promote subscriptions in a different way, and understand how algorithms work. 

• Try to recruit more qualified leads. Recruit less, but better, with higher ARPU. We want to target our offers even more, giving priority to our former subscribers, whose conversion rate is 13 times higher than that of our members.