HighBeam’s Conversion Optimization Tests Sell More Subscriptions to Consumers and Business Execs
Highbeam Research provides students, journalists, academics and business execs a convenient subscription database of 90 million newspaper, magazine and journal articles. In this Case
Highbeam Research provides students, journalists, academics and business execs a convenient subscription database of 90 million newspaper, magazine and journal articles. In this Case Study, Joe Miller, Vice President of Product, UX & Marketing, and Sarah Hough, Analytics Manager, reveal the company’s extensive testing of trial offers, conversion tactics, and pricing — including special pricing for students and how to word your annual rate to get more conversions!/p>
Company Profile
Founded: 2002, acquired by parent company Cengage Learning in 2008 No. of Publications: 2 Employees: 60 Business Model: Hybrid Paying Subscribers: Undisclosed Location: Chicago, IL Website:http://www.highbeam.com www.highbeambusiness.com
Target Market
Highbeam primarily serves consumers interested in research, particularly students and academics. However, about a third of their audience are business professionals.
For this reason, Highbeam created Highbeam Business, a sub-domain that has a specialized set of content and is marketed as a separate product.
Content
Highbeam primarily functions as a database of articles from newspapers, magazines, trade publications and academic journals. All of the content is syndicated, i.e., licenses from newspapers, trade journals and peer-reviewed academic publications, such as The Economist, The Boston Globe, and Science. Subscribers can access up to 90 million articles, most of which were written in the past 25 years.
Highbeam also offers subscribers time-saving tools for finding, saving, organizing and sharing information as Microsoft Office documents. For example, subscribers can export the full text of articles to Microsoft Word, set up email alerts for new material on a certain word or phrase, or save customized searches and search results.
As opposed to free search engines, Highbeam Research serves as a single point of entry for multiple publications. Some of the content (particularly from academic journals) is not available for free elsewhere on the Web, while other content is going behind individual paywalls per publication; a subscriber would need multiple accounts and logins to access the breadth of Highbeam’s syndicated content. In short, Highbeam’s biggest selling point is convenience.
Articles are added on a daily basis, approximately 40,000-50,000 each night. In most cases, Highbeam (or the parent company Cengage Learning) has a relationship with a publication or a group of publications through a parent company. Highbeam has created an automated system to receive new content, either through FTP sites or an API (application programming interface). Content from smaller publications is often added through GALE, a separate content database and distribution system created by Cengage.
Highbeam Business contains a subset of the content available on Highbeam Research. It also offers company profiles containing revenue reports, financial data, and executive team breakdowns, as well as industry reports.
Revenue Streams
Highbeam would not disclose their total annual revenues to us, but Hough did tell us that 98% of their revenues come from subscriptions and 2% from advertising.
HIghbeam Research has two pricing options for its B2C audience:
Monthly at $29.95
Annual at $199.95
The monthly pricing plan is taken by about 75% of subscribers.
Highbeam has done extensive testing on its pricing. One pricing lesson Hough and Miller shared focused on the site’s annual pricing for students. Normally the $199.95 annual rate would increase in year two to $299.95, but after extensive testing, Highbeam has determined that it gets longer lifetime value and more accumulated revenues if it doesn’t raise the annual price for students.
Highbeam Research also has group subscriptions, which are priced by volume usage on a case by case business. However, Hough and Miller said that the site doesn’t currently have many group subscribers and hence, they make up a fractional part of revenues.
Highbeam Business also has two pricing options:
Monthly at $49.95
Annual at $499.95
The monthly option is almost exclusively chosen by subscribers to Highbeam Business.
Marketing Tactics
Traffic Drivers The biggest driver of site traffic for Highbeam Research is natural Google search. HighBeam supplements natural Google search traffic with PPC campaigns, which account for 1% of new traffic on the site but 18% of subscriptions. The next biggest traffic driver is direct traffic.
Highbeam Research also gets referral traffic from partnering sites, like Dictionary.com. The site has an API called Headline Direct that allows other sites to list Highbeam’s headlines and link to the previewed article on Highbeam. Hough says about 3% of site traffic comes from these partnerships.
Highbeam has a significant social media presence on Facebook (3700 likes) and Twitter (496 following, 802 followers).
The site also has a separate blog (http://www.highbeam.com/blog/) that is not easily visible from the homepage, but which provides for search traffic by covering trending stories, from the Queen of England’s jubilee celebration to tropical storm warnings to advances in genetics. Curiously, most of the blog posts link to external articles (instead of the preview of the articles on Highbeam Research). But the posts also have embedded links to publications in the Highbeam database that cover the topic discussed (such as the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology for the tropical storm post). The company uses a combination of freelancers and in-house staff to keep their blog content flowing.
PR Highbeam’s PR efforts do not focus on promoting Highbeam as a product, but rather promote the data and facts that come from their database. For example, Highbeam will measure how many times a keyword or phrase in mentioned in the media, like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. They’ll then create a report documenting their findings and release it to the general press, sourcing Highbeam. This method of PR allows the site to build on backlinks and increase Highbeam Research’s SEO ranking overall.
Highbeam’s PR efforts are handled in-house, although they use an outside agency as well.
Affiliate Marketing Affiliates get a one-time commission fee: $10 for a monthly free trial lead and $20 for an annual free trial lead.
Conversion Tactics
Since most prospective subscriber arrive through referral traffic, most land on the article preview page, which also serves as a the de facto paywall page. The page has no button, but the marketing team found they had an 8% lift in trial offer conversion when they changed their Call-to-Action copy from “To read the full text of this article and millions more, try us out for 7 days, FREE!” to “To read the full text of this article and others like it, try us out for 7 days, FREE!” [Emphasis mine.]
If a prospect clicks the link (or the button for the free trial offer on the homepage), they are taken to the registration page. Highbeam Research offers all prospects (monthly and annual) a 7-day free trial with credit card required. The registration is a 3-step process requiring:
An email address and password. This allows the site to promote to prospects even if they abandon the sign-up form.
Demographic information (profession, etc.). This allows Highbeam Research to flag business professionals and market to them through a separate email list. It also lets them offer special pricing for students (see Revenues section).
Payment information.
This information is presented through a dynamic three-step funnel. As you can see from the image below, the promotional offer of $3.85 is continuously present in the lefthand box as prospects fill in the information on the right.
During the trial period, subscribers receive an email series describing the benefits of subscribing to Highbeam and first steps of using the service.
Through testing, Highbeam Research has learned a number of conversion lessons:
The initial landing pages were tested extensively and first since most of the site’s traffic comes through these pages. Originally, the pages had a lot of advertising before visitors could see the content preview. Testing found that putting the content up top led to better user experience and more conversions.
The marketing team found that the best conversion page presented the annual offer as $3.85/week during the 3-step sign up process. (See image.) They had tested offering a free whitepaper, as well as displaying publication logos on the left, but the $3.85/week offer led to a 22% lift in sales per visitor.
The $3.85/week wording has also been able to squeeze more visitors into the annual offer (although the monthly subscription plan is still more popular).
Highbeam has tested upsells at the time of registration. When a visitor opts for a monthly plan, Highbeam offers a one-time deal of a $174.95 for the annual subscription if they take it in full right then. Hough says about 2% take this offer.
The site also identifies its business professional users and tries to upsell them a subscription to Highbeam Business. They reach out to these upsell prospects through email marketing.
Groups Sales The minimal group subscriptions that Highbeam gets are usually through in-bound calls and emails and closed in-house.
Retention Tactics
Highbeam tries to employ as many best practices as possible in their payment processing in order to retain subscribers. This includes using Account Updater to keep credit card numbers current. The site also uses “rebilling logic” to experiment with second and third attempts. For example, they track card failures by code and experiment with whether re-trying on day 7 or day 30 is better — or anywhere in between.
The site also sends a renewal notice 30 days ahead of time for annual subscribers.
About Joe Miller and Sarah Hough
Joe Miller got his start in the telecom industry, working for Bell. He then moved to the direct marketing arm of GE, and began selling membership plans for auto clubs, supplemental health plans and other clubs. His first foray into paid content was at Encyclopedia Britannica.
Miller says that the biggest surprise (and most pleasant) has been realizing how powerful the subscription revenue model is. “I tested the pay-per-article at Britannica and couldn’t come close to the revenues you can get from a subscription model,” he says.
Sarah Hough got her start in analytics in offline gaming at a Midwest casino. She then moved to the online business and enjoys how one can test new ideas out and get almost immediate feedback. But she’s also been surprised about how fast the reverse can happen : “Whether it’s spending or billing, things can get out of hand fast, too.”
She’s a huge fan of testing and recommends everyone in the business to do it for everything — from pricing to messaging to the number of steps in your processes online. “I’m continually surprised as to which ones win,” she says. “And survey results are not a substitute for testing. It’s far different what works online versus what people say that they want.”
Vendors and Technology
Hosting — Self-hosted through parent company, Cengage Learning.
With more and more content going behind paywalls, Highbeam Research offers the convenience of a one-stop shop for researchers. The convenience of their service, supported mainly through their content licensing deals with thousands of publications, is a value proposition that will likely increase with time. We especially like how much they’ve tested their pages, from design to marketing copy to their trial offer funnel. We also like how they’ve created a B2B upsell within a B2C service.
We would like to see them highlight and flesh out the site’s research tools a bit more, especially any tools for creating bibliographies and endnotes. And they should definitely be linking to Highbeam’s content in the their blog, not to external articles available freely on the Web. We’d also like to see them do more testing on their article preview pages, which serve as landing and paywall pages. We’d be curious to know if simply presenting the article with a button (instead of a line of text) and getting rid of distractions, including links to other resources in the database, would improve conversions.
Do you understand laws targeting your subscription business? We invite you to check
Log In
Join Subscription Insider!
Get unlimited access to info, strategy, how-to content, trends, training webinars, and 10 years of archives on growing a profitable subscription business. We cover the unique aspects of running a subscription business including compliance, payments, marketing, retention, market strategy and even choosing the right tech.
