Featuring the latest news in Winnipeg, the Free Press currently offers both physical and digital products, a weekly e-edition and a Sunday edition. With more publishers monetizing content on their core websites, mobile sites, and apps, the company aspired to develop an innovative model for consumers to access premium content. Following extensive research, the Free Press saw an opportunity to monetize segments of its audience who were not already subscribers, leading to the implementation of a customer centric model which offers a new revenue stream.
Using the fully integrated cloud Identity Management, CRM, and eCommerce platform the Free Press is able to deploy an ‘iTunes for news’ approach to content monetization. This new model will enable readers to view the news as normal, choosing which articles they wish to read, and paying only for the content they consume using eSuite’s post-pay micropayment capability.
MPP Global’s PCI-DSS compliant platform is made up of industry proven modules, enabling the Free Press to attract and retain new customers with a unique model to access content, says MPP Global.
The platform provides the Free Press with flexible and tailored pricing and packaging, the ability to seamlessly roll out promotions, streamline new customer acquisition, and measure the health of their customer relationships.
The Free Press can use eSuite to streamline customer registration journeys, offer one-click payments, and better manage the rapid changes in technologies and applications from a single platform, driving down operational costs and the need to rely on technical expertise.
The Free Press has a centralized view of its customers across all of its services, enabling the company to effectively manage all of its customers and their data.
Focusing on the customer experience, the Free Press enables its customers to manage their own accounts and place orders directly via the self-service. Customers are even able to cancel a payment if they decide an article is not relevant to them after purchase.
The Free Press can specify the number of free articles a consumer can access before a data wall prompts them to create a consumer profile. Presenting a data wall enables the Free Press to collect crucial consumer demographic information so that they can better target and market products to their audience, providing a more customer focused approach.
Following the consumer’s registration, additional articles can be read before a consumer is asked to create a payment account using a credit card or Paypal. The consumer is then able to view more content and is only billed once a pre-determined number of articles have been read. This post-pay micropayments model enables low value transactions to be batch processed, where a combination of time and value serve as triggers to when the consumer’s payment is taken.
With consumers having created an account, the Free Press can successfully gain insights into subscriber behavior and pay-as-you-go analytics, opening up editorial opportunities to target individuals or groups of customers with relevant articles, promotions or other services. The data will be utilized to drive business decisions and strategy, including how best to target its customers with marketing campaigns and promotions.
The project is a significant move for the Free Press as it sees the company rebuild the traditional newspaper model. This customer centric post-pay model enables the Free Press to tap into a new revenue opportunity, providing its readers with a choice of how they access content, as well as increase the insight into its customers.
Christian Panson, VP of Digital Content and Audience Revenue at Winnipeg Free Press, said: “eSuite enables us to engage with our audience in an entirely new way. The micropayment model provides us with a more effective way of drawing in casual readers, enabling us to monetize all segments of our audience.
“Under the new system, a reader would pay $4.05 for 15 articles per month, which is an amount we figure will compare favorably to other options from competing paid websites. Not only do we expect our overall digital revenue to increase 10 to 15 percent in 2015, but we are confident that our customer centric post-pay model will set us apart from our competitors when it launches in the next few weeks.”
Paul Johnson, CEO at MPP Global, said: “We are now full steam ahead delivering eSuite for Winnipeg Free Press in Canada. This ‘iTunes for news’ approach will see Winnipeg Free Press engage with a larger audience, with the functionality to target readers who might not normally pay for online news and only consume a handful of articles. Offering the post-pay micropayments functionality reaffirms Winnipeg Free Press’ position as a leader in the industry.”
