Wherever you live, we hope you are staying cool this August! As we enjoy our air-conditioned offices, we bring you this week’s edition of Five on Friday: Drip explains the four steps of the consumer decision journey, LinkedIn brings us top subscription jobs, #besomebody shares five tips for increasing your website’s conversion rate, Texas Monthly fights ad blockers with an experiment, and DoorDash helps customers avoid delivery fees with a new monthly subscription service. 

The Four Steps of the Consumer Decision Journey

Before you can analyze how to convert online visitors into subscribers, it is important to understand your customer’s decision-making process. According to Drip, quoting McKinsey research, the consumer decision journey includes four major steps:

1. Consideration: The prospect considers several brands.
2. Evaluation: Based on the consumer’s research, they eliminate brands that don’t meet their needs and elevate those that deserve serious consideration.
3. Selection: The customer chooses a brand they want to do business with.
4. Re-engagement: The customer buys your product a second time, without an outside trigger. In the case of subscriptions, this is the recurring monthly payment that indicates the subscriber is satisfied with your product or service and is willing to continue to do business with you.

Read more about the consumer decision journey and what comes next in “What Drives Customer Loyalty? (Hint: It’s Not What You Think)” on Drip.

Top Subscription Jobs on LinkedIn

Director, Subscription Programs
Groupon
Seattle, WA

We’re seeking a Product leader with experience growing and driving customer value through paid subscription programs. This role is both technical and business facing and the successful candidate will be analytical, creative and comfortable driving strategy, leading meetings, and developing a cross-functional team of product managers, business analysts, merchandisers, engineers and marketers. If you’re passionate about leading subscription programs that are win/win for consumers and for local businesses, this is the opportunity you should explore. Groupon’s culture offers a perfect hybrid between startup-like atmosphere and impact and the assets of a public company. We’re curious, fun, a little intense, and obsessed with helping local businesses thrive. Read more.

Marketing Manager, Subscription Apps
Apple
Cupertino, CA

We are looking for a Marketing Manager, Subscription Apps to join the App Store team. You will lead marketing to help grow acquisition, engagement and billings of apps with the subscription business model. The marketing strategies, programs and campaigns you lead will drive meaningful impact to the App Store business.

The App Store has become an important part of Apple’s product ecosystem. It provides our customers with a daily experience that will enhance their lives through apps and games discovery. You will lead creative new programs that drive growth for subscription apps on the App Store: set the vision, develop the strategy, build campaigns and programs, and drive precise cross functional execution.Read more. 

Senior Digital Marketing Manager – Subscriptions, Registration and Commerce
The Telegraph
London, GB

We have an exciting opportunity for a Senior Marketing Manager to join us in-order to support the development and growth of our Subscription and Lifestyle Commerce businesses as well as our overarching Registration strategy. The successful candidate will devise and implement performance campaigns that support strategic initiatives for acquisition and customer retention. Working closely with your direct team of 1-4 dedicated Marketeers and the wider Performance Marketing team, you will lead on our day to day Performance Marketing strategies working across the full marketing channel mix. Read more. 

Product Marketing Manager, YouTube Media Campaigns
YouTube
Los Angeles, CA

As a marketer for this team you will be responsible for working on YouTube’s marketing activities to consumers, creators, and key opinion influencers. YouTube, a Google company, strives to give everyone a voice, to evolve video and to make our partners and advertisers successful. YouTube is changing the face of how we interact with each other and the world around us.

YouTube’s mission is to give everyone a voice and a chance to succeed, bring people together and show them the world. As we continue to evolve our subscription services beyond YT Premium, we are driving subscriptions to YouTube TV (US) and YouTube Music (Global). As part of the YouTube Marketing Team, your mission is to deepen consumer engagement with our products and build YouTube TV, Music and Red into the most beloved subscription experiences. Additionally, you will have the chance to support the YouTube brand through innovative media campaigns. Read more.

Senior Manager CRM & Retention
TULA
New York, NY

TULA is hiring an analytical, customer-centric Senior Manager of CRM to drive all of its customer retention initiatives. Reporting to the VP of E-commerce & Digital Marketing, this critical hire will reinforce TULA’s relationship with customers at every stage of their journey. He or she will have wide-ranging ownership of all strategy and tactics aimed at driving retention and loyalty and increasing LTV. Key KPIs for this hire include: revenue, retention, and reactivation. Read more.

Five Tips for Increasing Your Website’s Conversion Rate (#besomebody)

Want to increase your website’s conversion rate? #BeSomebody has 36 tips to make your website user friendly and to turn website visitors into buyers. Here are 5 we recommend you try:

• Client testimonials: Yes, you should tell people how great you think you are, but those statements are much more powerful coming from clients, so use testimonials.
• Customer reviews: Along those same lines, customer reviews are also powerful, whether you pull those in from LinkedIn, Yelp, Facebook or another source.
• Dedicated landing pages: If you are using pay-per-click ads, send those website visitors to a dedicated landing page that addresses what they were searching for. If you send them to your home page instead, they might not know what to do once they’ve arrived.
• Catchy headlines: Interesting headlines with action words are more likely to get a reader’s attention than passive ones. Sign up for our free newsletter today versus Newsletter sign-up.
• What’s in it for them: Prospects will want to know how your subscription product or service benefits them. Will it save them time, money or make their lives somehow easier? Tell them that.

Read the other 31 tips here on BeSomebody.com.

Texas Monthly Tests Solutions to Reach Ad Blocking-Readers 

Multiple studies have shown that ad blocking continues to grow as consumers become less tolerant of intrusive ads. For publishers like Texas Monthly who rely on advertising income, this is more than a nuisance – it is costing them cold hard cash. Media Post reports that the regional magazine began testing a solution in July. When ad blocking readers land on the Texas Monthly home page, a pop up asks readers to support their work by either whitelisting their publication or signing up for their email newsletter.

In an interesting variation, readers can opt out and read articles on the site with their ad blocker on. Texas Monthly has also taken the opportunity to let readers know that they don’t share reader data with third-parties. This may serve as motivation to whitelist or subscribe to the newsletter.

Media Post notes that Texas Monthly does not offer digital subscriptions, so a pay-per-article or recurring digital subscription is not currently an option. So far, the magazine has seen a slight decline in readers using ad blockers and a jump in email subscribers. Learn more about the experiment on Media Post.

DoorDash Users Save on Delivery Fees by Subscribing

If you love ordering in as much as we do, you are probably familiar with DoorDash, its wide variety of door-to-door cuisine options – and its delivery fees. DoorDash is offering a solution to do away with those delivery fees. They’ve launched DashPass, a monthly subscription service that offers free delivery on any order over $15 for just $9.99 per month, reports Food & Wine.

If you order more than three meals a month via DoorDash, DashPash will pay for itself. Subscribers get other perks too, including exclusive promotions, free food and drink, discounts and more. This service is similar to Deliveroo and UberEats programs in the U.K. which we’ve written about before.

Similar to Amazon Prime, where two-day shipping is free, the more you use the service, the better value you get for your subscription dollar. We wonder whether the $9.99 a month subscription fee will be enough to cover costs for frequent DoorDash users and how this will affect fees paid to drivers. If DoorDash eats the cost – forgive the pun – this could work. If DoorDash expects drivers to absorb the cost though, drivers will have to be compensated some other way to keep them around.

Read more about DashPass at Food & Wine online.