Last week, 65 membership and subscription site executives from companies ranging from The Financial Times and Media Bistro toBriefings Media Group, gathered for our live Summit.  (BTW: Interested in attending next time? Click here for early-bird discount info.) Everyone made new friends (I saw Motley Fool and TheStreet.com whispering to each other in the back, while the publishers of Wire Jewelry Bootcamp and Jewelry Making Professor sat together at lunch); happily badgered the Case Study presenters with tons of questions; and took loads of notes during the workshops.Here are my own notes of Top 25 Most Practical Subscription Marketing Tips I picked up at the Summit:Search Marketing Tips

#1. Add “Official Site” to your headline copy for search PPC marketing. Improves responses and helps you stand out from affiliates and competitors.#2.  If you’re marketing to women consumers, Bing and Yahoo! Search PPC may do even better for you than Google does.#3.  Launch seasonally-themed public content pages (holidays, tax season, etc.) for SEO marketing purposes at least 60 days prior to the season with a vanity URL (ie. www.brandname.com/tax-tips) and then keep them updated and promoted year after year.

Social marketing

#4.  Gather (traditional) email opt-ins on your Facebook page. These names can have up to 70% higher open rates and clickthroughs… work even better than the list you gather on your own site!#5.  Give customer service access to your brand’s Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts and task them with replying to queries, praise, and complaints in that medium.   Don’t expect editorial to handle this.#6. Share Twitter love and make friends by auto-following all your Twitter followers (except spammers) and by creating cleverly-named Twitter lists of vendors, source, and best bloggers in your niche (ie. “Best [Topic] Bloggers”, “Top [Topic] Consultants”, etc.)

Landing Page & Offer Tips

#7. Does a mobile-friendly version of your landing page show up for mobile users? (Yes, this can happen automatically if you set it up correctly.) Top priority for mobile-version pages: your search and email campaign landing pages, as well as any campaigns to under 25s. Note: Flash-based video and audio do *not* work on mobile, so change streaming formats if it’s important for your conversions.#8. Break your offer page into at least two pages, so you get the email first even if visitors balk at entering their credit card on following pages. 25% or more of people who initially bounced can be wooed back to pay.#9. All pages of your public site should contain a prominent offer – above the fold, including an offer headline and form fields (such as email address) to begin the conversion process. Build it into your public template so the offer follows visitors wherever they go.#10. Remove member log-in boxes/forms from public pages and replace them with a tiny link in the upper right corner of the page. Add a membership offer to the actual member log-in page itself for non-members who happen to click there.#11. Copywrite your public FAQs page based on common sales objections. Make a list of them and then address each one.#12. Consider removing the street address and city/state fields from order forms (only require zip) to make ordering easier. Only recommended for low-price consumer offers as you can’t postal-mail anything later.#13. Try testing an exit overlay – a form of pop-up that appears when a visitor leaves your offer page without converting – that contains an instant chat offer. Make sure reps are online and respond quickly at all times.#14.  Run A/B tests of your most critical conversion pages for both incremental tweaks and radical ‘out-of-the-box’ redesigns. An A/B test can take less than an hour to set up (without much, if any IT help), cost next-to-nothing, and give conclusive results in 21 days.

Improving retention:

#15.  Add a LiveChat offer prominently on the ‘thank you’ page that shows up with someone registers registers for a free trial with credit card.#16. Add a “site orientation” video to your member homepage for new members to view so they don’t overlook the best parts of your service. Especially important if you have a heavy-content or highly complex site.#17.  Send a printed ‘thank you’ card or postcard to all new members (if your price point supports it). Some sites even send a physical “welcome kit.”  Also send a printed notice to everyone at the 11 month mark to comply with legal obligations.#18. Don’t abruptly cut off involuntary expires (people whose cards don’t work for auto-renew); instead allow them site access but add overlays or other personalized offers to get a new card from them once they log in.#19. You can auto-renew larger accounts than you think – TheStreet.com auto-renews $5000 per year accounts!#20. Identify ‘sleeper’ accounts (people who haven’t logged on for a while) and send them a special marketing campaign, perhaps a free gift, to entice them to log-on prior to their next renewal date.

Cross-selling additional products:

#21.  MediaBistro’s paid AvantGuild members are 32% more likely to buy its online courses than its free email list members are.#22. If you don’t have the time to make your own extras (ebooks, training, etc) to sell to your list,  partner with a third party to sell theirs. Assume the lion’s share of the marketing and admin work for this – just cut your partner checks for their sales.#23. Gather collections of your ‘best of’ evergreen content in alternate formats (such as a printed report) and offer them to your current subscribers. 12-15% of your subscribers may bite at the offer.   Perhaps add offer to ‘thank you’ page for paid subscriptions.#24. Webinars are a great way to promote training offers – use 85% of the time for valuable training content and the remaining 15% to promote the training offer. Offer a prize for sticking through the presentation to the end.#25. Paid classified advertisers and readers both see big value in your streaming their job ads via Twitter. Be sure to use the hashtag #paid for tweets.

BTW: As I mentioned above, we have already started planning our next annual Summit. As always, we are keeping the seats strictly limited so everyone can have a truly intensive experience. You can find out more and register for early bird discounts at http://subscriptionsiteinsider.com/summit .