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Publishers want to free their subscription revenue from the influence of the news cycle.
Must-follow stories like pandemics and presidential elections can boost subscription numbers, but once these stories fade, publishers are left to figure out how to keep subscribers engaged and paying.
While it’s relatively easy for publishers to gather first-party data on what content resonates with their audiences, activating it is another story. So publishers like The Washington Post rely on customer data platforms (CDPs) to turn their first-party data into actionable strategy and extend the lifetime value they get from subscribers.
WaPo partnered with ActionIQ two years ago to overhaul how it markets to subscribers throughout the various stages of their subscription life cycle. The new customer retention efforts and targeted paid media campaigns made possible by the CDP are producing exponentially better results.
The 2020 boom and the 2021 bust
Like many news publishers, WaPo’s subscriber numbers took off in 2020 as audiences flocked to coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Biden vs. Trump presidential election. By the end of 2020, WaPo was reportedly nearing 3 million paid digital subscribers.
But by the end of 2022, when those news cycles were no longer top of mind, WaPo’s subscriber count had fallen to 2.5 million.
As WaPo watched its subscriber gains evaporate, subscription retention became a top priority, said Chief Subscriptions Officer Michael Ribero. And leadership took steps to coordinate efforts across the publication’s various internal systems and verticals.
The ActionIQ integration was a way to bring all of the company’s disparate efforts to gather audience data and improve the value proposition for subscribers into one platform.
With its new prospecting capabilities, WaPo has seen improvements in its ability to convert registered users into subscribers, its ability to get lapsed subscribers to resubscribe and the effectiveness of its paid media campaigns.
Since the beginning of this year, WaPo’s “lead nurture journey” campaigns – or efforts to get registered users to convert into subscribers by sending content recommendations and prompts via email – have produced 25 times more conversions than all of 2022’s non-CDP-based campaigns.
Over the same time span, “terminated subscriber journeys” – or campaigns to convince lapsed subscribers to start paying again – produced 1.5 times more conversions compared to WaPo’s non-CDP approach. The resubscribe rate has also been 38% higher so far this year compared to WaPo’s historical benchmark.
And CDP-based paid media campaigns for the first few months of 2023 have produced 131% more new subscribers than control campaigns. Those results have encouraged WaPo to increase its paid media spending by 322%.
From un-smart to smart
WaPo’s subscriber journey starts with registration, when a user provides an email address. Any insights into the user’s content preferences, such as answers to survey questions or onsite behavior, are tied to this email address.
From there, WaPo’s goal is to convince these registered users to become paying subscribers and keep those subscriptions active. Their email addresses are used for email campaigns or to identify and retarget users on social media.
Before WaPo started working with ActionIQ, its subscription prospecting campaigns could be described as “un-smart,” Ribero said. “Everyone would get the same communications, and everyone would be prompted for the same actions.”
But once WaPo integrated ActionIQ’s CDP into its tech stack, it was able to more effectively tie signals about user behavior to their email addresses.
For example, if a user had not yet downloaded WaPo’s app, the publisher could see that in the CDP, then prompt that user to download the app, either by sending an email or targeting that user with paid ads on social media.
WaPo divides its content into broad areas of interest, like tech and well-being. Before using a CDP, it was able to tell if a reader was particularly interested in tech content. The CDP now allows WaPo to gain more granular insight into the specific types of content readers are reading, Ribero said.
WaPo also uses the AP’s content taxonomy, which categorizes news coverage down to an individual article’s subject matter. The CDP made it easier to use the AP’s taxonomy to tell which users were visiting the tech section to read about cryptocurrency as opposed to, say, gadgets.
In other words, WaPo went from approaching content recommendation at a “subsections level” to thinking on a “topical level,” Ribero said. And that increased granularity enables more effective content recommendations and ad campaigns.
WaPo is also looking at targeting users with emails from journalists whose content they read often as a more personalized incentive to continue subscribing.
And the publisher is looking at more sophisticated approaches to prospecting, like using the CDP to predict which users are most likely to unsubscribe or keep subscribing and targeting messages to them based on those signals, Ribero said.
‘A twofold benefit’
WaPo measured the effectiveness of ActionIQ-based campaigns by comparing them to control campaigns that used the publisher’s previous “un-smart” approach.
Although WaPo is confident there is a causal relationship between integrating the CDP and the subsequent lift in conversions, some of the results could have been skewed by changes WaPo made to its subscription strategy, Ribero said. For example, WaPo recently started requiring a user to register by providing an email address before they can access certain articles, and that may have contributed to higher overall conversion numbers.
While the impacts on subscriptions are encouraging, WaPo is very much a dual revenue stream business. It hopes its efforts to activate its first-party data will benefit its advertising revenue, too, Ribero said. The same interest-based segments WaPo uses for its own purposes could be turned into targetable audiences that advertisers can purchase.
“We’re moving as an enterprise toward understanding our readers better,” he said. “There’s a twofold benefit: It helps us create the right journalism and serve it to the right readers, and we can be a better partner to brands that want to reach our audience.”
