There are a number of different strategies and solutions that can be deployed for each of these churn reasons. Specifically, employing strategies that ensure readers see the right content and offers at the right time. This is where technologies focusing on personalization and dynamic paywalls can help.
As subscriptions become a key revenue stream for publishers, using paywalls effectively is a key component to building a predictable and sustainable revenue stream. When it comes to personalization, first-party data collected from users can enhance a paywall offer by displaying relevant articles the subscriber will gain access to. It can also be used to calculate the best moment to show a paywall to each user based on their behaviour and propensity to subscribe.
Subscription experience platforms encourage a progressive approach to relationship building with readers: ensuring incremental value across the entire monetization spectrum – advertising, affiliates, events etc. From there, publishers should look to develop an evidence-based understanding of the customer journey that underpins a successful subscriber strategy. Building on that enables publishers to increase organisational agility and leverage data to scale up subscriptions, increase sales and ramp up renewals over time.
Where personalization truly elevates the user journey is with their on-site experiences as a whole. Usually, this involves collecting first-party data from users on a registration form, and then using known user interests to display a variety of relevant content topics, ads, and even personalized messaging (like a welcome-back message). Displaying content that is similar to the user’s current behaviors or recently viewed articles keeps them engaged and on-site.
Taking this further, publishers might consider using cross-device tracking to ensure every opportunity is optimized, making sure user behaviours are tracked everywhere (from smartphone to laptop, to tablet) so that their preferences are accurately collected and the best content is put forward each time.