How to make your subscribers feel valued

Last updated: December 29, 2023

By now, you know you can’t depend on fleeting traffic to drive your media business: Top news sites got about 11.5 percent of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September 2023, it was down to 6.5 percent.

Instead, you need to invest in creating a robust subscriber experience that makes each member of your audience feel seen, valued and understood on a personal level.

Creating relationships is hard work, though, and that’s just as true in media: If you’re struggling just to get impressions, truly resonating with your subscribers might feel like a pipe dream.

Master subscription models: 9 Proven tactics to skyrocket retention & revenue:

But with personalization, audience insights and some good old fashioned customer service, you can create lasting connections with your subscribers.

Learn how to do it below:

Welcome them and thank them for subscribing

First impressions matter in media: Nearly a third of new subscribers to some news publications cancel in the first 24 hours, according to research from Nieman Lab.

Start strong by immediately sending your new subscribers a welcome email. This should include the following:

Thank them for their subscription
Introduce them to all the subscriber-exclusive content you have to offer
Proof of credibility (describe your publication’s background on the topic or give a statement like “70,000 people sign up to receive our insights on impact investing each month”)
Include information on how to access their online account, submit payments and contact customer support

Bonus: Omeda’s audience marketing platform connects subscription management and billing with an email and marketing automation platform, so you can execute this workflow to perfection — without needing to manually transfer data between systems.

Send a gift with the first issue

Surprise and delight your new subscribers with a free gift, whether it’s a free issue or even a handwritten note thanking them for their subscription. In a digital-first world, your subscribers will remember — and appreciate — a physical gift.

Some other first-issue gifts to consider:

Branded T-shirts
Branded merchandise, like bookmarks, pens or coffee mugs
A gift bundle of products from advertisers
A free book by one of your editors, leaders or advertisers

Prefer a digital option? Give your new subscribers these gifts:

Discounted or free tickets to events
Access to premium content like eBooks and courses
Vouchers or promo codes for discounted merchandise, event tickets, or digital subscriptions to related publications

Provide personalized content recommendations

The single best way to make your subscribers feel valued? Give them what they want. A few decades ago, that meant conducting focus groups, interviewing your audience and doing quite a bit of guesswork. Now, though, it’s about harnessing your audience data to create hyper-personalized experiences for each person.

One of the best ways to do this is through personalized content recommendations.

On Omeda, content recommendations are personalized based on each reader’s engagement, browsing and purchase history. And because Omeda is connected to a customer data platform, this algorithm is able to account for someone’s activity across every marketing touchpoint, from events and email to print and offline engagement, so it can generate super-precise recommendations very quickly.

Besides improving your subscriber experience, this also helps you generate more first-party data about your audience. From there, you can further strengthen your content and improve your subscriber experience.

Want to personalize your newsletters? Use dynamic content in your emails. This serves each recipient content that’s personalized to their engagement, browsing and demographic record. Every single recipient gets the content they want most — and you don’t have to segment your list to death.

Cross promote and upsell related publications

It’s one thing to give your audience what they already want. It’s another to introduce them to content they didn’t know they needed. That’s how you can differentiate yourself from the other brands in their timeline and keep them coming back for more.

Cross-promoting related content is one of the most effective ways to do this. And the more data you have on each subscriber, the more successful your offer will be. Some common cross-promotions and upsells include:

Promote related publications or newsletters based on someone’s past purchase history and content downloads.
Create a more expensive tier featuring add-ons and target it to your most loyal customers.

But your offers won’t resonate unless they lead each person to the one thing that’s best suited for their needs. So before creating your cross-promotion campaigns, use your customer profiles to learn more about your audience, including:

What products/publications are most commonly bought together?
What content is most popular among your readers and which articles are most frequently read together?
If you’re recommending articles to your readers, which ones are most popular? Which ones have the most crossover appeal between segments?
What additional content your subscribers are viewing on your website, especially if it’s behind a paywall or meter? (If someone’s providing their email address to view articles related to a topic, chances are that they’ll at least subscribing to a magazine on that topic.)
Your subscribers’ job title, industry, age/location and other demographic information
Your subscribers’ average order volume
If applicable, see what event sessions, breakouts and panel discussions, and webinars your subscribers attend

From there, you can recommend the right resource to the right person at the right time — and prove you’re in touch with their needs.

Provide best-in-class customer service

You already know that you need exemplary customer support. But it’s worth investigating your customer experience to see where you can optimize.

Two common issues are long wait times and insufficient responses. And often, this stems from data silos.

If subscriber data is scattered across different solutions, your customer success representatives don’t have all the information they need to help a subscriber. So they need to contact other teams to verify someone’s information and get their payment records, or they’ll provide advice that’s not personalized for the person’s situation. All that back-and-forth adds time that your subscribers don’t have — and makes them feel less valued.

One solution: Use a customer data platform to unify all of your subscriber data in one place. These tools take in subscriber data from all of your touchpoints and then consolidate them in one place, so everyone on your team has a single view of everyone in your audience.

So in one search, your success reps can pull up a subscriber’s complete record including demographics, subscriptions, marketing contacts and payment record and information. That empowers them to resolve issues more quickly — and keep your subscribers happy.

Some other ways to create seamless experiences for your subscribers include:

Make payments easier by providing a self-service payment option. Also consider an automated subscription management and billing solution to remove human error from the process and ensure every issue goes out on time.
Provide an auto-renewal option for extra convenience, along with automated reminders.
Display pop-ups and trigger automated emails reminding people with expiring credit cards to update their payment method before their payment fails.
Consider a subscription management solution with a native email platform and database, like Omeda. This way, when subscribers update their payment method or have a failed payment, it’s instantly updated in a single profile accessible to your entire team. From there, each subscriber is added to relevant email segments. So you can reach out through an automated email and resolve their issue as quickly as possible.

Sweeten the post with subscriber-exclusive perks

Sure, you could just give paid subscribers access to your content and leave it at that. But if you do, you’re missing opportunities to add value to your offering — and you risk losing subscribers the moment they get bored of your content.

Create irresistible subscription packages by adding some of the following features:

Free or discounted access to events
Access to promotions
First looks at new publications
Subscriber-exclusive product bundles
Exclusive audio articles and digital PDF libraries
Access to iOS and Android apps
Bundled pricing for multiple publications or subscription packages
Product boxes
Additional resources

Perks are most effective when they’re closely tied to your publication’s value proposition. One of my favorite examples of this comes from The New York Times’ Cooking subscription, which includes exclusive access to the Cooking app. The app includes:

The entire Cooking recipe database.
How-to guides and editor-curated collections.
All the organization and customization tools in your Recipe Box. This includes the ability to use auto-organizing smart folders, create personalized folders to manage your saved recipes, and searching within your Recipe Box.

Take it from a horrible cook: The App is a goldmine for anyone looking to up their culinary game. And they’re enough to keep any on-the-fence subscriber engaged.

This package works because the perks are so actionable: Subscribers aren’t just left to read recipes and wing it in the kitchen. The app gives them the tools they need to organize their meal prep and improve their cooking.

What better way to make your audience feel appreciated?

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