In this week’s Five on Friday, Digiday explains how the direct-to-consumer membership model can improve retention, Forbes tells us how much the average person is spending on media annually, FeedStuffs explores the future of meal kits, the American Press Institute provides guidance for news sites on how to improve subscription registration and payments, and Media Post shares how The New York Times is using Google Cloud to expand its ad campaign.

DTC Companies Shift from Subscriptions to Membership 

As consumer shopping patterns change, businesses are shifting their business models to accommodate new needs and preferences. Some direct-to-consumer companies that were once successful with subscription services are shifting toward a membership model, reports Digiday in a recent article on the topic. Through membership programs, which are growing in popularity, businesses get recurring revenue and customer loyalty, while members get discounts, special perks and exclusive access to products and services.

Digiday shares the example of MeUndies, an underwear retailer for men and women. The company started as a subscription company, but switched seven months in. In addition to receiving discounted underwear purchases for a monthly fee of $14 (men) or $16 (women), MeUndies members also receive special discounts on other products and access to limited-edition designs not available to non-members.

Other ways to build customer loyalty include discounts for recurring purchases of everyday items like cosmetics, toothpaste or razors and creating waitlists and/or exclusive access to build anticipation and make members feel valued. By creating exclusivity for members, companies can build deeper engagement with their customers which is critical to improving retention.  

“The subscription might be the gold standard – buying every month – but memberships drive frequency of purchase and engagement that resembles that behavior,” said Corey Pierson, co-founder of Custora, a customer analytics company, in the Digiday article.

Read more on this growing trend in “DTC brands are embracing membership models to improve retention” by Hilary Milnes for Digiday.

How Much Did You Pay for Digital Media This Year?

As the subscription economy has grown, digital media services have grown with them, attracting subscribers to streaming audio, streaming video, audiobook subscriptions, magazines, online news, video games and more. Those costs add up over time, especially when you sit down to look at what you are really subscribing to. Examining my own habits briefly, I subscribe to Netflix, BritBox, Hulu and Spotify. That doesn’t seem like a lot at first, but when I look more closely, I also subscribe to The New York Times online, print magazines including Sports Illustrated, HGTV and Real Simple. Not including the print magazines, I’m paying about $636 a year in digital media subscriptions alone. Surprisingly, this is about half of the national average.

According to global research company PQ Media, U.S. consumers pay an average of about $1,345 a year for media subscriptions. In a “How much does the average person spend each year on media” by Toni Fitzgerald, Forbes quotes PQ Media who says that spending on digital devices – nearly $415 billion worldwide – is the biggest of any platform. Digital content subscriptions grew by more than 19 percent this year.

How much will you spend on media this year?

Maturing Meal Kit Industry to Sell $3.1 Billion in 2018 

Since coming to the U.S., meal kits like Blue Apron and Purple Carrot have become a billion-dollar business. In fact, in 2017, Packaged Facts estimates that the U.S. meal kit industry had $2.6 billion in sales. They predict the industry will grow by nearly 22 percent by the end of this year to reach $3.1 billion in sales. After that, over the next five years, double-digit growth rates will drop into the single-digits, reports Feedstuffs.

In addition to sales growth, the market will mature in other ways, says Packaged Facts. In addition to subscription-box meal-kit sales, new markets will open up or expand. For example, more stores will carry meal kits for one-time purchases, such as the Home Chef meal kits sold in Kroger stores, Blue Apron kits are available at Costco and now Grubhub, reports CNBC.

David Sprinkle, research director for Packaged Facts, said meal kit companies are challenged to find new ways to deliver their products to customers. Meal kits tend to be expensive because shipping fresh food items to consumers is costly. Also, consumers have adjusted to “on demand” grocery and food delivery, so waiting for a subscription meal kit to be delivered isn’t necessarily attractive. While meal kit companies may need to be more creative, and growth may slow, Packaged Facts believes the industry will continue to be a money-maker.

Read more on the future of meal kits in “Meal kit providers pivot focus, expand services in $3 billion market” on Feedstuffs.

5 Tips to Improve Subscription Registration and Payment Forms

Every news outlet should be familiar with the great resources offered by the American Press Institute, a nonprofit educational organization that helps to provide resources, training and support to news outlets to help them to be sustainable. If you haven’t checked it out, I highly encourage you to do so. One resource I found through their daily newsletter is a must read for news outlets – “How to improve subscription registration and payment forms” by Gwen Vargo, director of reader revenue for the American Press Institute . In this thorough guide, Vargo provides many examples of email sign-up forms, site registration forms and payment forms.

I don’t want to steal Vargo’s thunder, so I’ll share just five of her tips, but please check out her full article on the American Press Institute website. Even the most successful news outlets are sure to glean at least one tip from this treasure trove of good advice.

1. Every step in the digital checkout line is an opportunity for a positive – or negative – user experience.
2. Registration pages should be brief, clean and simple. Don’t ask for too much information or site visitors are more likely to abandon the page.
3. Test different options to see what works best for your audience. Vargo suggests testing promotional offers (tiered offers perhaps), text and design.
4. Bullet points are great for outlining options.
5. Offer multiple payment options so there are fewer subscriber objections to overcome.

Read more great tips and see examples of successful forms here.

How The New York Times Is Using Google Cloud to Archive More Than a Century of Materials

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the Saturday Evening Post’s 10-year archiving project of issues dating back to 1821. They aren’t alone. The New York Times is also in the process of digitizing millions of old photos, microfilm, news clippings and other archives, dating back to the late 1800s, reports Melynda Fuller for Media Post. The Times will use Google Cloud to help digitize those items, previously inaccessible for use.

Fuller says that Google Cloud has produced three ad campaigns to talk about their partnership with The Times and how the newspaper can use Google Cloud technology to analyze and archive images digitally. The campaigns include a four-minute informational video to explain how Google Cloud can be used. This serves at least two purposes: giving The Times visibility for this historic preservation project and showing other businesses and organizations how Google Cloud can be used for the painstaking process of archiving documents and images.

On the Google Cloud blog, Sam Greenfield, technical director, Cloud Office of the CTO, talked about the project. According to the post, for more than 100 years, The Times has archived from 5 to 7 million photos in hundreds of file cabinets three stories below the street. In this archive, nicknamed the “morgue,” a card catalog gives an overview of archived contents, but it lacks the rich detail and context often needed to locate a specific item.

“The morgue is a treasure trove of perishable documents that are a priceless chronicle of not just The Times’s history, but of nearly more than a century of global events that have shaped our modern world,” said Nick Rockwell, chief technology officer, The New York Times, in the Google Cloud blog post.

The benefits to using the Cloud Storage solution include:

• The ability to store high-resolution scans of images
• Automatic life-cycle management
• Storage in geographically-distinct regions
• Easy-to-use management interface and API
• A searchable asset management system

Learn more about this project, Google Cloud and how machine learning comes into play on the Google Cloud blog.