Five on Friday: Growing Digital Subscriptions, New Product Development and More

Five on Friday this week explores growing digital subscriptions, a new take on fantasy sports leagues, new product development, effective survey construction and customer

Five on Friday: Growing Digital Subscriptions

Source: Pixabay

As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development, I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products.  Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for September 2, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.

1. How the Washington Post Grew Digital Subscribers 145 Percent

Under the leadership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post has officially made the leap into embracing social platforms. This article from Digiday on their strategy to grow digital subscribers is worth a read in its entirety. No time?  Here are the highlights:

Digital-only subs have grown 145 percent year-over-year, after starting digital offering sales only three years ago.

How have they done it?

  • Targeting growth outside of their hometown, both within the U.S. and overseas.
  • Publishing all stories to Facebook Instant Articles.
  • Making its app free on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet and offering free, six-month subs to Amazon Prime members (taking advantage of Bezos’ role at Amazon).

The No. 1 predictor of people subscribing is how much they read, so once people have sampled, the next step is to get them reading more. To that, the paper has cut page load time 85 percent and studied reader behavior to determine what articles to offer them next.

  • Leveraging email newsletters as loyalty tools. The Post has more than 50 newsletters, and has increased traffic to the site from newsletters by 129 percent in the past year.
  • Closing site-access loopholes. People used to be able to read an unlimited number of articles when clicking through from a newsletter; now the Post cuts them off at five articles.
  • Serving pop-up messages to visitors after they’re read a given number of articles asking them to provide their email.

The jury’s still out on whether digital subscriptions will become a significant part of the Post’s revenue, but appears that the likelihood is growing.

2. Fantasy Sports Leagues Play For Big Dollars on a Nationwide Level

Recently, Digiday offered an update on Turner Sports foray into fantasy sports on a massive scale:

Last fall, Turner Sports set out on a bold experiment, launching its own professional eSports league. This “ELeague” followed 24 teams competing for a prize pool of $1.2 million. These competitions were broadcast live on Twitch and weekly on TBS.

 New Product Development and More

Source: ELeague

By all measures, Turner Sports is already pleased with how the league has performed. Through the first nine weeks of ELeague’s inaugural season, viewers combined to watch nearly 800 million minutes – or roughly 13.3 million hours – of ELeague content across Twitch and TBS.

3. Customer Service Trends:  Good, Bad and Ugly

Recently, entrepreneur.com posted findings that, while increasingly a focus of most companies, customer service has not yet come into its own.  Some of the trends the reported include:

The Good:

Customer service is now a company-wide initiative.  Most businesses are realizing that everyone touches the customer somehow, and that everyone should understand how to work with customers as well as escalate problems.

According to a recent Forrester study, customer experience leaders outperformed the portfolios of customer experience laggards by 80 percent.

The Bad:

Many companies are still below par on social CS. While Baby Boomers definitely want to be able to speak to a human, Millennials are just as comfortable communicating via social media and online chat, which is an area often overlooked by even customer-focused companies.

The Ugly:

Most brands still take the inside-out approach, doing only what is most convenient to them.  Insider Idea: offer fewer methods of customer service if you have budget constraints, but offer the ones that are most important to your customer. 

4. Does Question Order Affect Survey Responses? Yes and No.

The Premise:

In the days when telephone surveys were new “technology,” question-order was widely proven to impact survey results.  But what is the impact of question order on online surveys? SurveyMonkey recently performed a test to find out. 

The Results:

Does Question Order Affect Survey Responses? Yes and No.

Source: Pixabay

If all questions are on the same page, the order of questions doesn’t change how people respond.

However, when a more general question was on a separate page from a drill-down question, and respondents were not able to go back to previous pages, there was a significant difference in response.

Showing questions in a different order makes people think about and answer the question differently.

The Takeaway:

Think about paging. If there is a question you want to know the answer to before you introduce new information (because you think the new information will make them change their mind), make sure to put the new information on a new page.

Example:

Q1: How much do you like Brand A?

Q2: How much do you like Brand B?

[New Page]

Did you know that both Brand A and Brand B are both owned by Company C?

5. Back to Business Reading: New Product Development Article Series (Available to Subscription Insider Members Only)

Does Question Order Affect Survey Responses? Yes and No.

Source: Subscription Insider

In case you were working on your beach reads over the summer, here’s a link to my New Product Development article series, Getting Your Product Out the Door: New Product Development Basics. The six-part series includes specific case studies, templates and examples of the foundational elements for creating and launching a new subscription product.The series is available to Subscription Insider members only, however.  A good reason to join now!

 

 

 

Up Next

Register Now For Email Subscription News Updates!

Search this site

You May Be Interested in:

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.

Already a Subscription Insider member? 

Access these premium-exclusive features

Monthly
(Normally $57)

Perfect To Try A Membership!
$ 35
  •  

Annually
(Normally $395)

$16.25 Per Month, Paid Annually
$ 195
  •  
POPULAR

Team
(10 Members)

Normally Five Members
$ 997
  •  

Interested in a team license? For up to 5 team members, order here.
Need more seats? Please contact us here.