As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), 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 May 20th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.  

1. Subscriber Retention: Seven Steps to Improve

If you’re thinking about customer retention, Entrepreneur.com’s “7 Strategies to Revamp Your Customer Onboarding” is worth a read. No time? Here are the seven tips and a bonus from me:

Personalize your welcome email.

• Offer regular product demos and instruction.
• Set milestones for customer engagement (I.e., are customers using your product the way you expected they would? They way they expected they would?).
• Offer assistance.
• Send useful content, beyond “how to” and advertising materials.
• Showcase successes.
• Follow up regularly.

Bonus: Don’t know where to begin?  Start at the top of this list and implement one action per quarter.

 2. Creative Market Expansion Strategies to Grow Your Business, Learned from The New York Times

The New York Times (NYT) is testing the boundaries of its brand with a couple new offerings. 

As reported in Digiday, NYT recently launched a newsletter called Watching, which offers commentary and recommendations on movies and TV shows.  The publication leverages the high loyalty and recognition their film critics enjoy, which is a smart move for any subscription with such assets to maximize.  Further, NYT tipped its hand that it plans to morph this effort from newsletter to online video channel this summer. 

Most recently, NYT partnered with food-delivery service Chef’d to expand into the food-delivery business. NYT is building on the popularity of the NYT Cooking website; they will offer the ingredients in their recipes for delivery (by Chef’d) within 48 hours of order.

Kudos to NYT for their bold experimentation.  But what are the takeaways for other subscription businesses?

• You’re never too old to learn – and take a risk.  There are few brands as venerable as The New York Times, and yet they’re trying new ideas that just a couple decades ago would never have made it off the drawing board.  Your reputation will shift from respectable to stodgy without continuous revitalization with new ideas.

• Think about the logical extension of your subscription, and offer it.  If you’re a foodie magazine you could emulate NYT and partner with a delivery service or a cooking school so your readers could continue their relationship with you into the next logical step in the food-lover process (eating).  Are you a food-delivery subscription box business?  Emulate Chef’d and find a content partner to showcase your recipes. 

• Find a partner.  You don’t need to do everything yourself, and there are probably more than a couple logical businesses for you to work with to mitigate risk and double your marketing reach.

3. Marketing to Women?  Stay Gender-Neutral

“According to a study by Fluent LLC, only 26% of women surveyed said they preferred marketing messages directed specifically at women. In fact, almost three-quarters of female internet users said they prefer marketing messages to be gender neutral.” — eMarketer

4. How to Trademark a Phrase

Subscription businesses of all types use catchphrases to differentiate themselves and spark a reaction with the customer base.  Experts can build recognition and reputation with a well-turned phrase that encapsulates a core tenet of their position whether it’s on macroeconomics, European politics or curling. But how do you protect the phrase that defines you?  Is it even protectable at all?

If you have concerns about protecting this type of intellectual capital, take a look at this post from lawyers.com.  Where to begin?  Whatever your next steps, your first should be to conduct a trademark search yourself at the USPTO.  Only after this step should you consider registering for a trademark.

5. How to Update Blog Content

Is it okay to update old blog posts?  If so, when and why should you do it?  Get some ideas in this quick read from Darren Rowse at problogger.net, No time?  Here are three suggestions:

• Beware of simply reposting a blog if you use dates in your blog url’s (if you don’t know, ask your web developer). This will impact your SEO.

• It’s totally okay to update a blog post, and especially if you 1) discover a broken link, 2) have changed your opinion or 3) have updated information on that which was shared in the original blog.

• A good way to increase traffic is to link back to an old blog post, rather than try to republish it.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Diane