Streaming video professional development is all the rage, and Vet Visuals International has been able to capitalize on it on a global level, earning million-dollar revenues. Publisher Andre Romijn spoke to Insider about the site’s complex post-production, why he’s foregone large events for small ones, and how the site is able to retain more than 90% of subscribers. Plus, discover email marketing tactics to grow your list and a few design elements to avoid.
Company Profile
Founded: 1988 in the Netherlands as Roman House Productions, which mainly produced print publications dedicated to veterinary sciences. Moved to the UK in 1998. Started Vet Visuals and online video streaming in 2009. Vet Visuals International launched in 2012.
No. of Publications: 1, in both Dutch and English. Looking to expand to Spanish and Portuguese by next year.
Employees: 3 full-time.
Business Model: Hybrid — subscriptions, events, one-offs.
Paying Subscribers: 1200 (75% Dutch, 25% International).
Location: Ripon, North Yorkshire, UK
Website: http://www.vetvisuals.com
Target Market
Vet Visuals International’s primary market consists of small animal general practitioners around the globe who are looking for the latest news and research in their field.
The site’s secondary market consists of students studying veterinary medicine.
Content
Vet Visuals International’s content consists mainly of news and education for small animal veterinarians.
Because Roman House Publishing originally produced a bi-monthly magazine focused on news in the industry, Vet Visuals International has a decent number of news items on the site, added daily. But the big draw and differentiator is the site’s video content, which is added on a weekly basis.
Vet Visuals International’s videos present topics and depth that cannot be found for free on the Web. “It’s still the traditional role of publisher,” says Romjin. “In the past, we gathered information, put it in context and distribute. That’s still what we do.”
But Romjin admits the 45- to 50-minute videos take more work than the print publication did. The site recruits lecturers and professors from universities to give lectures with a slide presentation. (Each lecturer is compensated with £250 for one lecture, but most give three in a row for a total of £750.) Both the professors’ face and the slides are recorded and are then edited together in post-production. Post-production can take anywhere from five to eight hours and is complex — often a video will zoom in on an information-dense slide, zoom out, and then zoom in if the professor is saying something important.
Romjin does much of the editing himself, but also has some freelancers with knowledge of video editing and veterinary medicine so that they know what content needs to be emphasized. In fact, a number of veterinarians are among his freelancers since “they’re not as rich as people think.”
Since the video is streamed (not downloaded), they live on a dedicated server where it’s possible to have more than one subscriber stream the same video. The hosting service also alters the quality of the video according to the subscriber’s Internet connection — slow Internet connections get low resolution videos, while high-speed connections get HD video, which is advantageous when demonstrating surgical techniques.
Vet Visuals International will also produce bespoke videos and continuing education modules for companies or universities. These videos may be accompanied by quizzes, assessments or certificates.
Events
Vet Visuals International has hosted large conference in the past, but it has scaled back its events because in the last 2-3 years, events have been de-railed or cancelled because of weather.
However, Romjin is looking to launch smaller, local events in the UK and Holland later this year. These events would tie in with a 10- to 11-month training module that is primarily done online, but will require one or two workshops with small groups. He plans to recruit local tutors to teach these workshops and possibly form reciprocal deals with post-graduate education groups to create the courses. Currently, the site is certified to issue continuing education (CE) credits to veterinarians in the UK, who are required to have a certain number of CE credits each year; CE credits are not yet mandatory in other European countries.
Revenues
Vet Visuals International garners between £750,000 and £1 million a year (approximately $1 million to $1.5 million).
80% of its revenues come from subscriptions, while 20% comes from spin-off products like events, custom trainings, books, and other one-offs. Approximately 54% of revenues are from Dutch subscribers, while the rest from English-speaking subscribers.
(In order to work with university lecturers from all universities and associations all over the world, Vet Visuals International has decided to stay away from any advertising, which would threaten its market neutrality.)
As we stated earlier, 75% of the sites 1,200 paying subscribers are Dutch. Of the 25% that are outside the Netherlands, 70% are in the UK and 30% are from other countries, including Australia, the US, Germany, Italy, and China.
Subscriptions are priced at £265 a year. Technically, the site’s payment processor should change the subscription price to match local currencies based on a visitor’s IP address, although we found some glitches in this technology when perusing the site..
Because the site is based in the EU, it must collect and remit Value-Added Tax from UK and EU subscribers. However Romjin told us that if an individual subscriber is part of a clinical practice, the practice usually has a VAT ID number that they can submit. When they do so, Vet Visuals International no longer needs to worry about collecting VAT because the business is now responsible for reporting it.
**Editor’s Note: The VAT is a complex tax. For a better understanding, read LAWS & REGS: Selling Digital Subscriptions in the UK and Europe
Marketing Tactics
Vet Visuals International’s site traffic is primarily through two means — organic search and from its e-newsletter.
SEO
40% of the site’s overall traffic (and nearly 100% of *new* traffic, i.e.,not returning visitors) is from organic search results. This is likely because the site is optimized enough to come up first for its name. Content pages are not as optimized, but this is not as critical as it is for some sites since the site has brand recognition amidst the small community of small animal veterinarians. (See Word-of-Mouth marketing below.)
E-newsletter
Site visitors can sign up for a free e-newsletter on the Vet Visuals International site, which we discuss below in Conversion Tactics. However, the site’s newsletter also serves as a traffic driver for new traffic since the Vet Visuals team will pick email addresses up from Twitter and LinkedIn and add them to their newsletter list. The newsletter also has a “send to a friend” feature that increases their email list within the 24 hours after a new newsletter is sent.
Newsletters are sent every week to Dutch subscribers and every three weeks to international subscribers in English.
Social Media
Facebook brings in 8% of the site’s overall traffic, although Romjin says it’s not a very good conversion tool. Twitter is responsible for 4-5% of traffic, while LinkedIn accounts for 2-3%, which Romjin was surprised was so low since Vet Visuals International is a professional development site. Vet Visuals also uploads promotional videos to YouTube, but since their target market is professionals, not consumers, YouTube has done little to drive or convert new subscribers.
Word-of-Mouth and Events
The lecturers on the Vet Visuals International videos are often the best promoters of the site, informing their students and audiences about the site and their video. In fact, Vet Visuals International will often informally ask the professors to be ambassadors.
Vet Visuals International and lecturers will often have a presence at international conferences and events, which provides a lot of in-person networking and marketing.
Open Access Policy
Vet Visuals has a policy to give a free subscription to any veterinary students in the last two years of school. Romjin says it’s a great marketing tactic since 70% to 80% convert to paying subscribers once they graduate.
Conversion Tactics
As mentioned above, the site’s e-newsletter serves as both a traffic driver and conversion tool. The Dutch newsletter has 3000 names, while the international one has more than 10,000.
Site visitors can also sign up for the newsletter through the site, but the conversion box (left) is incredibly hard to spot, as it basically looks like an ad and has no button.
Another conversion tactic is free viewing of a few full-length videos.
The site also has a seven-day paid trial for £25. However, the site’s conversion funnel for both trial takers and paying subscribers is rather poor, requiring visitors to add a trial/subscription to their cart, and then not taking them to the next step in the process. Instead, prospects need to click on the cart button in the top right corner to advance through the funnel, which then has other worst practices, such as unnecessary steps like logging in as a guest. (It’s likely that the conversion funnel was built off of standard e-commerce software, not online subscription commerce and membership software)
Retention Tactics
Despite some weaknesses in its conversion practices, Vet Visuals International’s retention rate is above 90%. Romjin told us he only loses about 10 paying subscribers each year, and that the main reason for cancellation is subscriber has retired or discontinued their practice.
Remarkably, give these strong renewal rates, subscribers are not on auto-renew. Instead, most are renewed through paper invoices. That’s because most Dutch and UK subscribers prefer direct debit or alternate payment methods to credit cards.
Romjin says he tries to do something new every year in order to improve subscriber retention. For example, this year the site plans to launch a new learning system, where subscribers will have their own secure gateway where they can learn and record what they do. That way, at the end of the year, they can show a national body how many hours they spent on continue professional development or what certificates they’ve completed.
Cross-Sells and Upsells
As mentioned above, Vet Visuals International has an events business, and the site’s newsletter and subscriber database provide the best leads.
The bespoke videos for companies and organizations are usually generated through in-person leads Romjin acquires through international conferences.
About Andre Romjin
Andre Romjin has been interested in publishing since he was a child, when he was publishing the school newspaper. During his time in the Navy, he continued to write and publish the Navy paper, and has worked for a number of large and small B2B publishing companies.
“The great thing that I like from B2B publishing, you publish information — what people need to know,” Romjin says. “Consumer publishing is ‘nice to know.’ If you publish what people NEED to know, you can make a good living out of it.”
That said, Romjin says his biggest surprise is how much people in the trade would stick to free publications, even if they’re not good.
“[It] takes a lot of effort to convince them that if they pay for something, they get better experience. [But] once you do, you can get them to stick.”
His advice to publishers is to “dare to be different.”
“Be sure you deliver something that’s new and unique and always surprise your readers.”
Vendors & Technology
Hosting — Zeezicht
http://www.zeezicht.nl/
Payment processing — PayPal
https://www.paypal.com/worldwide/
Content management — CMS Made Simple
http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
Video hosting — Longtail Videos, NY
http://www.longtailvideo.com/
Analytics — Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
http://www.google.com/analytics/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
Subscription Site Insider Analysis
We applaud Vet Visuals International for creating a very unique product and capitalizing on streaming video training before it was a trend. It’s impressive that the site has a 90% retention rate, and that’s most likely due to the strength of the content. We also like Romjin’s idea of combining year-long online training with local events. As our Case Study on HDI shows, local chapter events can be a highly successful revenue stream and retention tactic. We also like how the site is able to convert 70%-80% of students who have open-access to paying subscribers upon graduation.
Vet Visuals International would benefit most from more concentrated SEO efforts and a serious paywall overhaul. While it may be constrained in some ways by PayPal, the homepage and conversion pages need to highlight calls-to-action more prominently with contrasting buttons and above-the-fold placement. Furthermore, the cart process should automatically advance itself; there’s no need for an actual “cart” icon for subscriptions. And the technical glitches need to be resolved so that prospects can see subscription prices in local currencies on the first cart page. We’re convinced that implementing just a few best practices in paywall optimization could lead to a significant lift in subscription sales.
