How a Pioneering Industry Newsletter Expanded Into a Suite of Online Subscription Products and Contract Writing Work

Insider’s exclusive interview with Nadav Malin, President, BuildingGreen.com, reveals how the 20-year-old newsletter publisher used its reputation as an unbiased source of sustainable-building news

Quick Overview

Just because you’re the pioneer publication in an industry doesn’t mean your work is done. See how BuildingGreen.com turned its 20-year-old print newsletter for the sustainable building industry into a suite of online subscription products. President Nadav Malin describes how creating ad-free subscription products cemented the company’s reputation as an unbiased source of news and information and helped them develop a major business in contract writing work for government agencies, non-profits, and other publishers. Plus, he explains how relationships with internal “champions” at major architecture firms has helped the company grow site licenses into 30% of their overall subscription revenues.

Company Snapshot

Founded: 1985 as AT Wilson Associations
Environmental Building News Founded: 1992
No. of Employees: ~20
Business Model: Hybrid (50% Subscriptions, 50% contract writing/web projects)
Headquarters: Brattleboro, VT
http://www.buildinggreen.com
http://www.leeduser.com

Target Audience

BuildingGreen’s primary audience is architects, designers and engineers working on environmentally-sustainable and energy-efficient construction projects.

When the team launched their first print newsletter in 1992, they expected their target audience would be homebuilders and construction professionals. But they quickly learned that efficiency specs needed to be addressed during the design stage, not the construction process, so their target switched to architects and engineers.

Homebuilders and construction professionals remain a secondary audience, along with anyone involved in sustainable building policy, such as federal, state, and local code officials and enforcement divisions.

Content Model

BuildingGreen publishes a mix of print and online products covering green design and building trends, including:

Environmental Building News, the company’s flagship publication, is a 16-page monthly newsletter that includes feature articles, news briefs, product reviews, and green building “primer” articles to help newbies learn the basics of green building. It’s published in print or available online for subscribers. – GreenSpec is a premium online catalog of 2,200 sustainable/energy efficient building products selected by the company’s editors. Vendors cannot pay to have their products included. – The BuildingGreen Suite is an online subscription that provides access to EBN, the GreenSpec catalog, and an online database of case studies about sustainable building products – LEEDUser is a separate subscription product hosted on its own website (www.leeduser.com), which offers tips, checklists, and sample documentation to help building designers achieve LEED certification for their projects. The site includes an online forum and Q&A with LEED experts.

The company accepts no advertising for any of its products in order to maintain its reputation as an unbiased source of green building information. As a result, publications and online databases are subscription-based.

Certain content is available for free to attract web traffic and generate leads for subscription products. For example, the site offers a weekly free email newsletter and breaking news alerts, and publishes open-access news articles and occasional features on its website.

The vast majority of content is produced by an in-house staff of researchers and writers. The company also uses a few trusted freelancers who primarily are former full-time employees. Developing that in-house expertise has allowed the company to expand its content model to include contract writing/website projects.

For example, the BuildingGreen team receives contracts from government agencies such as the US Green Building Council and the US Department of Energy National Labs to produce reports or online resources about sustainable building. Whenever possible, the team negotiates to re-use the content they produce for a client as part of their own publications: The database of green building case studies available with a BuildingGreen Suite subscription was originally produced on contract for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The team also provides content for McGraw-Hill Construction’s GreenSource print magazine. The team helped McGraw-Hill launch that publication, and Malin acts as its executive editor directing and reviewing monthly content.

Revenue Streams

Subscriptions typically account for the majority of revenues. Contract work generates 30%-50% of revenues, but has been trending closer to 50% recently as team has pursued more contract work to offset slow subscription sales caused by the construction-industry slowdown.

#1. Subscriptions

An individual subscription to Environmental Building News costs $99 annually (non-autorenew) or $12.95 a month for an autorenewing monthly plan. Individual subscriptions to the BuildingGreen Suite of online resources cost $199/annually (non-autorenew) or $19.95/month (autorenewal plan). Individual subscriptions to LEEDUser cost $99/annually or $9.95/month. Both plans autorenew.

The site also offers group subscriptions and site licenses for its online subscription products, and these group subscriptions account for 30% of all subscription revenue. Subscriptions for up to 10 users are sold online for:

  • $499/month for the BuildingGreen Suite
  • $349/month for LEEDUser

IP-authenticated, firm-wide site licenses also are available, with pricing negotiated on a case-by-case basis. A large firm might pay $600-$15,000 annually to provide online access for all its employees. Colleges and universities can get campus-wide sites licenses for $999 annually.

“40% of the top-10 architecture firms in the country are firm-wide customers for us,” says Malin.

#2. Contract projects

The company bids for custom writing and website development projects, with fees ranging from $30,000-150,000. The team focuses on projects that develop content they want to produce for their own publications and products, so they can re-use the work.

For its ongoing contract with McGraw-Hill, the company is paid on a per-word basis for the articles it provides to the GreenSource magazine, as well as an annual fee based on the publications profits.

Marketing Tactics

Organic search

About 40% of the site’s traffic comes from organic search, thanks to its large library of past articles, new, free articles, and links from partner sites.

The team keeps is low-end, commodity news items free to help attract traffic. The editorial team also makes every third or fourth feature from the premium newsletter free, looking for popular trends that are likely to be the subject of frequent searches or the kind of story likely to be linked from other green building sites.

They also make the primer articles from each month’s EBN newsletter available for free on the site to attract prospects who are new to the sustainable building world and looking basic education.

“We segregate our audience by how knowledgeable and experienced they are in the green building world,” says Malin. “If they’re less experienced, they’re less likely to pay for a subscription, so we use free stuff to draw them in.”

Legacy print subscriber database

When the company transitioned to online subscription products in the early 2000s, existing print subscribers opting in for online versions were the primary source of online conversions. “I don’t think we would have been successful without that print subscriber database to transition to online.”

Internal firm champions for site licenses

Most site-license sales come through relationships the company has with individuals at larger firms. Many firms have added a sustainable-building expert, such as a “sustainable design director,” to oversee efforts in those areas. These individuals typically had a long history in green building design and were therefore likely to be EBN subscribers. They then act as champions for BuildingGreen’s publications and services, and convince their bosses that a firm-wide license is necessary to help train all employees.

Online conversions

Since launching LEEDUser in 2009, the site has become one of the company’s top-converting products. Marketing Director Walter Pierce says that its success has taught the company an important lesson about clearly conveying the value of their online subscription products.

LEEDUser targets a very clear pain-point for architects and designers: Getting their projects through the LEED review and certification process. Headlines and body copy on that site’s homepage reiterate that benefit, using phrases such as “LEEDUser helps takes the hassle out of LEED projects.”

Now, the team is looking to reposition the rest of its BuildingGreen subscriptions as solutions to other major pain-points — but first had to work through a recent transition from a legacy content management system to a new Drupal platform. “BuildingGreen was a pioneer in this field, but can’t live forever off of being a pioneer,” says Pierce. “With an industry under financial strain, it’s necessary to bring the benefit home to the prospect and to their bottom line.”

Technology and Vendors Used

Drupal: BuildingGreen.com’s new content management system http://drupal.org/

MailChimp: The site’s email service provider
http://www.mailchimp.com/

Authorize.net: Payment gateway the site uses for subscription sales
http://www.authorize.net

CentralDesktop: Collaboration software the editorial team uses for project management and article version tracking
http://www.centraldesktop.com/

About Nadav Malin

Malin joined the company in 1991 and helped founder Alex Wilson launch Environmental Building News to cover the emerging trend of sustainable building. Although both writers had experience and connections in the sustainable-building world, neither had every launched a publication.

They read books about newsletter publishing to help launch EBN, and over the years added more publications like the GreenSpec product catalog. Along the way, they determined that maintaining ad-free, subscription based publications was essential to the company’s reputation as an independent, unbiased source of information. “Becoming good at selling ads was not particularly interesting to us.”

Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis

BuildingGreen shows how establishing your publication’s reputation as an unbiased, expert source of information about a specific topic pays dividends beyond subscription sales. By deciding against selling ads for their flagship news and product-catalog products, the team created an opportunity to land high-value contracts from government and non-profit partners that have become a major source of revenues. And we love how they’re re-using those custom-content jobs for their own subscriber-base. We can’t stress enough the importance of maximizing the value of the content your team creates on a daily basis.

We also agree that the team’s next big opportunity is to focus on optimizing online conversions — and suggest they buckle down and do some testing on the site’s subscription offer pages. For example, the BuildingGreen Suite subscription offer page displays four subscription offers vertically on the right column of the page. There are very few graphics or other clues to help a prospect decide which package is right for them. Testing some treatments that bring those packages front-and-center on the page, and use colors and graphics — such as a feature/benefit comparison chart or a “most popular” badge” — can eliminate confusion and help get more prospects through the subscription funnel.

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