How publishers create digital growth - Our recommendations
In this blog post we try to explain how more digital subscriptions are sold
At the annual conference of the SGKM (Swiss Society for Communication and Media Studies), I had the pleasure of speaking with Marc Isler (Chief Revenue Officer for payment media at Tamedia) about how publishers today successfully sell subscriptions.
We showed how important subscriptions are in the rapidly declining advertising market and how demanding it is to convince readers that excellent journalism costs money. But Tamedia shows that growth in digital products is possible, and I am proud that Merkle can contribute to this.
In the lecture we gave insights into the recipe for success: "doing the homework". The attractive content was already available and so was a paywall, which allows access to a small number of articles only with a valid subscription. The challenge here is the reading behaviour of the users. Many do not want to take out an annual subscription. We see over 34% of the readers (per device and user agent) only once a month and another 60% only once a month. The right product is therefore called the day pass.
And what have we done? A first, very simple step, namely the consistent reduction of abort moments in the purchasing process. Everything was possible within the framework of the concept and an even simpler solution had to be found. Simplicity above all!
Although the purchase process would be even simpler (we are on it or Google is doing it again), the first iteration of the process adaptation has already doubled the sales.
