User Experience Matters For Subscription Businesses

Starting and building a subscription business is not like flipping a switch. There are a lot of factors that go into a reader deciding to fork over money for a publication.

But so often, when publishers decide they want to launch a subscription, they put too much emphasis on the content without doing a deeper dive into the user experience. The reality is, after the content, user experience is likely the second reason why a user does or does not convert.

Digiday published an interesting piece about how four different publishers are tackling subscription growth. And this part about Gannett jumped out to me:

The conversion rate of existing Gannett readers becoming paid subscribers is less than 1%, which is below the industry average of 7% to 8%, he said. Closing that gap will be important for Gannett to reach its goal of 10 million subscribers by 2025.

To achieve that increase in conversion rate, Gupta said his team wants to “continue building a more sticky experience” that gets non-subscribed readers staying on its owned-and-operated websites longer by creating more landing pages for evergreen stories that don’t burn out with each new news cycle.

On the surface, Gannett and its network of publications have the brand to support a subscription service. For decades, people paid for newspaper subscriptions. So, why a sub-1% conversion? Let’s put the content aside for the moment (though I think this is also problem) and focus on its user experience.

When visiting a few different Gannett sites, many of the same things happened. First and foremost, a giant pop-up offering 6 months for $1 appeared. You don’t even have a chance to click on a story before the pop-up appears. One second after that pop-up appears, I got a Chrome alert for browser push notifications. Two things I have to close before I can even engage with the product.

You’re putting significant friction in front of the user trying to get to a story. I know pop-ups work to get people to convert, but people have to first start using the product to determine if there’s value. A <1% conversion rate on that pop-up is pretty rough. Not to mention, this is probably not how Gannett wants its brand to be perceived. The person who pays $1 for 6 months is not likely the person who will pay full price.

Once I get to an actual story page, I am hit with a bunch of programmatic ads, an outstream auto-playing video, and then a second auto-playing video in the Taboola unit. This UX is more likely to make a user want to close the page than engage with the actual content. There’s never going to be a conversion event if the user doesn’t engage with the content.

Good user experience is equal to good audience development. And so, if we want to acquire more paying subscribers, we need to push forward a great UX. Although not running a subscription business, Dotdash’s Neil Vogel is a good example of what to do. On the AMO podcast, he said:

We all have been to that website that causes the fans on our laptops to go into overdrive. Whether it’s popups, pre-rolls, interstitials… You name it, we’ve likely all experienced it.

Dotdash bet that by reducing the number of ads on the site—2/3rds of what their competitors might have—that the sites would load faster and that would make people happier. That, in turn, would result in people engaging with the content and ads more.

He was right. Remember what I said above: content is the #1 reason people are going to convert to a subscription. But that means people have to actually engage with the content. If you’re getting in their way, they’re more likely to just leave than actually convert.

So, what should be done?

Publishers need to audit their websites and really break down where the brand and UX are being negatively impacted. Are there popups that are getting in the way of the user before they’ve had a chance to engage with the content? Are the ads causing the content to move around? I remember being on a site where the content incrementally moved to left one pixel at a time because there was an ad trying to slide in from the right. They were also trying to get me to become a paid subscriber.

Publishers should also get more aggressive with their tests. If I were Gannett, I’d take 20% of the pages and remove all programmatic ads. Instead, I’d push users to sign up for newsletters or the paid subscription product. What does conversion look like on those pages? If Gannett can add 7x the paid subscriptions it is getting right now (7% industry average, according to Digiday), then I would wager that the subscription revenue would more than offset the lost ad revenue.

Another thing I would look at is how the users are moving through the site. For users that are converting, how are they finding your site and what types of stories are they converting on? Pick a specific traffic source; let’s use email as an example. The reason newsletters are the best driver of paid subscriptions is because the user sees more content than a flyby reader. A simple test could be to reduce the ad load considerably for users coming from email as the source. Does that result in an even greater bump in subscriptions?

If we return to Dotdash, one of the reasons the company found such success is because it prioritized page speed. We don’t often talk about this as part of user experience, but the slower a page loads, the more likely users are to bounce. A simple exercise could be to look at conversions by page speed ranges (0-1 second; 1-2 seconds, etc.). Are they converting more on faster pages? If so (and my guess is it’ll be true), you can find ways to make pages faster. For tips on that, read here.

Even with all these changes, it may not work right away. Poor brand perception takes a long time to overcome. But if we actively improve the website so users can actually engage with the content, subscription growth should follow. That is, of course, if the content is good. Nothing can overcome bad content.