According to our research report with Digiday, fifty-one percent of publishers have three or fewer paid products, and 1-in-5 publishers do not offer paid products at different prices. Limited product choice at fixed price points often leads to potential customers falling through the gaps and current subscribers looking elsewhere. Readers may decide that your content is too expensive, not relevant or no longer valuable to them. When publishers don’t provide alternative products or prices, it lessens their ability to align customer value with their content offering and results in missed conversion opportunities and costly churn.
Not all your subscribers are created equal, meaning one pricing strategy or offer will not fit all. To counter price and product/market fit reasons for churn, you’ll need to ensure the ability to meet the value expectations of subscribers and provide products that fulfil a genuine need.
When you segment your audiences into behavior, preferences, and demographics, you can begin targeting those different segments with unique offers that will pique their interest.
Subscription experience platforms enable you to study subscriber activity, gain insight into the content they’re engaging with, and determine whether they have specific interests that you can match with relevant product packages. For example, suppose you know your subscriber is a C-suite professional and regularly reads political news. In that case, you could offer a package for political content or offer premium packages at a slightly higher price point because you know they’re likely to have a higher expendable income.
As well as trying to tailor products and price points to better cater to audiences, understanding what value-added services you can provide will go a long way to make your products more enticing. For example, offering exclusive access to a podcast series or premium customer support for the highest paying customers can increase the value perception of your packages. While you might see a marginal increase in operating costs with additional add-on offerings, you’ll see an exponential increase in brand loyalty and reduced churn for the long run as offers become more appealing.