You have a successful subscription product. This is about everyone else: the people who said no, and the people who said yes but are about to leave.
Most subscription retention playbooks end in the same place: A customer clicks cancel and a cheaper price appears. Sometimes they take it. Sometimes they leave anyway and come back months later on an introductory offer. The Reuters Institute found that at least a third of news subscribers had cancelled or renegotiated their price.
This might keep overall subscriber volumes up.
But it also teaches your best customers that paying full price is not only optional - a mug’s game, even - and it erodes the value of your best product.
In our experience, subscription levels tend to settle at between 2 and 5 per cent of the total audience at best, for most media companies, and a little higher for specialist titles. Industry benchmarks put the typical figure lower still, at under 1 per cent of monthly visitors, while specialist titles such as The Athletic, The Economist and Which? convert more than 10 per cent.
Natural churn is inevitable, and few businesses keep customers forever, especially in a market as competitive as media.
But by keeping subscriptions priced for the dedicated minority that see the product as indispensable and gain habitual value from it - whilst introducing casual payments on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis for the remaining majority - subscription publishers can retain otherwise churning customers.
Your audience is more than subscribers and non-subscribers
Your subscribers are the people who said yes. Around them are three other groups:
people who said no to a monthly commitment;
people who subscribed, then cancelled;
people you keep only by discounting.
Together they make up most of the audience you have already worked hard to attract. Today most of them are worth nothing to you directly, or less than they should be.
If you change just one decision
The approach we propose changes what happens at the point of churn. When a customer will not pay full price, or is about to cancel, do not cut the price. Offer PAYG access instead.
Axate makes it possible for them to pay for what they want, when they want it, by the article or by the day. When their habits change, Axate also makes it easy for them to switch back into a subscription. The same person moves between the two over time, rather than being won once at great cost to the business, and possibly lost for good when they churn.
Your full-price subscription stays exactly as it is. Acquisition costs can fall. Casual payment revenues from PAYG monetise your non-subscribing readership.
What PAYG replaces is the discounting used to hold on to everyone else.
No migration project
Most subscription-led media companies run on established platforms, and nobody wants a migration to test a theory.
Axate does not require you to change a working legacy system.
Existing subscribers stay put on your current system.
Axate sits alongside it as a small tab on the page, with a single wallet and sign-on for audiences who sign up via Axate.
You set the terms: which content carries a price, the price per article, and the free point, for example the rest of the day free after two paid articles.
Axate offers subscription too: use Axate to keep your churning customers as paying customers, and to upsell them back into a subscription when they are ready.
The sensible starting point is a pilot to prove how PAYG adds revenue without touching the strong subscriber base you have built, or introducing revenue- and brand-eroding discount schemes.
What decides the result
The biggest factors are in your hands: the product itself, how much you give away free, and how free access is structured. The single most important choice is to stop sacrificing PAYG revenue to discounted subscriptions.
See what it could be worth
Our reader revenue assessment takes your monthly audience and full subscription price and returns an indicative picture of what PAYG could add alongside your subscription, in year one and by year three.
If the numbers are interesting, book a half-hour call. We will open the model with you and change the assumptions one at a time, using what you know about your own audience rather than our defaults.
[Book a call] · [Try the assessment]