Periodical Prospects: It Pays to Woo and Win Millennial Subscribers

Successful media brands learn to compete in a digital native culture of loyalty.

Photograph of a stack of magazines

Source: Bigstock

Media consumers of a certain age (including this columnist) knew how to buy magazines back in the day. You filled out a blow-in card. Or you signed up for a few titles with the kid down the block raising money for a class trip to Washington. Or your great-aunt sent you a subscription to something edifying … U.S. News and World Report, maybe, or Reader’s Digest.

Nowadays, media brands can’t rely on these analog tactics to reach digital devotees. Instead, brands grow by standing out in the modern ultra-competitive media landscape where myriad options are just a click away for a generation raised on computers and texting. Once they attract the attention of these Millennials, they can win not just their attention but their devotion. Fortunately, the Millennial generation — unlike its forebears — has an especially keen sense of loyalty that excellent brands can leverage.

Before we go there, however, let’s look at some facts about Millennials and how they differ from Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.

Millennials are more likely to consume digital editions of magazines: 

(Source: MPA)

They are, thank goodness, readers, like their parents were before despite being weaned on sound bites and short takes:

(Source: MPA)

They like magazines and the Internet … but … newspapers, not so much:

(Source: MPA)

Now all three of those graphics come from the “MPA FACTbook 2016-17.” The MPA is a trade organization of magazine publishers, so you have to take these very positive data with a grain of salt.

However, other sources also support the conclusion that Millennials are into their subscriptions. For example, Millennials are evidently surpassed only by so-called “Matures” in their likelihood to continue subscribing to magazines and newspapers:

This infographic lumps magazines and newspapers together, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d suggest that the Matures number skews high because Matures love their newspapers, and the Millennials datum ranks high due to a love of magazines. (Sources: Vantiv and Socratic Technologies via Statista)

And once they are subscribed, these Millennials do not want to unsubscribe, either. Harris Interactive and Nielsen conducted research to look at the ways people are economizing. They asked, “Have you done or considered doing any of the following over the past six months in order to save money?” They offered choices such as “switch to generic brands” and “brown-bag your lunch.” For our purposes, the key option they asked about was cancelling subscriptions to save money. And they broke down the responses by generation. Turns out, when economizing, Millennials (the light blue bar on the bottom) are least likely to cut back on magazine subscriptions:

On the other hand, they are about as willing as anyone else to cut back on newspaper subscriptions when they have to cut back on luxuries:

(Sources: Harris Interactive and Nielsen via Statista)

Most Gen-Xers, Boomers, and Matures follow the old-school model of paying for subscriptions — they pay once a year, via a manual payment like a check or a one-time credit card payment. That’s in contrast to Millennials. More than 70% of them prefer regular monthly or weekly payments that are automatically deducted. This includes the 52% who authorize regular credit card payments, and the 22% who authorize regular checking account withdrawals.

Of these, 37% of Millennials make weekly payments, and 44% make monthly payments. (Sources: Vantiv and Socratic Technologies via Statista)

But don’t think these young people are burning through their paper checks. Rather, they are authorizing regular, automatic withdrawals through electronic transactions.

Photograph of a stack of magazines

Source: Bigstock

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For all other demographics, the most popular way to make payments is to manually write a check or authorize a one-time transaction. (Sources: Vantiv and Socratic Technologies via Statista) But 74% of Millennials want to set it and forget it — naturally, that makes them subscription gold. Each time a subscriber opts in to extending a subscription manually is a moment in which the subscriber may reconsider the value of the subscription and choose to unsubscribe. A customer with automatically recurring payments is a customer with fewer such moments. That makes Millennials a top-value customer right there.

And if that were not enough, here’s another reason to value recurring payments. Subscribers represent a viable magazine business model, but single-issue sales do not. Take a look at what’s happening at America’s newsstands:

Photograph of a stack of magazines

Source: Bigstock

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(Sources: MarketingCharts; AAM via Statista)

Let’s recap, then, the ways that Millennial customers are among the best customers for subscription media brands.

  • Millennials are readers who engage with magazines with greater frequency than other generations.
  • They are the most digitally savvy customers, and thus are the least expensive to service, given the cost of paper, ink and stamps.
  • They are more likely to continue to subscribe to the brands they like, and less likely to cancel, even when they are tightening their belts.
  • They prefer to set up frequent recurring payments through automatic deductions from credit and checking accounts.

There is a unique value underlying these points: Millennials are more brand-loyal. To attract and sustain that loyalty, it is imperative to understand it.

Boomers grew up with three TV networks, one or two daily newspapers, and magazines that took large staffs to publish. Gen-Xers got cable TV with a few dozen channels on top of that. Millennials grew up with literally thousands more choices, including evolving traditional media, sophisticated digital-only media platforms, lone bloggers, and celebrities on Twitter. When you only have a few choices, picking one out of the few is not a big deal. But when you are picking one out of a huge crowd, that choice becomes YOUR choice, and that choice may be one with which you identify, and to which you have some loyalty.

On social media, Millennials have learned that “liking” others is a powerful way to express your support. Moreover, the desire to be “liked” teaches a sort of empathy; the value of reaching out actively to others is in reciprocity. That mindset has translated, not to the micropayment libertarian utopia that some economists predicted, in which users would gladly pay pennies for every bit of content they consumed, but rather into a system in which minipayments become economic tokens of approval. What is crowdfunding but a way for many people to “like” a project by tossing a few bucks at it? What are Patreon and Kickstarter and IndieGoGo but ways to show you support a thing by paying for it?

A crowded media landscape — in which everything online is basically “media” — offers so many choices that picking any one to support becomes a personal statement. And while a Boomer expresses support by watching, a Millennial supports a preference by actively liking it, often by putting small recurring payments into it.

Another factor that makes these choices more meaningful for Millennials is that they are more frugal than their forbearers, and they are not putting their money into things frivolously. Kevin Drum recently debunked the myth of the Spendthrift Millennial with data from a Consumer Expenditure Study:

Photograph of a stack of magazines

Source: Bigstock

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(Source: Mother Jones and Consumer Expenditure) Drum elaborates:

Three decades ago, 18-34-year-olds spent 10.5 percent of their income on entertainment and eating out. Millennials spend 8.6 percent. In real dollars, that represents a small decline. In other words, millennials are more frugal about dining and entertainment than past generations.

So what do millennials spend their money on each year? They may have $3,000 more in disposable income than young families of the 80s and 90s, but they also spend:

  • About $1,000 more on health care.
  • About $1,500 more on pensions and Social Security.
  • About $2,000 more on overall housing (rent, maintenance, utilities, etc.).
  • About $700 more on education.

Well then, what can media brands do to gain the long-lasting loyalty of Millennial consumers who do not have a lot of disposable income?

First, provide unusual honest value. In a world with Google, it is next to impossible to be unique, but you can be unusual. Find your niche, and master it. And no goofing around with crap-all content scraped off other sites, or “SEO-friendly” unreadable “keyword-rich” articles compiled by Amazon Turkers, or listicles that fail to actually say anything, but just entice one more click. Apply the same high level of quality you would use for print. Gather subject matter experts to be your writers and editors and video talent and podcast hosts; then build them into brands themselves; foster a rapport between your users and your content creators so that users recognize and then seek out your authors. This works for all demographics, but it is especially important to Millennials, who have more refined bullshit detectors and who are looking for brands they are proud to like, are excited about sharing, and are attached to emotionally.

Second, engage engage engage! That means, be on social media. You already know you have to do this; don’t shy away. Amazingly, only 68% of Millennial business owners are on social media promoting their businesses; that remarkably small number only highlights the even more remarkably small number of non-Millennial business owners on social media: just 27% of Boomer business owners are!

Photograph of a stack of magazines

Source: Bigstock

3)]

(Source: SmallBizTrends.com, Magisto) Social Media is designed to be easy to use; there’s really no excuse not to be on it. Moreover, the greatest value of social media may be that others notice when influencers engage with you. You want your credible content to be noticed by these influencers, and then when Millennials see that you have credibility with people they trust, they will trust you.

Third, appeal to nostalgia. Millennials are sentimentalists, and if you can remind them of their youths (ie, the 1990s), it builds appeal. That’s according to Taylor Holland at ContentStandard, citing academic research.

Nintendo and Niantic aren’t the only companies targeting millennial consumers with nostalgia marketing. In the last couple years, Coca-Cola brought back Surge, a popular citrus-flavored soda from the ’90s, after 12 years off the market. Calvin Klein re-released items from its ’94 collection, and five of the 12 styles sold out within two months. Former PBS star LeVar Burton managed to revive the ’90s television show Reading Rainbow after raising $1 million from millennial fans via Kickstarter in just a few hours. And McDonald’s brought back the iconic Hamburglar – only now he’s all grown up and sporting facial hair.

Now, content marketers are jumping on the bandwagon, engaging those of us who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s with brand storytelling designed to remind us of “the good old days.”

Fourth, engage some more! Do not shy away from using crowdfunding tools for your established business. For example, PBS’s NOVA has used Kickstarter, and so is Standard Motorcycle. According to Wayne Friedman at MediaPost,

To be sure, Kickstarter campaigns don’t offer equity or ownership in a project to its “backers.” Yet, those who back the projects get fairly close to the creative process, as well as typically getting rewards from project owners.

Both of those advantages — letting users get close to the process, and getting rewards for participation — are key incentives for Millennials who reward that kind of honesty with loyalty.

Pundits looking to score cheap points with “kids these days” columns really miss the mark when they paint Millennials as silly, layabout, latte-swilling, iPhone-poking airheads with no attention spans. Yes, Millennials will click away from your content. That’s fine, encourage them to do so! Offer valuable content, and they’ll come back. Make it easy for them to engage, and they will do so. And with engagement comes the conversion to loyalty that will keep them coming back for decades.

Insider Take:

Research shows that it is well worth seeking out loyal, digitally savvy Millennial media consumers, but how? Grab their interest with unusual, valuable content that is presented honestly, does not manipulate user behavior to maximize clicks, and does not fear sending them off-site to other relevant content. Engage them not only on social media (although that’s super important), but also through payment platforms (like Kickstarter) that make them investors in your brand and reward them with a sense of participation. And build emotional bonds with these sentimental consumers, by promoting your authors as experts and peers, by appealing to nostalgia, and by fostering the feeling that you depend on them.

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