Marketing a membership plan — lessons from the frontlines
Read Part 1 here.
One area of membership research that is a little sparse is that of marketing. Because membership in news is a fairly new concept and most programmes are unique, it’s understandable there isn’t as much material out there to assist budding efforts. Here are some other things we learnt along the way and principles that helped guide our decisions.
Find your most engaged readers
For us, this was people who read to the end of our long-form articles and people who were regular newsletter readers. We invested heavily in newsletter products for more than eight years before launching membership and right away we used most of our unsold newsletter advertising inventory to promote the membership offering. But things really exploded for us when we started sending direct mailers to the subscriber base explaining why membership was important and how it helped us fund important investigations and keep the best political cartoonists free for all.
These direct mailers go out twice a month (around the 7th and just after pay-day on the 25th), and we’ve tested different kinds of messages, ranging from current affairs like our power utilities woes to our own precarious financial position. We found that being honest about how close we have come to closing in the past has worked well, as did publicising when a political party banned us from attending their events off the back of an investigation.
Always-on. Always asking.
B2C marketing is an always-on effort. We are continuously writing new copy to place on post- article footers, banners, direct mailers, newsletters, and more. We’ve managed with the existing team to get by, but as the demands and the growth ambitions accelerate we’ve made the call to hire a full-time marketing ninja to assist us in achieving our target of 20,000 active members by the end of 2020.
We’ve yet to go the paid acquisition route, despite knowing the lifetime value of our members is pretty high and how much we can afford to acquire new members. We’ve held off because this means giving Mark Zuckerberg money, and we can’t reconcile that our few dollars of ad spend would help pay for his triple-ply toilet paper. We’ve chosen to instead invest in getting better at converting our on-site readers and newsletter subscribers. It really is an always-on effort. Every Monday we discuss the next big marketing push, which messages and channels are working well, and how we’re planning to convert attendees at our events.
Have multiple channels
It’s imperative to have many channels feeding in new leads and conversions. Different benefits will appeal to different members, so on any given day, we’ll have Uber vouchers, ad-free browsing, comments, banners or “Defend Truth” editorials driving conversions. Each of these needs to be given a share of voice on the website and tracked to know how they are performing.
Ad-free browsing for members ranked highly in our MVP pre-launch survey, so we diverted tech resources to make that happen sooner. When we launched ad-free browsing we wrote an editorial post, sent a direct mailer and placed a “turn ads on/off “ button above each advert on the site and a message that tells readers that members can choose to turn off ads. (Many members, in fact, do not turn them off because they don’t feel we abuse their reading experience and they know we get a tiny bit of cash from showing those ads).
Stay on brand. Always
If your membership is cause-driven, don’t get sucked into the product/discount/prize world. Chances are people who sign up because of those promotions are unlikely to stick around for very long. Cause-driven marketing is harder but more rewarding. Our churn rates (+-5%) are below industry averages for subscriptions (7%) and we believe that’s because we’ve delivered on the community-building, engagement and editorial promises we’ve made. Pay-what-you-want permeates all of our pricing strategies, including tickets to our biggest events.
Our primary membership goal is to build the best community we can, not generate the most revenue we can out of them.
Revenue should be a successful by-product of what we do, and that has to carry through in all our marketing efforts and messages. Marketing may get people through the door but if members don’t find value and substance in being part of a community, they’ll simply choose to leave. Marketing cannot just be sales rhetoric and tactics, it has to be an extension of, and align with, the cause in order for it to be long-term successful.
