Quick Overview
Site launches are always filled with surprises — even for subscription site experts like Michael McCurdy, formerly of TheLadders.com. In September 2010, McCurdy teamed with an author to launch TestingMom.com, a subscription site to help parents prepare their children for intelligence and placement tests. Five months in, McCurdy tells Insider about the biggest lessons learned, including the need to quickly expand content to appeal to a wider audience than anticipated, and the effectiveness of free teleseminars to attract new members. Plus, he explains why launching with PayPal was a near disaster that had them scrambling for a new payment processor within two months.
Company Snapshot
Founded: September 2010
No. of Employees: 2 (both co-founders)
Business Model: Subscriptions
Membership Growth Rate: 150% per month
Headquarters: New York, NY
http://www.testingmom.com
Target Audience
The site’s primary audience is parents in New York City looking for resources to prepare their children for pre-K through Grade 3 intelligence and school placement tests.
The majority of subscribers are women, but not by the margin McCurdy expected. The female/male split is about 60/40, whereas he expected about 80% of subscribers to be women.
The site also developed a larger-than-expected secondary audience outside of New York in places such as Chicago, Texas, California, Florida, and Washington. About 30% of subscribers come from these areas — much higher than the 10% of non-New Yorkers McCurdy anticipated.
Content Model
All site content is aimed at helping parents prepare their children for common assessment tests used to determine public elementary school placement and private school admissions. The site’s practice tests and other content offer a less-expensive alternative to private tutors or testing-prep classes.
Subscriber resources include:
- 60-140 page downloadable home assessments for four common tests
- A library of 575+ practice questions
- Teleseminars on specific testing topics
- Online Q&A with testing and school admissions experts
- Member email newsletter with new practice test questions
Free content on the site includes a directory of more than 15 intelligence and state achievement tests, with descriptions of their approaches. The site also has a blog that covers testing news, school testing schedules, and upcoming TestingMom.com events.
McCurdy and his co-Founder, Karen Quinn, write the majority of site content, including home assessments and practice questions. Quinn is a testing expert and author of two books, including Testing for Kindergarten. They use a contractor to illustrate their test questions in the same manner as the standardized tests.
They learned their first big content lesson a few weeks after launch, when members began clamoring for more and practice questions. At the time, they only had a few practice questions prepared for the site and had instead planned to email members new questions each week.
In response, they cranked out new questions as fast as they could, and now have more than 575 practice questions on the site.
“[Subscribers are] really there for the questions, and one of our value propositions is the instant gratification,” says McCurdy.
The team’s second big content lesson came when prospects began asking for resources to help 3rd, 4th 5th and 6th-graders. McCurdy and Quinn had launched the site solely focused on pre-K through Grade 1 testing, and didn’t anticipate that many parents would also want resources for older siblings.
They quickly added a second level of practice questions for one major test, and now break down their practice question library according to Pre-K through Grade 1, or Grade 2 through Grade 3. They haven’t yet had the resources to develop practice questions for certain tests given in Grades 5 and 6.
“We lost a lot of subscribers just because we didn’t have the content.”
Revenue Streams
All revenue comes from subscriptions. The site currently offers three pricing tiers that offer access to extra content and special features, such as a private 30-minute phone consultation with the site’s founders, in exchange for a higher monthly rate.
Pricing is discounted according to length of subscription:
– Basic memberships only allow access to a limited number of practice questions and the daily member’s newsletter. They cost $14.99/month for a month-to-month subscription; $9.99/month for a three-month subscription; $7.99/month for a six-month subscription; and $4.99/month for an annual subscription.
– Intermediate memberships offer access to all practice questions, the email newsletter, and downloadable home assessments, but do not include private consultations. They cost $39.99/month for month-to-month; $29.99 for three months; $24.99 for six months; and $19.99 for an annual subscription.
– Top-level memberships include all content plus a monthly phone consultation. They start at $79.99 for a month-to-month; $59.99 for three months; $49.99 for six months; and $39.99 for an annual subscription.
The site initially offered a fourth, free entry level tier for that offered immediate access to one sample question and additional weekly email questions. But the offer was confusing to prospects, so McCurdy decided to replace the lowest-tier membership with a free, 7-day limited access trial.
About 60% of subscribers choose the middle tier, which the team promotes prominently through tactics such as a “Most Popular” badge on the signup page.
The remaining 40% of subscribers are split evenly between the top tier and the lowest tier.
McCurdy was nervous about offering one-on-one phone consultations to top-tier subscribers, thinking he and his partner might not have time to manage all the calls. In fact, they’ve discovered they must remind top-tier subscribers to schedule their consultations.
Marketing Tactics
McCurdy described some of the most effective tactics they used for pre-launch and post launch marketing:
Pre-launch marketing
#1. Pre-existing websites and blogs
McCurdy and Quinn maintained their own websites and blogs about elementary school testing before launching TestingMom.com. Quinn had a personal blog and a website for her book Testing for Kindergarten. McCurdy wrote a personal blog about his family’s experience with NYC gifted and talented education programs.
The pair used these sites and blogs for pre-launch marketing in several ways, including:
- Developing email lists
- Writing keyword-rich posts about the same subject matter as TestingMom.com
- Linking to the TestingMom.com site once it was live
#2. In-person seminars
McCurdy and Quinn used their blogs and mailing lists to promote four in-person, informational sessions in New York City to discuss the upcoming school test schedule and announce the launch of TestingMom.com. These well attended events — one session attracted 150 parents — built immediate demand for subscriptions.
Looking back, McCurdy says he’d do those in-person seminars a little differently. They were more like pitches for TestingMom.com than practical/educational sessions about testing. If he were doing it again he’d make the content more practical/educational to better position themselves as experts in the field.
Post-launch marketing
The site had attracted enough subscribers by February to turn cash-flow positive. Here are the tactics that have been most effective for generating traffic and new subscribers:
#1. Search engine marketing
McCurdy uses a combination of paid search advertising and SEO to target specific keywords.
He uses his personal blog and free content pages on TestingMom.com to secure first-page organic placements for a specific phrase, and then buys a search ad for the same term so the site will have at least three listings on the first page of a keyword search.
For example, he’s written several posts on his personal blog about the OLSAT test, which point readers to TestingMom.com for practice questions. He also maintains a free page about the OLSAT on the TestingMom.com test directory. Finally, he bought a Google AdWords ad for the phrase “OLSAT practice test.”
The result: McCurdy’s personal blog has the top natural search result for the term “OLSAT practice test”; TestingMom.com’s directory entry has the fourth natural search result; and TestingMom.com shows up at the top of the page as a paid search ad.
One great technique he uses to get good search rankings: He allows visitors to comment or post questions about tests on the free pages in the site’s testing directory. Then, he or Quinn respond to those comments/questions on the page, using keywords like “practice tests.” The result is a page that’s continually refreshed with new content, rather than a static page, which helps maintain a higher organic ranking.
#2. Facebook “likes”
Facebook is third biggest source of traffic to the site after McCurdy’s blog and Quinn’s Testing For Kindergarten site. The site has 489 likes, but McCurdy suspects they’re generating additional visits from people who are not fans or “likes” but who click on links to TestingMom.com that they see on their friends’ Facebook pages.
Once he saw how popular practice questions were, McCurdy used them on the TestingMom.com Facebook page as incentive to get more “likes”. He sent an email update to free trial users announcing that they’d posted new questions on the Facebook page and extending a special offer: Anyone who likes them on Facebook and emails him back will receive another free bonus question by email.
“We had all these people fanning us on Facebook so they could get a free question,” says McCurdy. “We doubled our Facebook fan base in two weeks.”
#3. Free teleseminars
The site recently began hosting free, stripped down versions of its member teleseminars to attract prospects. McCurdy and Quinn get to show their expertise by providing an overview of a topic, such as an introduction to OLSAT testing. But they refer prospects to additional, in-depth content available on the site and do not allow audience members to ask questions.
They recently converted 20% of free teleseminar attendees into paid subscribers.
#4. On-site conversion optimization
Since launch, McCurdy has been tweaking the site’s design to encourage more conversions. Tactics include:
– A site overview video
In response to initial confusion about membership tiers, they created a video of Karen Quinn introducing TestingMom.com and describing what subscribers get with their memberships. They added this video to barrier pages and the site registration page itself, and saw a dramatic increase in conversions.
– Customer testimonials
McCurdy has a page dedicated to written and video customer testimonials. They solicit testimonials from parents who’ve been in frequent contact with them about the site.
But they also collect testimonials from a surprising source: Subscription cancellation emails.
Subscribers who are cancelling for reasons such as lack of time or a change in plans often go out of their way to say how much they liked the content or how helpful the site was to them. In these cases, McCurdy asks if he can share their testimonial on the site.
Technology and Vendors Used
The site is built on WordPress, and McCurdy says he’s been pleasantly surprised by how effectively he can manage a subscription site on the platform. Other technology surprises have been less pleasant.
The biggest lesson learned was about the drawbacks of PayPal. He launched the site with PayPal because he thought it was the quickest way to set up payment processing. But he soon realized that PayPal was emailing every subscriber each month prior to billing their card, and as a result the site’s renewal rate was “tanking,” he says.
“If there were five people up for renewal in the next two days, we’d see three of them emailing us that they wanted to cancel.”
By the end of November he switched the site’s payment processing to Authorize.net, thanks to a custom-developed workaround that let his membership platform integrate with that gateway.
Here are a few more vendors and tools he’s using:
S2 MemberPro: Membership plug-in McCurdy uses to handle the site’s subscription tiers with different levels of permission/content access. Comes with pre-integration to PayPal, but as noted above requires custom development to integrate with other gateways.
http://www.s2member.com/
Constant Contact: The site’s email service provider. However, McCurdy expects to switch to a mid-tier ESP that can handle more advanced email marketing strategies he is planning to launch soon.
http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp
VideoBio: Created the Karen Quinn welcome/site tour video for about $300.
http://www.videobio.com/
About Michael McCurdy
McCurdy is veteran subscription content marketer who has worked for Match.com and The Ladders.com. But when his daughter tested into a New York City’s Gifted & Talented program, he embarked on a new venture as a blogger detailing his personal experiences in the complex world of assessment testing and G&T program.
The blog became a hit with New York City parents, and through it he met testing expert Karen Quinn. After a few conversations in summer 2010, they saw an opportunity to combine her subject matter expertise with his subscription content background. “There was nobody out there in the marketplace serving the needs of parents who want to work with their children themselves,” he says. “There are lots of tutors out there, but we wanted to create an affordable alternative to spending $5,000-$10,000 on a tutor.”
Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis
TestingMom.com offers powerful lessons for anyone planning a site launch. We applaud their ability to pivot quickly to develop the kind of hot content that subscribers demanded. Remember, it’s all about giving subscribers what they want — even if that wasn’t exactly how you planned it. And their success with the site overview video is yet another example of how much these elements can boost conversions. If you haven’t added a video to your conversion funnel, now’s the time to test one. Finally, McCurdy’s tip on letting visitors comment on what otherwise would be static site pages is a great SEO tactic.
We think that they could further improve the conversion process by streamlining both the membership options and the way those options are presented. The video was a big help, but the site’s paywall pages still use long copy to describe two options for signing up (taking a free trial or signing up immediately for a paid membership). They are still a bit confusing to first-time visitors. Testing different treatments for the membership options — such as a visual comparison chart — or reducing the number of clicks it takes to get to the sign-up page could further lift conversions.
