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 16th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.
1. How The Economist is Rethinking Twitter Activity
In an article that’s worth a read in its entirety, Digiday offers insight into why – and how – marketers at the Economist are changing their social media strategy. No time? Here are the highlights:
- Fewer Tweets, More Quality. A year ago, 15 different tweets were written for each article the Economist published. Now, each article now gets between three and five tweets.
- Paring Away Small Accounts. The Economist formerly had about a dozen Twitter accounts, split by region or topic – some with hardly any followers. More than 50 percent of their effort was going into the secondary accounts but was generating very little in reach and traffic. As a result of this analysis, their effort was redistributed to maximize reach.
“Our job is to expand the top of the funnel and get as many globally curious people as possible reading the journalism,”
—Denise Law, community editor, the Economist
Adding Local Channels. Resources have also been redirected to more relevant platforms such as Japanese messaging app Line. Less than six months after launching Line, the Economist has increased its follower count to more than 300,000 from around 33,000.
2. Product Development: the Right and Wrong of Bug Reporting
Subscription Insider members, if you haven’t already read my article series “Getting Your Product Out the Door,” or you are a non-member still deciding whether to subscribe, below are some good examples of the do’s and don’ts of product development bug reporting.
Most product managers will (and should) spend time testing their products both pre- and post-launch. But to make the most of this activity, it’s necessary to provide the engineering team with the best possible information when you find an error, or “bug.” How to do that? Read on:
3. Driving App Discovery and Engagement: Leverage Deep Linking
Entrepreneur.com recently posted some tips on driving app discovery that’s worth a read. My favorite? Leveraging mobile deep linking. Deep linking is an extremely effective re-engagement strategy that allows users to return to your app directly from the Google search results page. You can deep link searches into an app they’ve already installed and continue to market it just as you would before your subscriber downloaded. This helps ensure that your users return frequently. Just make sure to specify to your developers that you’re looking for mobile deep linking, as the code is different from that used for web deep linking.
4. Leveraging Geolocation Data to Improve Subscriptions (and Offers)
Several years ago I visited a print media business that was the high-water mark in content customization. They shared with me that they created 230 slightly different versions of their periodical every month, and were still profitable. Their reasoning was simple – their market was farm and ranch personnel, and, given the specifics of crops, seasonality, and other factors, the content had to be geo-specific in order to be valuable.
Your business may not require that level of specificity, but could you benefit from knowing where your customers are? Yes.
While this data from MarketingProfs is focused on marketing benefits, it does illustrate how geo-customization can increase interaction, subscription and ongoing value to your subscriber.
Here are some additional ideas:
5. Subscription Accelerator Bootcamp is Just Two Weeks Away!
If you haven’t already, now’s the time to sign up for Subscription Insider’s Subscription Accelerator Bootcamp, which is being held on Thursday, September 29th at the Bentley Reserve in San Francisco.
It’s hard enough to acquire customers, but losing them to involuntary churn, fraud, refunds, and chargebacks? Those are preventable revenue leaks that hurt profitability. Join us for this unique day of learning which will teach you where your recurring revenue “leaks” are and what to do about them – helping your business grow customer lifetime value and most importantly, revenue.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
Diane