The way to open the media science powder-powder
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “ Full Media Party (ID: quanmeipai), author Tencent Media.
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Almost every Internet user has experienced a metering wall
:
You can read a certain number of articles for free, and if you want to continue reading, you will have to pay.
However, for many media organizations, this effect is not satisfactory. In order to change this one-size-fits-all “barbaric” strategy, they began to improve the pay wall.
Now,The more “fashionable” paywall is data-driven, it’s smarter and more user-centric, only The content that users convert to subscribers will be placed behind the paywall, and most of the rest will remain free.
Efficient use of data requires technical staff, modern technology, and a flexible organizational structure that is a challenge for both conservative traditional media and new digital media with limited budgets.
But it is still achievable, and success stories have emerged.
This issue of the whole media (ID:quanmeipai) exclusively compiles the Reuters research papers, using European and American media organizations as a case to explore the leading digital subscription product operation model in the media industry, focusing on analyzing data in digital subscription products. The role played.
Users pull new diversified test water
When talking about digital subscription products, we usually focus on user acquisition, user engagement, and user retention.
The user gets the measure of converting the user into a subscriber, imagine a funnel structure, and at the bottom is the subscription behavior.
The deeper the user enters, the more likely it is to become a subscriber.
User participation is to ensure that subscribers use the service as much as possible.
High use of servicesVolume is usually positively related to customer satisfaction, and organizations with a large share of subscription earnings often invest a lot in user engagement to promote retention.
User retention refers to the method of ensuring that users continue to subscribe, and this part can usually be used to evaluate the final result of the first two efforts.
The three key behaviors form a loop:
You must get a subscriber to know how your service behaves and then increase its usage;
When the user wants to leave, you must find out the cause and take action to prevent them from leaving and prevent other users from emulating.
How does this pay wall work?
Follow the details
The data model can be personalized to the subscription channel.
For example, users who have not previously visited the Wall Street Journal will first see more brand-oriented ads;
Users who show interest in subscribing to the Wall Street Journal will see marketing that indicates a specific price.
Norwegian newspaper giant
Schibsted
Adopt similar measures through their Touchpoints platform,
Encourage business and product teams to quickly produce news such as banners.
For subscription sales, banner is the second most important source after the article.
By testing the wording, location, and goals of the banner information, they not only significantly increase the click-through rate and re-subscription rate, but also enhance the participation of existing subscribers, such as reminding them to share the family and re-deliver the holiday newspaper.
New Zurich newspapers also personalize the details of their marketing materials, such as font color and price breakdown (weekly, monthly or yearly) are adjusted to maximize user-subscriber conversions The state of the rate.
finding the model
Subscription possibilities are usually represented by a decimal between 0 (less likely to subscribe) to 1 (very likely to subscribe). In order to better test the possibility of subscription, media organizations need to first identify what kind of Data can be an indicator of subscription behavior.
Only the most relevant index to the subscriber who becomes the subscriber will be considered in the development of the trend model.
Demographic indicators, such as education or income-related indices, have strong correlations with subscription possibilities, but due to technical and legal constraints, these data are often difficult to collect for developing a propensity model.
The Wall Street Journal has adopted a method based on other data (such as positioning) to circumvent the restrictions.
There are now more than one hundred decision trees in this model to try to make the estimates as accurate as possible.
Troubleshooting
Most media organizations with subscriptions regularly re-adjust their data models based on performance and rewrite the weights and plurals of specific indices. Because there are always special circumstances, so
Media organizations need to check for errors on a regular basis. In the New Zurich newspaper, if a user usually only reads a few articles on different topics, then this user is more likely to subscribe than a user who reads the same number of specific topic articles.
Exemption rules
Different models also create “exempt rules” programs to increase efficiency.
The Wall Street Journal created the “sacred period”, in which the most subscriptions have been reached in history, and the reasons for driving conversions have not been abstracted from the data, so more stringent rules need to be applied.
Similarly, the Zurich News will also cancel the paywall at certain times because they know that many regular users will log in to the site at that time (such as commuting), and canceling the paywall will not bother their usual behavior.
Content Filtering
byIn the personalization of the paywall, the editorial team of the Wall Street Journal and the New Zurich newspaper has been unable to decide whether a particular article should be charged or free, and the news editorial department seems to have lost some of its editorial authority.
Therefore, this creates a certain amount of friction inside the media organization. However, according to user feedback, dynamic paywall is the most effective method.
Although content filtering by data or manpower does not reach consensus in the media industry, media organizations are more or less using data to help them make decisions about content filtering.
Best practices for user engagement
The latest report of the International Press and Media Association pointed out that The media industry has always invested the most in new users, but recently there has been an increasing trend in the input of user participation.
The Financial Times’ investment in user participation is three times that of users.
Media organizations, including the New Zurich News, see user engagement as the basis for their development.
Media organizations attempt to personalize each user’s use of the product to enhance user engagement to increase user subscription and retention. after analysis
User behavior data, development automation and personalized parallel solutions to help optimize content and increase user engagement.
Personalized communication
The New Zurich News is designed to personalize the new user guidance process and to flexibly select marketing materials, content and channels such as emails, apps or websites when communicating with users.
They calculated the next best course of action for each user and the communication channels they like.
The only part that is not personalized is the time to send the message, but they plan to personalize this part in the future.
Gamification apps
In October 2018, the Financial Times launched their “Knowledge Builder” tool, an attempt to apply game mechanics to articles to enhance user engagement.
Subscribers can choose topics they want to gain more knowledge, such as manualSmart or blockchain,
With further reading of these topic articles, users can collect “knowledge points” that appear at the top of the article. When the user finishes the article, the knowledge points are sent to their account and displayed as a progress bar at the bottom of the article.
“Knowledge Builder” scores knowledge points and article relevance through algorithms and dynamically assigns them to corresponding articles. Although this tool has only been tested by 13% of subscribers, the results are very optimistic, especially It is reflected in the user participation promotion of users with high unsubscribe risk.
Personalized front page
The Swedish Daily attempts to use internal data to automatically typeset and improve user engagement. Reporter
The article’s news value (1-5 grades) and timeliness (short, medium, long) are scored, and the article is labeled and classified by algorithm to help the article find the best position in the layout.
After typography, the performance of the article (such as pageviews, browsing time, and website conversion rate) determines whether the article is left in place or in a location.
Only the first three articles are the same for each user, and the rest of the homepage is personalized based on user behavior and interests.
In addition to improving the workflow, this strategy has increased the clickthrough rate of the homepage by 10% and the conversion rate of the homepage by 2%.
Selective Vulnerabilities
There is one main rule when it comes to manual and manual content filtering:
If an article is a paid article, then it needs to be presented as a paid article.
Slovakian newspaper DennikN is against
Its way
And do it.
They pay close attention to the sales data of their content,
When a paid article is released for a few days and can no longer be sold to more subscribers, they lower the threshold for reading this article to register for a new free account. subscriber.
They believe that although they can’t get more fees, they collect more email addresses to maximize the value of the article.
At the same time, they will also recommend this article on various social networking platforms or newsletters, telling everyone that they can read for free.
This bait article has become the way to get the most email addresses.
But
The number of bait articles that look like marketing vulnerabilities is limited, and most paid articles will still be placed behind the paywall.
Block unsubscribing and increase user retention
Digital subscription products are essentially a process-oriented, continuous business model. If a digital subscription product of a media organization wants to achieve stable profitability, it must solve the problem of user unsubscribe.
Many media organizations can
To achieve unsubscribe prediction through technically relevant data analysis, that is, to know the probability of subscribers unsubscribing to the service, but
More critical than this is to figure out the reasons for unsubscribing, and based on these reasons, launch a strategy to prevent unsubscription and achieve the purpose of user retention.
Finding possible unsubscribers
Norwegian Evening Post 2015
A predictive user churn model was developed in the year to help newspapers find potential users to unsubscribe and improve retention.
They combine multiple data sources such as user data (demographics and subscription information), CRM data (how and when customers log in), behavioral data and third-party data (income, education, etc.).
The data team is able to identify metrics that are closely related to churn, such as low participation.
Then, try to contact the customer who is likely to cancel the subscription to try to recall.
Now, this approach has been extended to the telemarketing and customer support division of Schibsted Media Group, which now understands the risk of customer churn based on green, yellow or red metrics.
Get used to outperform content
Behavioural data often shows the strongest correlation with the unsubscribe probability.
For the Wall Street Journal, “active time” is the index of behavioral data that is most strongly associated with the unsubscribe probability.
“Active Time” refers to the number of days a subscriber interacts with the Wall Street Journal content during a 28-day period.
The Wall Street Journal believes that the more active days you have in a month, the less likely you are to unsubscribe.
Wall Street Journal
Both Schworst and the newspapers are very concerned about a subscriber’s first 100 days, which is the key to a subscriber’s subscription career.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a subscriber is four times more likely to form a new habit in the first 100 days, and habits can prevent unsubscribe.
The Scheer Steader newspaper found that after the subscriber paid more than twice, the probability of unsubscribing would be reduced by a factor of 2.5.
Shaping the habits of subscribers does not mean that the content is monotonous.
The Wall Street Journal found that ups and downs of content changes played a big role in the formation of subscriber habits.
It’s like a TV show, and you have to make sure that the audience is always fresh.
Always put the user experience first
Subscribers unsubscribe for a variety of reasons: increasing user engagement does not completely prevent users from unsubscribing, subscription prices or competing products, etc. may result in user unsubscribe. Therefore, based on the data of the reason for unsubscribing, it is not always effective to find out the measures to prevent unsubscription.
Knowing everything and watching it change is often an effective measure.
The New Zurich newspaper believes that sometimes it is a smart idea to let subscribers take a break instead of reminding them to renew their subscriptions.
For some media organizations, communicating with subscribers who want to unsubscribe is a challenge because subscribers are now
Will reduce contact with subscription products.
All mediaGood period
“Wall Street Journal Supervisor Sharing: How to use data to develop a membership retention strategy? 》
Mentioned, in order to create more and better space for members to communicate
,
The Wall Street Journal launched the “Canvas Project”, hoping to promote products without compromising user experience.
Household participation. Ensuring a enhanced member experience without compromising user experience, news and brand standards.
Interpersonal communication cannot be ignored
While many media organizations have expressed the desire to reduce unsubscribe by automated means, most of them still rely on telemarketing.
Interpersonal interaction between users and customer service seems to be the most effective way to change the perception of unsubscribing.
To encourage interpersonal interaction, the Wall Street Journal even made calls as mandatory.
Although users can register and subscribe by clicking the mouse, unsubscribing must be done by phone.
They also increased their investment in customer service and hired customer service staff instead of outsourcing to third parties.
These brand ambassadors receive training from the company and deliver valuable feedback by talking to customers.
All media articles
“Overseas platform latest paid illustrations: How to Create a content subscription with product thinking》
Listed overseas media
Use “product thinking” to do content
New attempt,
Data orientation is an important manifestation of product thinking. Thinking about the direction of content, the relationship between media and users, and creating a benign model of come-read-stay-pay, every small step of new attempts means that we are one step closer to users.