The four-step subscription lifecycle: engagement, conversion, retention and win-backs

Madeleine White, editor-in-chief of The Audiencers, speaking at Newsrewired in November 2024

Credit: Frank Noon / Mousetrap Media

A reader’s journey from anonymous to loyal subscriber is by no means simple, but it is a vital part of a modern digital subscription

At The Audiencers, we have seen best-in-class strategies from around Europe that compel readers to engage with a news brand, become registered and paid-for subscribers, and even win back churned users.

Here, I will take you through this four-step subscription lifecycle with best-in-class examples and benchmarks for each.

Soft engagement 

Unless you are on Married At First Sight, you would not propose on the first date. And this is the same when it comes to conversion to subscription - you need to build up engagement gradually over time, ensure a reader understands your value proposition, mission and what additional benefits your paid products provide. 

Some classic options:

• Access to content
• Newsletters, both habit-forming and thematic ones
• An engaging app
• Games, puzzles
• Community (commenting, debating, etc.)

But the best in the business use registration, converting an anonymous reader into a logged member, as a preliminary step to subscriptions (The New York Times), as a way to qualify readers before launching subscriptions (Blick.ch), or as a way to increase advertising revenue and improve the user experience through personalisation (e.g. 20minutes)

A best in class example: Alternatives Economiques 

• Having started with a newsletter wall, the French publisher moved to registration to log readers across devices and be more effective in their metered model
• Registration has also proven to increase conversion rates to subscription by 10-20x
• Free articles are blocked by a registration wall, whilst premium articles are blocked by a paywall, where registered members get one premium article for free

Conversion to subscription

Most publishers have one wall, but many different types of visitors. 

• 95 per cent of your audience can be considered unengaged
• Not all your content is optimised for conversion (over advertising or mission-led)
• Those in your city, region, country or continent do not have the same conversion propensity as those further afield - recent research by LMU Munich found that discounts significantly increased subscriptions among remote visitors, but not local ones
• Conversion rates on mobile are not the same as on desktop

The solution? Let’s stop asking: 

• What percentage of articles should I block?
• How many articles to offer for free before the paywall?
• How do I decide which content should be free vs premium?
• Which paywall model should I be using?

Why? Because the answer depends on so many factors. Most importantly, it depends on each reader (their propensity and context) and each content type (section, user need, etc.).

Instead, let’s ask: how can I maximise the ARPU (average revenue per user)? The best model to succeed in subscriptions is a dynamic one that adapts to a reader’s profile or context. 

Best in class: Jeune Afrique

• Audiences are segmented into 2 layers: location (country groups based on propensity scores and preferred payment method) and the user’s level of engagement

• Offers, messaging and payment methods are adapted to each segment

These efforts doubled conversion rates to subscription.

Retention 

Retention starts the moment a reader arrives on your website for the first time, and retention teams should be working closely with acquisition to ensure you are all working towards the same goal - a high number of subscribers, yes, but those who stay.

One moment when retention work is particularly essential is in the moments immediately after subscription, the on-site onboarding journey.

How should you choose your onboarding steps?

• How popular a product is (proxied by the average proportion of users that use it at least once over a 30-day timeframe)
• How impactful a product is on engagement (proxied by how engaged a user of that product is 30 days after using it)

You can then rank features by how 'likely' they are to drive adoption and generate engagement, using this to structure your onboarding process accordingly.

Best-in-class example: DER SPIEGEL

• Using audience research, the team sought to uncover which editorial and product features lead to regular and deep engagement
• The goal: to be able to prioritise which features should be promoted and explained during onboarding, and incorporated into product design considerations
• Results: All features are mapped on the usage-preference matrix below using two axes. The Y-axis shows the observed usage values from our website tracking tool, while the X-axis shows the preferences that fans indicated in the survey

Cancellation and win-back

Last but not least, the cancellation journey is an important moment because of the concept of primacy and recency.

As consumers, we have a tendency to recall experiences vividly at the start of a relationship and at the end, while the bits in the middle are remembered less (based on extensive experimentation into memory by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus). 

Brands that do well in the cancellation journey:

• Make unsubscribing accessible online and easy to find
• Make customers reconsider by highlighting loss aversion
• Create slight friction but not too much frustration
• Understand why users are cancelling, and do something with this information
• Offer alternative solutions, including mutually beneficial options e.g. a discount on extended terms
• Use non-final language e.g. using words like "stop auto-renewal" rather than "cancel"
• Be clear when confirming cancellation
• Be innovative when considering alternative options or lock-in strategies

But this is not the end - you can also work on win-back during and after the grace period. 

Best-in-class example: L’Équipe

• During the grace period, subscribers that have churned see a banner on premium content sharing that they soon will not have access to this article

• As well as a pop-up message from the editor-in-chief where he details some of the exciting sports events coming up, that the reader of course would not want to miss

Interested in diving deeper into any of these steps? Drop me a message or connect with me on LinkedIn

Madeleine White is VP of marketing at Poool and co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Audiencers, spearheading the company's global expansion and providing digital publishers with the tools, expertise, and inspiration needed to succeed in their membership and subscription strategies. With a deep understanding of the digital publishing industry, Madeleine has developed a strong grasp of the challenges and opportunities that publishing brands face in engaging, monetising, and retaining their audiences.

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