Every subscriber who leaves has to be replaced before a subscription business can grow, which makes retention the quieter half of reader revenue and often the more profitable one. The first renewal is the real test of whether acquisition brought in the right people.
Retention starts with habit. The publishers that keep subscribers longest engage them well beyond the welcome emails, and renew on the strength of the brand rather than another discount. A surprising share of churn isn't a decision at all. Expired cards and failed payments quietly lose revenue that can often be recovered.
Some brands are losing subscribers and hard-fought revenue that could be saved with some attention and effort.
Tracy Larner Our subs retention strategy: William Reed
When someone does want to leave, how it is handled matters. Understand why before offering anything, and make the exit easy, because subscribers treated well on the way out are far more likely to come back.
Below you'll find some of our best feature articles on subscriber retention and churn, from engagement and renewal pricing to payment failure and cancellation, alongside our latest news and industry commentary.
Does your CEO know what your subscriber retention rate is? The chances are, probably not. But, according to Julian Thorne, author of our Guide to Retention Strategies for Publishers, this number should never be far from his or her (or your) mind.
A subscriber’s first 30 days are important to build habit but so is every day after, says Emma Robinson, head of customer experience.
You cannot improve a process until you have documented it, and you cannot achieve an objective until you have a process and system to support it, says Rosa Sherwood, head of CRM, engagement and loyalty.
It’s a well-known fact that engaged subscribers stay for longer, says Susanne Kinnaird, head of digital reader revenue.
It’s important not to lose subscribers and hard-fought revenue through involuntary churn, says Tracy Larner, subscriptions director.
It’s important to understand the reason for cancellation and to ensure the retention offer directly addresses the subscriber’s stated concern, says Mike Halstead, managing director of HH&S.
What determines pricing power is not only the category of need, says Andy Burden, founder of Substribe, it’s the stakes.
Making it super-hard to cancel a subscription does no one any favours.
The web is now a major source of magazine subscriptions, via publishers’ own sites and third party online magazine shops. One of the leading online shops, iSUBSCRiBE, recently commissioned Wessenden Marketing to undertake research into their customer
Getting customer service right costs money, but does it cost as much as getting it wrong? Publishers, whose profits are based on repeat business, can’t afford to alienate customers. Jess Burney looks at the importance of joining up the customer journ
Easy living, passionate people and long long lunches, Italy is a country where the term ‘maniana’ is adopted as a lifestyle. Not then an obvious choice for publishers wanting to explore overseas markets. However, according to Paride Forte, the Italia
Winning shedloads of new home delivered customers is all very well, but if you’re losing half of them every year, then you have to invest precious resource and credibility in recanvassing campaigns. A fruitless downward spiral. That is why publishers
Inroads from other media and an increasingly fickle consumer are two of the challenges facing newspapers. The irony is that the best defence against these challenges – namely home delivery – is in decline. Ken Moreton argues that now is the time for
The combination of pressure at the newsstand and improved direct marketing skills has raised the standing of subs departments at many publishers. Subs are taking a bigger share of the marketing budget than ever before and are growing their share of t
When it comes to analysing costs, are you a ‘big pot’ kind of person? Chucking everything in, and then working from a single total cost figure, is a superficially attractive approach, but it does mean that you have little idea of, and therefore littl
Is there such a thing as unwanted revenue? Uncontrolled chasing of one dimensional revenue targets risks rising costs and falling profits. The solution, says Michael Smith, lies in concentrating your resources where they will make the most difference
DD usage is now widespread in the publishing sector, but are publishers maximising its potential? Some publishers are introducing DD schemes without the necessary planning, with the result that DD is not always being used as imaginatively or profitab
This may come as a bit of a shock, but publishers can learn something from the direct marketing techniques used in other industries! Hard to imagine, I know. What is particularly interesting, says Debbie Stenning, is to look at the relative importanc
Home delivery remains an important element of many newspapers’ circulations, particularly amongst the regionals where the tighter concentration of readers makes it an easier process to manage. Andrea Kirkby looks at where home delivery stands today a
When writing copy, it can be helpful to visualise an extremely sceptical prospect. That way, you won’t allow any lazy assumptions to sneak into your work. Here are twelve ways in which you can add instant credibility to your subscription copy.
The National Magazine Company is one of the highest profile magazine publishers in the UK, publishing as it does a whole host of famous magazine titles. Lucy Aitken met with its chief executive, Duncan Edwards, to hear his views on the challenges and
Ever been at a loss as to what to do with the results of the research on your lapsed subscribers? Anthony Ray has been thinking about the problems surrounding this area and how magazine publishers can improve their processes.
With the most recent ABCs being littered with unwelcome minus signs, some commentators have been quick to add magazines to the internet’s long list of media victims. Yet a number of titles posted very positive results and, says Lucy Brunning, it is u
