Surviving the subscription slowdown
Subscriber growth always gets harder – especially now.
Many publishers find that, as their offering and audience matures, acquiring and retaining subscribers becomes more and more of a struggle. As it does, the number of churned users grows frustratingly – customers who love your product enough to have signed up, but not enough to have stayed. The current cost-of-living crisis is being felt acutely among subscription businesses, with monthly commitments among the first savings to be made by many.
The business of creating and sustaining a subscriber base takes a lot of time, effort and money, all justified by the high lifetime value of the subscribers you manage to sign up. When that lifetime turns out to be shorter and less lucrative than you expected, it hurts - especially for smaller publishers who are in competition with the bigger, national papers. The success seen by the New York Times, and a handful of other leading titles, is not spread across the industry, with local, independent or niche publications facing the toughest challenges.
Having found themselves at a plateau of subscriber numbers, many publishers are offering increasingly steep discounts to continue expanding their subscriber base or to discourage churning users. As a result of relying on increased discounts, acquisition costs are rising and, along with lifetime value, ARPU is falling.
Breaking the cycle.
Axate offers a number of ways to break out of this downward spiral.
Churned subscribers, for example, are an untapped resource. You know they like your product enough to subscribe. The chances are they still like your product, so if you can avoid locking them outside your paywall you can keep them as paying customers.
One of the top reasons why people churn, or never subscribe, is their unwillingness to make a commitment. If you make paid access commitment-free, you have removed one of the biggest blockers.
So, re-engage churned subscribers, or to retain users coming off trial pricing, you can use Axate to offer them an alternative way to access your product, not just through a subscription. Casual payment models, like pay-per-article or pay-per-day not only address a much larger part of the audience but can potentially equal or even exceed subscription revenues for highly engaged customers.
Casual payment can also be a great alternative to discounting for new users as well. Rather than a super-cheap trial, why not start them off with some free credit to use to sample your product? They can carry on reading whenever they like by adding their own payment details or by subscribing.
What results can you achieve?
By adding casual payment options alongside your subscription offering, you can funnel casual readers back into a subscription by allowing them to fall in love with your product again. And even if they don’t subscribe, you have still monetised readers you had previously lost – and rather than churned, you can think of former readers as “dormant”. If you can attract their attention again, they can become active, paying users with a single click.
By offering more options than just subscribing, you’ll also be able to maintain a consistent, appropriate price for your subscription offering, instead of having to keep slashing your prices to attract new users and appease existing ones.
Additionally, knowing that the vast majority of your readership are unlikely to commit to a subscription, you can expand your addressable audience by offering options which don’t demand commitment and leave readers in full control of how and when they spend their money.
Get in touch with the team today to chat about how you can improve your reader revenue model and appeal to a wider percentage of your audience with casual payments today, at support@axate.com.