By Minal Bopaiah
As a general rule, I try to stay away from one-size-fits-all advice, especially since digital media is constantly evolving. But after two years covering the subscription and membership site industry, there are four take-aways that I’ve come to believe really determine someone’s success in this business.
#1. Know how to position your premium content as valuable to your audience. While you may be starting a subscription site in response to dwindling ad revenues, this is not a compelling reason for your target audience to subscribe. Instead, we found that there are five main reasons people subscribe to digital content. Make sure you’re hitting one of those five reasons in your value proposition and marketing copy. Then watch our On-Demand Video on 5 PR Tips When Launching a Paywall to learn how to roll out your paywall.
#2. Innovative content is best. While correct positioning is critical, providing content that can’t be replicated via any other medium is sure to help you lock in subscribers. For example, Slide Bureau helps professionals create well-designed slides that can embed live data and video with ease. Knowing where to sell content is also critical; while Astrology Zone provides free horoscopes on its website, it’s been able to charge for the same horoscopes delivered over a mobile app.
#3. Email lists are critical to your success. Recently, the Pew Research Center found that direct traffic is more valuable to subscription sites than search or social traffic. But embedded in the Pew’s assessment of direct traffic is traffic that lands on a site via email. Our 2013 Online Subscription Benchmark Report also found that the majority of subscription site executives report that email is the most cost-effective way to acquire subscribers.
Focus on gathering email opt-ins when you launch a new subscription site (i.e., you’ll want homegrown lists, not lists with email addresses that are bought or stolen in any way). That requires implementing best practices like an email sign-up box on all pages and using a lightbox overlay. Check out some of our sample overlays for inspiration!
#4. This industry is in flux and evolving constantly. I wish I could tell you that if you do this, then you’ll make this much money. But as our Table of Estimated Subscription Revenues details, subscription revenues can vary from tens of thousands to billions of dollars (the highest grossing subscription site right now is Netflix, with $4.37 billion in subscription sales).
Subscribers to our premium site, Subscription Site Insider, know that marketing tactics are evolving quickly in the digital space, which means best practices change with time. That’s why we do our best to review best practices and evaluate new technologies with a keen eye on how each affects your bottom-line sales and profits. If you’d like to get a taste of the breadth and depth of our content, sign up for our $1 trial and get 10 days of unrestricted access. Join by April 14th and you can attend our Webinar on Marketing Automation for Subscription Sites for free!
