Subs

November 2018
Unpacking the Reader-

Subscriber-Lifetime
Customer Journey
A report from the INMA Consumer Engagement Summit
Miami, November 2018
November 2018
Unpacking the Reader-Subscriber-

Lifetime Customer Journey
A report from the INMA Consumer Engagement Summit
Miami, November 2018
Authors About the authors 3

Dawn McMullan Summit summary 4
Carly Price Introduction by Robert Whitehead 8
Robert Whitehead Chapter 1: Habits and rewards are key to engagement 15
Chapter 2: Engage your newsroom to engage your
Editor audience 20
Earl J. Wilkinson A. The Wall Street Journal 20
B. The Globe and Mail 22
Design & Layout C. USA Today Network 24
Danna Emde Chapter 3: Engagement has no magic metric 27
A. Financial Times 28
B. The New York Times 29
C. The Atlantic 31
Chapter 4: Lifetime value, relevance are key to retention 35
A. Times Newspapers Ltd. 35
B. Star Tribune 37
C. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 38
D. Aftenposten 40
E. Dagens Nyheter 42
Chapter 5: The role of paywalls in audience segmentation
and growth 44
A. Paywall options 45
B. Nurturing buying habits 47
Chapter 6: Conclusion 49
© INMA 2018 The contents contained within this report are the
exclusive domain of INMA and may not be reproduced without the
express written consent.
INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 2

About the authors
Dawn McMullan is senior editor at INMA, based in Dallas, Texas,

USA. She has been in the news media industry for 30+ years,
working as a blogger, editor, radio commentator, magazine
writer, and social media editor.
Carly Price is a freelance writer and editor based in Austin, Texas,

USA. She has 20+ years of experience with an emphasis on
magazine journalism, content development, and marketing, and
currently serves as a blog editor and regular contributor for INMA.
Robert Whitehead is a board member of McPherson Media

Group. He is a tech start-up advisor and investor based in Sydney,
Australia. His previous media roles include head of marketing at
Fairfax Media and editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. He was
co-moderator of the Miami engagement summit.
About the International News Media Association (INMA)

The International News Media Association (INMA) is a global community of market-leading news
media companies reinventing how they engage audiences and grow revenue in a multi-media
environment. The INMA community consists of 10,000+
members at 700+ news media companies in 70 countries.
Headquartered in Dallas, INMA has offices in San Salvador,
Antwerp, and New Delhi.

Summit summary
Finishing up two days at the INMA Consumer Engagement Summit, fighting

off conference fatigue and Miami temptation, 35+ attendees attended an
unconferencing workshop session to discuss customer value nurturing and how to
ensure subscriber success. The energy of the group — inside a chilly conference
room on a Friday afternoon, just an elevator ride away from a rooftop pool, a
summer-like sun, and cocktails — gives witness to the passion behind this topic in
the global news media industry right now.
The session was led by INMA Researcher-In-Residence Grzegorz Piechota, who

has devoted one year of INMA newsletters, Webinars, conference presentations, and
Participants brainstorm about how to create a community to encourage subscriber longevity.

strategic reports to the topic — again speaking to its importance. The tone of the
energetic session was set by the presence of markets and easels with large white
paper tablets. Piechota, a long-time leader at INMA, has spent the last few years as a
researcher for Harvard and Oxford. He literally jogged between groups because he
and the groups were so eager to share their discussions.
INMA Researcher-In-Residence Grzegorz Piechota is a global expert on the topic of digital subscriptions.
Piechota divided attendees into five groups to discuss these 10 topics. Here are
their brief takeaways and an overview of this report, which gives structure to all that
transpired at the Summit:
1. Onboarding subscriber: E-mails must be more than transactional.

Communication must share what you are as a media company. One-on-
one communication would be a benefit to make subscribers feel part of a
community. Perhaps a video showing how to navigate the content and other
products would be helpful.
2. Winning every visit: Need excellent load times. Perhaps add a “read later”
button or send unfinished articles to e-mail. Add subtle recommendations
based on personalisation.
3. Creating a habit: Reward readers for the amount of content they consume.
Deliver content based on time of day: traffic in the morning, recipes on way
home from work.

4. Creating community: Create niche memberships or subscriber-only
Facebook groups around passions or interests. Bracket-like competitions for
best CEOs or best ice cream.
5. Rewarding loyalty: Dividing rewards into online and offline experiences.

Meet-ups with journalists. Conference calls for subscribers only. Ad-free or
ad-light experiences. Personalisation for subscribers.
6. Paywall models: Tech hurdles such as incognito search continue to be a

challenge. Dynamic paywalls put everything we know about paid content
models on its head.
7. Content that converts: Content must be useful, drive conversation, feed the
ego to be educated on topics.
News media executives consider ways to create a habit among their digital subscribers.
8. Newsletter best practices: Consider time-based newsletters (morning

briefing, coffee break) and complete automation. What is a successful
newsletter — list size, percent of subscribers, data points you capture?
Reward shares or forwards to friends.
9. Getting newsrooms on board: Forget the idea that journalists and editors are
cranky. Data is persuasive, so use it as the starting point of the discussion.

10. Smart pricing: More news companies should look into dynamic pricing,
micropayments, and cryptocurrency. Pricing should be personalised and
without friction.
That’s the meat. What follows in these 50 pages takes you on the journey — a
journey where consumer engagement is by far the most important piece of the
media puzzle right now. Where retention is more important than acquisition. Where
media executives need fewer metrics (pick one and stick with it) and a uniting North
Star to guide the way. Where habits and emotions are key to the courting phase of
the media-audience relationship. Where personalisation isn’t optional anymore and is
deepening from content suggestions to paywall offers. Where journalists and editors
are in the engagement game, too, driven by metrics that speak to them. Where
automation is freeing up employees for more important work. Where your paywall
preference isn’t as important as how you executive engagement.
All this ends with one truth: The greater the engagement, the greater the consumer
revenue. n

INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT WHITEHEAD
How engagement
became the
biggest thing in
news media
There’s a strong sense we now know what we’re doing. News media companies in
disrupted markets had spent a decade in the darkness, grabbing at any new cost
reduction or the shiniest of sales diversification. Piling on strategic complexity,
diffusing focus, pulling off the odd success — but mostly it was test and burn. Yet out
of this panic has emerged, surely if unevenly, the road map for consumer revenue
success to transform the business.
Years after companies launched subscriptions and years after we began translating
them to digital publishing, there are now enough successful cases to know what
works for what type of brands in what type of markets. And from all the data patterns
comes an over-arching truth: the greater the engagement, the greater the consumer
revenue.
This is what we know:
l Consumer engagement is the most important factor in consumer revenue

success.
l The leading companies invest more in engagement than acquisition.
l The business process has to start with engagement goals, not how to get
consumers to buy.
l It takes a whole-of-business mobilisation.
l It needs one clear goal.

l It works if you have a strong value proposition for consumers that they
believe resonates.
l Personalisation and loyalty are fundamental to usage.
l The buck starts with editorial.
l The choice of pay gateway is less important than how you execute the
engagement.
l Generation Now has been trained well: We expect nothing less than service
nirvana.
It’s a compelling story and worth stepping through the detail.
Robert Whitehead, co-moderator of the Summit, speaks to attendees in Miami.
Consumer engagement has emerged as the most important factor in the most
important strategy (consumer revenue) for most news media companies. In our
previous business lifetime, we pursued engagement activities. But it was barely a
dismal science back then when we enticed them to stay longer on our sites (read
more) and rewarded subscriber loyalty (retained more). History, however, has judged
media’s Engagement 1.0 efforts harshly. It has only been the sophisticated rebirth of
engagement that has powered consumer revenue successes.

Most companies have under-resourced engagement efforts, and they expect
that to change quickly. A survey of 60 companies ahead of the INMA Consumer
Engagement Summit showed 59% spent less on engagement than on consumer
acquisition. Most over index on acquisition effort and vastly under index on
engagement. Yet the companies reporting the highest satisfaction with their
results are spending much more on engagement and even they think the game
is just starting. As an example, Financial Times, an early leader in the engagement
revolution, is now spending three times more on engagement than on acquisition.
Consensus would see best practice heading towards investing between three to 10
times on engagement than on acquisition.
The consumer revenue strategy starts with engagement and works back, in contrast
to the flow of the consumer’s personal journey. Create the profile of your most
valuable, engaged audiences from a lifetime value perspective (get expert help doing
this). Next, draw backwards to model those segments’ behaviours, especially the
triggers for deepening engagement which you can incorporate in your marketing,
product, and content. Finally, launch your acquisition campaigns to ensnare more
people like them.
It requires the full focus and mobilisation of the organisation, and its execution will
challenge even your most recent audience-first organisation structure. You need a
North Star to point the whole business towards. The FT uses engagement (defined as
recency + frequency + volume). The Wall Street Journal uses monthly active users.
The Telegraph in London was using total registrations, but switched recently to total
subscriptions to highlight monetisation.
Whatever North Star is set, the focus needs to be precise and every team in the
business needs to know its role in moving that dial. It blurs responsibilities across
structural lines between content, product, and marketing — and having one clear
goal unifies the response. It’s been easier to get commercial teams to fall into
alignment. There is progress, however, getting editorial to realise its central role
in driving engagement. At Dagens Nyheter, the editor is in charge of subscription
acquisitions and retention. At Gannett’s USA Today Network, regional editors are
about to be charged with driving readers to the sign-up prompts (after completing
their recent extensive overhaul of content engagement).
Driving engagement requires tracking better measures. Don’t chase time spent;
don’t chase one-and-done readers; ditch the fly-bys from your dashboards. Chasing

Panelists Martin Jönsson, Espen Egil Hansen, Magnus Engstrom, and Thomas Sundgren discuss
Scandinavian media at the Summit.
registrations has taken a renewed prominence this past year. It fuels revenue yield
improvement for businesses that are still deriving serious advertising volumes, and it
also provides quality prospects for subscription conversions. But it’s only one tactic
in the consumer revenue assault. Similarly, chasing a subscriptions headline number
became an imperative for many — certainly for publicly listed businesses — but that
chase has proved hollow without being linked to retention and lifetime value and can
drive profitless acquisition (poorly acquired, barely engaged, badly burned).
Which brings us to the imperative of tracking higher quality engagement metrics to

deliver the goods. Scandinavian companies tell their journalists which of their stories
trigger subscription conversions (Aftenposten, Dagens Nyheter, Amedia’s regionals).
They are adding the tracking of stories that deepen subscriber engagement, too.
Gannett has a multi-variant newsroom model, “The Vitruvian Man,” which shows
the value of a story across a balanced engagement scorecard. All the leaders in the
field have built their own subscription/engagement dashboards for their newsrooms
in the absence of off-the-shelf solutions. The American Press Institute is about to
relaunch its Metrics for News tools to help plug this gap.
Every element of the product must reflect a strong, unified value proposition to
consumers. The brand must stand for something that deeply resonates with the
audience, something they feel the need to buy into. It ideally would be strong
enough to embody a “forever proposition,” in author Robbie Kellman Baxter’s terms,
that they want to live among emotionally and never leave. Editorial must focus

on bringing that precise proposition to life — day in, day out, in everything they
craft. The marketing communications and loyalty schemes must embolden this
same brand personality. And every plank of product development must build on it.
Newsletters, an old weapon that’s new again, are a strong example. They slice and
dice captivating content to present new engagement points for readers, listeners,
and viewers. The New York Times has shown how to use existing newsletter
machinery to launch niche and temporal topics to capture the imagination of a
moment. Its science is also being deployed to reinvent the push notification as digital
engagement gold.
Personalisation to deepen engagement has begun to play a big role. The publishers
reporting the highest satisfaction with their execution are moving further into the
automation zone to lift the relevance of content, communications, and conversions.
One-size-fits all retention and engagement is so yesterday’s business model.
Aftenposten has just launched its personalised Web site for subscribers using an
editorial-guided algorithm. Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland is kilometres in front
with its tailored newsletters and customised sites. And The Wall Street Journal leads
the play in personalising the paywall. Many publishers now personalise subscription
pricing and acquisition tactics (but with a warning: make sure your endeavours drive
towards your engagement North Star, not merely optimise yield). The next big step
will be personalised paywall tech arriving off-the-shelf for publishers. This will allow
personalised content, marketing, pricing, and paywalls to be synchronised.
Of all the initiatives news media companies have undertaken in the digital decades,
it is the consumer revenue play — uniquely — that defines the next generation
newsroom. It also provides the urgency and commercial imperative to overhaul
editorial, so it makes more of the great material that is most valued. Prioritise content
that drives the deepest engagement and, as a subset, the content that triggers a
subscription purchase. Improve the storytelling and presentation of the important,
worthy topics that may be vital for the brand’s proposition. For everything else that
few read or fewer care about — kill it or cull it or consign it to automation to free
people to make the most valuable stuff.
Gannett is focusing on culling the bottom half of its story lists and improving how
those topics are told. MittMedia has successfully handed over to machine writing
its lower-end sports results copy and coverage of every property sale. Dagens
Nyheter is using its engagement score in the newsroom to increase article and video
relevance to help reduce subscriber churn. Aftenposten says its journalists have

welcomed the deeper story tracking tools as reporters want their work to be well
read.
When the engagement is deep, the consumer revenue will grow. Oxford University
Research Fellow and INMA Researcher-in-Residence Grzegorz Piechota has
connected the dots:
l Demonstrate the value of the content.
l Loyalty and personalisation will drive usage.
l Usage will drive purchase.
Many publishers are stuck unnecessarily on the question of what type of pay gateway
to deploy, which is no longer the point. While we know there are some technical
reasons some paywalls suit some brands and markets better, it is more important
that your brand be robust and whatever you choose, you do well.
Pay models are also converging — tighter meters are starting to look like tighter
freemium models or tighter hybrids. The publishers that are happiest with their
Panelists Karl Wells, Carla Zanoni, Louis Deering, Kelli Dakake, and Josh Awtry discuss newsroom
engagement with Summit Co-Moderator Nicki Purcell.

performance are tighter freemium and hard paywall publishers working with strong
brands. Piechota contends publishers that continually change their pay models, and
use the paywall as an audience segmentation tool, can have accelerated growth.
Adapt the mechanism when you want to adapt your growth plan to chase new, rich
targets. Dagens Nyheter is experimenting with putting some highly attractive articles
behind the wall after hitting its engagement objectives for several hours. The Wall
Street Journal provides a lesson of when and how to engage a person after they
subscribe to help them lock themselves in. Habits are formed in the first 100 days …
or not at all. The Wall Street Journal examines the key drivers of active use for each
segment and seeks to stimulate those activities from the first moment of onboarding.
Excellent customer service has to be an aspiration of the engagement plan.

Automation is helping drive better service results — even if media is not yet in the
league of Tencent in China, which uses machines to help to address queries within
80 seconds. Mediahuis properties in Holland (NRC and De Telegraaf) match the
personalities and style of service center agents to consumer types to engage and
retain. The Wall Street Journal is testing every payment mechanism to achieve as close
to frictionless payment and renewal nirvana as possible. The Atlantic has demonstrated
the power of directly connecting with the membership base in public discourse to
strengthen the brand and to drive product development. The Times in London has
optimised its save strategies and continues to refine. And finally, The Atlanta Journal-
Constitution may have found the true benefit of surprise and delight tactics: Help
transform a customer into a super user who will share their passion virally.
All up, these themes in the engagement playbook add up to the biggest thing in
news media in years. n

CHAPTER 1
Habits and
rewards are key to
engagement
Key to building engagement is understanding the power of habit, according to

Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Power of Habit,
which explains the science of habit formation.
What scientists call “the habit loop” can be applied to reader engagement: Every
habit has a cue, routine, and reward.
Building engagement is about playing with the reward.
Charles Duhigg said media companies can improve engagement buy rewarding readers for habits. But the
reward needs to be emotional — not just transactional.

“We can change how people behave if we understand which rewards are most
powerful,” Duhigg said.
There is a neurological explanation for why some habits flourish while others do not.
Duhigg gave an example of laboratory research at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology). When scientists monitored rats’ neural activity as they learned to find
chocolate at the end of a simple maze, they found that at first the rats rely on every
possible source of information — visual, olfactory, touch. While learning the maze,
there is a lot of neural activity because the rats are making constant decisions based
on the input.
But over time, the rats prioritise the information, figure out the smallest number
of steps needed to reach the reward, and stop making conscious decisions.
Neurological activity drops. The activity becomes habit.
The same applies to news consumers.
The amount of neurological activity when performing a habit is not much different
than the amount of brain activity when people are asleep.
In other words, people literally stop thinking when performing habitual activities.
About 40% to 45% of the things people do every day are habits rather than conscious
decisions, Duhigg said, and the way we want to change our customers’ habits is the
same process as changing our own habits.
To create a new habit, there needs to be a clear and powerful reward. People are
more likely to develop a habit when the reward is obvious and immediate. For
instance, research shows people are more likely to stick to an exercise plan when
told they will get a piece of chocolate directly after.
“Educating someone about the habit loop seems to change their behaviour,
particularly among customers. If you make the reward explicit, they understand the
manipulation and embrace it much better,” Duhigg said.
Furthermore, a habit such as exercise is considered a “keystone habit,” which means

it leads to other positive habits and even more rewards.
“We know that developing an exercise habit sets off a chain reaction that changes

other patterns in their life,” Duhigg said, citing a study that found when a person
exercises, it changes their behaviour for the rest of the day: He or she eats healthier,
is 33% less likely to use a credit card, will procrastinate about 20% less at work, and
will start washing the dishes 18 minutes earlier than usual.
Media companies should work to identify keystone habits in readers’ lives to create a
chain reaction those customers are grateful for.
“In our industry, we should look at what rewards readers are giving themselves,”
Duhigg said. “When you study analytics on readers or customers, what kind of
content are they looking at? What are they doing with the Web site that isn’t
captured in your model? What rewards do they give each other?”
Even a negative emotion like anger is a reward that can create a news reading habit, but that is less
sustainable. Duhigg says news media companies need to offer positive emotional rewards.
Look for patterns that suggest habit formation. When you see a consistent return to
a reward, that lets them know it is a strong one.
“The New York Times, for instance, has a model where we look for people visiting
at least twice a week and looking at three different topics,” Duhigg said. “Once they
do that, we know it is someone primed to get them into a subscription. They are
developing a habit on their own and shopping for rewards.”

The most powerful rewards are not just transactional, but also emotional.
“When we design rewards for our customers, if we can’t identify the transactional
and the emotional reward, we haven’t thought through the entire value proposition.”
Articles that go viral and get shared most evoke a high arousal of positive or negative
emotion. Articles producing low arousal get shared less. Emotions are most powerful
when they are unexpected, and the most unexpected, high arousal emotion is anger.
“If we look at the last two years, the amount of anger in the news has boosted our
traffic,” Duhigg said, referencing coverage of U.S. President Donald Trump. “It is the
most high-arousal emotion on Earth and nobody expects they are going to enjoy it.
The trouble is the kind of arousal we most dislike when we can anticipate it is anger
— the emotion news usually causes. If you say to somebody ‘Would you like to be
angry?’ they will universally say no. Then they read something on Twitter that makes
them outraged, they will share it and read it again and again. We have to find other
emotional rewards to deliver something sustainable.”
News media’s historic emphasis on selling their products with an “eat your
vegetables mentality” — expecting people to buy because reading the news is “what’s
good for you” — lacks this emotional reward. Said Duhigg: “For the health of the
nation and the world, the vegetables are important. I am not saying we shouldn’t do
vegetables. But for the financial health of our organisations, the rewards are candy.
If we’re not taking the vegetables and dipping them in caramel, we’re making some
hard choices.” n

CHAPTER 2
Engage your
newsroom to
engage your
audience
The days of newsrooms ignoring audience engagement are over. Yet turning
journalists into audience experts is a challenge. More companies than ever are
educating their newsrooms about the importance of engagement and retention.
Three news media companies share how they are successfully engaging their
editors and journalists with what speaks to them: metrics, ego, journalism language,
and tools.
A. The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has invested deeply into educating journalists about
audience analytics, according to Karl Wells, general manager/WSJ membership. This
reflects the company’s universal goal and greater focus on reader engagement and
retention.
The universal goal started with the who, what, and where of its audience — centering
around measuring “active days,” according to Wells. When the team looked at
analytics of what causes/prevents churn, the number of active days a reader engages
with content was at the top. And it’s an easy-to-understand metric for newsrooms.
“Asking a journalist to help with churn does nothing. Asking a journalist to help get
more people to follow them in their app is something they can control,” Wells said.
Two projects came from this focus:
l Habit Project: Stolen from medical profession research looking at survival

rates of patients, the Habit Project is a model that looks at what onsite habits
make members stay longer. The project focuses on 16 different engagement
opportunities, each having countless line items for engagement actions like
Twitter shares, saving an article, or doing a puzzle, for example.
l Project Canvas: There are limited places to engage with subscribers —

especially those on the low-engagement list. Project Canvas is a focus on
increasing that real estate so more people “bump into” Wall Street Journal
content more often, Wells said.
Carla Zanoni explains how The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is training its journalists to understand audience
metrics and to think more about the “true lifecycle” of a WSJ member.
Carla Zanoni, WSJ’s editor/audience and analytics, spent six months traveling the
world, training every single reporter and editor working for the media company on
engagement metrics, audience metrics, and best practices/strategies.
“How do we [shift] from top-of-funnel acquisition focused to really thinking about

the true lifecycle of a Wall Street Journal member?” Zanoni asked. “Convincing a
newsroom of 1,200+ journalists that they should be thinking about these things in a
more nuanced way when they’re thinking about [deadlines is] a real challenge.”
To overcome this challenge, Zanoni focuses on three things:
1. Reach: How many people are you reaching at any given time? These people

were split into two buckets: current subscribers and people WSJ wanted as
subscribers.
2. Quality: After WSJ transitioned journalists from a focus on pageviews to a

focus on conversions, she worked on getting them excited about the quality
of those conversions. Are they readers who are going to return to WSJ
content? Are they bringing friends and family to WSJ?
3. Habit: When the habit is built, the cycle keeps going.
The editorial department must come to understand that engagement is not just a small
job handled by a single department in the company. It is a priority for journalists, too.
“[Journalists] want to make sure that people are actually reading their stories,” Zanoni
said. “When they understand time spent — that someone is only reading three
paragraphs and bouncing off — that wounds the ego. That is something we’ve really
driven home because it motives them.”
As a result of this new focus, average active days for digital-only members has
increased 3% year-over-year.
B. The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail also has worked to empower its journalists to better understand
and use engagement metrics.
Audience engagement is all about building relationships. And understanding those

relationships starts with data, according to Zen Habito, The Globe and Mail’s director/
loyalty and retention, which is why the company’s data science team built three
important tools:
l Sophi: A real-time dashboard available to the entire company shows how

articles are performing. Editors use Sophi to make decisions about content
and placement based on engagement. It also shows where readers are
coming from: social, Google, the Web site, and more. Clicking on an article
listed on Sophi allows journalists and others to see the number of visits, time
spent, and recirculation (did that article take you deeper into the site?), as well
as whether reading it generated a subscription.

l Delphi: Identifies high-value content before it’s published using machine
learning and natural language processing (NLP). Editorial teams are notified
in real time about this information through Slack. The newsroom uses this to
decide what content should be promoted with high homepage placement
and what content should be behind the paywall.
l Athena: A proprietary Web analytics platform measures and analyses

behaviour of The Globe and Mail’s digital audience across platforms, section
page, referrals, marketing campaign, and A/B testing.
Zen Habito, director/loyalty and retention for The Globe and Mail, says engagement is all about the
relationship.
Other engagement initiatives that have worked at The Globe and Mail include:
l E-mailing subscribers with the highest propensity to churn, which reduced

churn by 140%.
l E-mailing subscribers who haven’t logged in for 30 days, which reduced

churn by 27%.
l Creating a digital version of a formerly print-only lifestyle magazine on their

Web site, presented to subscribers who log in and visit lifestyle section. This
quadrupled downloads and reduced churn by 40%.

l Creating hub of member benefits for digital subscribers. Less than 1% of those
who use it churn.
C. USA Today Network
USA Today Network has been transitioning from a volume-based to a blended

subscription model — and its success hinges on newsrooms, according to Josh
Awtry, senior director for news strategy at USA Today Network: “As we’ve started to
pivot, local markets have really grown in importance. Our local newsrooms are really
becoming the prize.”
Five years ago, the company was training journalists about metrics based on the
volume model, and created a position called “audience analyst” in every newsroom.
While this increased awareness about how data can be useful to the newsroom, it was
only a first step.
More recently, USA Today Network has been building a series of tools, called
Pressbox, for communicating the data and its importance to journalists.
“It’s a report-focused view. It highlights [for an individual journalist] which stories they
wrote that performed below or above their average. We call it the ‘Fitbit for news,’”
Awtry explained.
With so many regional properties, USA Today Network faced an additional challenge
that different newsrooms were focused on different metrics. They revamped the
approach to training journalists in a way that would create more alignment and build
a bridge between the editorial and data teams.
“If you put a data team in the middle of a newsroom but they don’t speak the language
of journalism, they get eaten alive,” Awtry said. “To truly get journalists to understand
where we are going, it has to come directly out of a newsroom ethos. We went into
our newsrooms and we plucked the best digitally thinking, journalistically credible
people, and we … taught them to be analysts and statisticians. Then we put them back
in the markets and told them their job is content strategy. They could speak to editors
— they could sit down with the features team in Detroit or the entertainment team in
Phoenix and work with them regularly on what they were doing right.”
USA Today Network also created an internal campaign around a simple concept:

Josh Awtry, senior director for news strategy at USA Today Network, explains how the company put an
“audience analyst” in every newsroom.
“Stop doing things readers don’t want.” By examining the “bottom half” of content
that wasn’t performing well, they were able to determine that only 6% of the audience
was reading that content.
“We could eliminate half of our journalism and our traffic really wouldn’t change —
if we replaced it with nothing,” Awtry said. “What if we replaced that with content
readers really wanted? We knew early on we didn’t just want it to be about pageviews.
We decided to measure volume, engage time, and loyalty (return frequency), and we
created a lens by which we view successful journalism. Then we build some tools
around that.”
Pressbox provides newsrooms with easy-to-digest displays and measurable

intelligence so they can see what content is hitting marks. As a result, the company
is producing less content, which allows it to reallocate resources — while
simultaneously generating better metrics.
“We are publishing 2.7% less monthly while the article pageviews have gone up,”
Awtry said. “Pressbox is very exciting and will eventually be integrated into our
content creation engine, our content management system.”

The next step is to start holding newsrooms responsible for the number of readers
they can get to land on the offers page. Awtry thinks eventually newsrooms even will
feel more responsible for actual conversions, but getting there will be an evolutionary
process. n

CHAPTER 3
Engagement has
no magic metric
An engagement strategy that is effective for one media company does not
necessarily provide a blueprint for another. Every audience is unique — especially as
the news media industry further embraces personalisation.
From membership programmes to e-newsletters to building online communities

around content, many strategies are being utilised successfully. It’s really a question
of what resonates with your readers.
Advisor Matt Skibinski from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism has collected dozens
Advisor Matt Skibinski from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism shares the results of a benchmark study of
500+ news media companies worldwide.

of benchmarks, case studies, and best practices from 500+ news publishers. A
major challenge with any discussion of “engagement” is that it can be defined and
measured in so many different ways, he said.
For purposes of discussion, Skibinski defines engagement as “when readers find your
content, products, and brand valuable enough that they are willing to pay for it.”
Data can tell you what content will resonate with your most engaged readers,
Skibinski said, and “there is a pretty strong correlation” between which content
will drive a new subscription start and which content works to retain subscribers.
Benchmark data should be viewed as “a diagnosis rather than a prescription” when
comparing it against your own organisation, he added.
“Look at the health of your digital subscription business through these high-level
and important metrics, then look where you can set your goals,” he said. “Don’t
look at 25 metrics. Figure out where you need to focus and highlight that metric
everywhere. Put it in e-mails, talk about it in meetings. This will be different from
publisher to publisher. In many news organisations, there are so many numbers
floating around, nobody knows how to make decisions based on them.”
When asked what he believes publishers should focus on the most, Skibinski offered
this: “Every publisher should be looking at some version of the occasional reader
versus regular reader versus one-time reader breakdown over time. That’s where you
can see you’ve improved engagement in a way that is measurable by behaviour.”
A. Financial Times
Financial Times (FT) Head of Product Gadi Lahav agrees and sees the challenges with
metrics as two-fold:
1. You risk following the wrong metric. For example, the metric for Netflix is
total time spent. But what if your customer falls asleep on the couch while
watching a movie?
2. There are too many truths. What if your e-mail metrics show one truth and
your social media metrics show another?
Lahav advises news media companies to have a North Star when it comes to

Gadi Lahav, head of product at Financial Times, says news media companies need one guiding metric.
engagement: a single metric to guide it. FT’s North Star is a consumer engagement
score based on recency, frequency, and volume.
In an effort to provide the most relevant information to its audience, FT created

myFT, a Twitter-like feed for readers on their chosen topics — and engagement
increased 86%.
FT invests three times more in retention versus acquisition. The company spends a
lot of time looking at audience habits: devices, day, and time of reading, whether a
reader comes to the home page, what platform she uses.
Based on that information, the media company’s data science team puts readers into
clusters. Interestingly, what time of day a reader engages with content doesn’t really
indicate big differences in readers or their needs. But whether they are an app user or
a social media user is hugely important to know, Lahav said. “If they have a habit with
Facebook, they don’t really have a habit with us. They have a habit with Facebook, so
we need to push you into e-mail.”
B. The New York Times
The New York Times has relied heavily on e-mailed newsletters to keep audiences
engaged with great success.

Elisabeth Goodridge, editor/newsletters and messaging, has been leading the
newsletter initiative for the past two years. When she arrived, the Times had about
40 e-newsletters that had grown organically. She conducted an audit; analysed
competition; researched readers and the newsroom; established goals; identified
KPIs; and determined editorial, tech, and corporate needs to keep them successful.
Pop-up newsletters have proven a successful subset of this strategy. Examples

include pop-ups about “Game of Thrones” and “Summer in the City” aimed at
Millennials looking for summer activities in New York City.
Goodridge’s list of ingredients for a successful e-newsletter includes:
l Targeted audiences. For whom are you writing? Name them.
l An expert writer. Writers can’t just care about what they’re writing about —
they have to care about audience and product. “No one is going to open it if
you send a crappy subject head.”
l Clear, conversational voice. “That’s what people are expecting in their inbox:
chatty and conversational.”
Elisabeth Goodridge, editor/newsletters and messaging at The New York Times, started revamping the
company’s e-mailed newsletter strategy two years ago.

l Valuable, useful information. “It’s a very crowded place, your reader’s inbox.
Make sure the information is useful.”
l Delightful formats.
l Reader engagement tactics.
l Experimentation. Listening to reader feedback can help with this.
l Keeping a focus on your newsletter goals. Ask yourself, “Is it a brand builder
or an audience driver?”
C. The Atlantic
The Atlantic has built its engagement strategy around treating each customer like an
individual, according to Emilie Harkin, senior director for customer marketing and
growth. To support this, company recently launched its membership programme, The
Masthead, which includes exclusive content, ad-free Web browsing, and other perks.
“People are at the center of what we do,” Harkin said. “In a not-so-distant past in
media, we could think about audiences in terms of numbers: circulation, ratings,
rate base. We need to now think about people not as numbers. We need to put the
customer at the center of everything we do from the moment we meet and through
every interaction.”
Building customer relationships is not just about making business decisions, creating
new offers, and changing rates, Harkin said. It’s about how you treat your customers
and providing an excellent experience for them from the beginning.
Harkin identified specific ways The Atlantic accomplishes this:
l Don’t treat customers like they’re all one person. “View a customer as an
individual,” Harkin said. “It’s about creating a wonderful experience. What
are the moments that will make something truly special?” Media companies
should establish an environment where the customer service team can react
to individual feedback and tailor their response. A great interaction can turn
a customer into a brand ambassador — after a positive experience with your
brand, they may tweet and share it with the world.

l Help customers help themselves. There will always be customer service
problems. The Atlantic’s aim is to be: prompt, clear, empathetic, and never
blame the customer for the problem they are having. The Atlantic recently
built an online “knowledge base” tool for customers to search for answers to
common questions or problems. Customers also can up vote or down vote to
indicate whether an article was helpful. This feedback (83% up votes in early
days) is showing that most of the people find most of the content valuable.
Emilie Harkin, senior director for customer marketing and growth at The Atlantic, discusses engagement
tools like membership programmes and creating “surprise and delight” experiences for readers.
l Send them something they’re not expecting. Unexpected “surprise and

delight” experiences can bring value and depth to the relationship. Harkin
detailed two examples — one focused on the individual customer (sending
a custom-made outfit for the daughter of a reader after he wrote to say
he subscribes to expose his child to quality journalism) and another that
was bonus for loyal subscribers (a special Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. print
issue created for the newsstand recreated in digital format especially for
subscribers).
l Create micro-love, not micro-hate. This means reducing friction in as many

areas as possible: on pathways to purchase, changing account settings,
registration, and more.

l Don’t view the customer experience as a cost center. “It is not a drain on
resources. It is an investment that pays off,” Harkin said.
l View readers as collaborators. The Masthead from The Atlantic was co-
developed based on feedback from thousands of members. One year after
the launch, retention is hitting targets. “Before we launched this product, we
ran surveys and did a lot of intel,” Harkin said. “We spent time listening and
learning. We looked at e-mail engagement, site visitation, churn rates. We
also listened to benefits they would appreciate and we’ve added those.” n

CHAPTER 4
Lifetime value,
relevance are key
to retention
Any discussion of engagement leads to the topic of retention. In the current

competitive environment, there is little point engaging an audience without a plan to
keep them.
When news media companies share their most successful retention practices, a
common thread emerges: the customer experience. Publishers are realising they need
to adjust their scopes for a broader view of what that means. Rather than offering a
satisfying daily or weekly experience, there is an opportunity to provide a lifetime of
value and service over many years.
A. Times Newspapers Ltd.
Times Newspapers Ltd. in the United Kingdom, owned by News UK, has reduced digital
churn by 10% in 24 months and improved its save rate from 35% to about 50%. This was
accomplished by shifting the top-line focus to providing “lifetime service” for individual
customers over a 25- to 30-year period, according to Managing Director Chris Duncan.
“We looked at why people were leaving,” he said. “We weren’t delivering enough value
where people would pay when there was so much free content. In the UK market,
the BBC produces to a high quality standard, and 98% of our readers use it on a
weekly basis. We looked more at the psychology of our readers. They want to be well
informed, not just know facts. They want to be rounded and able to talk about a lot of
subjects. They told us they wanted to be confident they could repeat what they read in
The Times — so social currency.”
They also expressed a desire for information about where to travel and what to read.

The outcome of this examination was profound yet simple.
“We effectively retired from breaking news,” Duncan said. “Our readers didn’t really
value it. So why compete on something our customers didn’t value?”
The Times moved to publishing a few releases of highly valuable content each day
rather than constantly rewriting breaking news stories in an attempt to compete with
dozens of other news enterprises.
Looking at lifetime value of a customer means thinking about the first point of the
customer experience, which usually is before a subscription is secured — sometimes
years before.
Chris Duncan, managing director at Times Newspapers Ltd. in the United Kingdom, explained why his
company stopped covering breaking news and shifted its focus to what customers value more.
The Times began identifying potential subscribers and treating them like £10,000
lifetime value customers from the beginning. They created a registered access
programme (two free articles per week in exchange for an e-mail address) so they
could talk to those individuals. The surprise was this actually reduced churn.
“We thought it would go up when giving away a lot of free content. But with a hard
paywall, you bring people in with a one-month trial and then [they read the one story

they want to read], but they disappear,” Duncan said. “This allowed us to get rid of
those ‘one and done’ readers and removed them from our churn base.”
Habit delivers the highest return. New, young subscribers can become habitual
customers very quickly. This is another way to think about value, Duncan said. News
media companies sometimes maintain heavy emphasis on longtime subscribers and
“super fans,” but that can’t be the only focus.
B. Star Tribune
Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota, adopted a paid content model early on in 2012.
The news media company has had ups and downs since then, but in 2017, average
weekly digital-only starts increased 110% year-over-year, according to Louis Deering,
senior digital marketing manager.
At the same time, average weekly digital-only stops increased 46% and churn
increased 18%. This led to the question: “Do we have a retention problem? Depends
on how you define problem,” Deering said.
Louis Deering, senior digital marketing manager for Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota, talked about
the “lifetime value” of customers.

To re-evaluate its approach to retention, Star Tribune focused on three things:
1. Choosing the metric: Is churn the right metric to determine if retention

tactics are working?
2. Understanding why subscribers cancel: Look at subscriber feedback and

user data for answers.
3. Determining what tactics will bring the best ROI: Building new core
competencies takes time. Is retention really cheaper than new acquisition? “For
us, we weren’t sure that was necessarily going to be the case,” Deering said.
The company shifted the focus from churn and retention to understanding customer
lifetime value. Best practices in retention are still quite present in the strategy, and
retention opportunities were mapped out with a focus on ROI. It is just now put in the
context of lifetime value.
“If all you have is an acquisition hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Deering said.
“We need to broaden the retention toolkit.”
A first step was to revamp pricing, billing, and activation. Then Deering and his
team took a deep dive into retention offers. After a US$0.99-per-month sales, they
compared performance of three follow-up rate offers: US$9.99 per month, US$14.99,
and US$19.99. The results:
l Retention rate for the US$9.99 rate was 41% higher than the US$14.99 price.
l Lifetime value was highest for the US$14.99 price.
l The $19.99 offer had almost no difference in retention to US$14.99.
The team also tested quarterly billing versus monthly billing. The one-year retention
rate for quarterly billing was 28% higher than the monthly billing group — 39.4%
retention for quarterly versus 30.7% monthly.
C. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) developed its “Love the One You’re With”

customer journey initiative to improve the customer experience from the very first
interaction. During the past year, the focus has been on quality journalism to engage
and acquire, then “treating our subscribers like gold” to keep them, according to Kelli
Dakake, senior manager of consumer revenue
With customer service as the emphasis of the retention part of the journey, AJC
conducted a comprehensive audit of all customer touchpoints “making sure every
touchpoint has a consistent voice,” Dakake said.
Kelli Dakake, senior manager of consumer revenue for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), emphasised
the customer relationships and service as a key retention strategies.
AJC examined how every interaction impacts reader engagement and retention. Staff
looked at the importance of channel mix, relevance, frequency, and value.
They learned 70% of AJC subscribers were registered for digital access, but only half
were really engaged. After investing more resources, now 70% of those subscribers
are now actively engaged, according to Dakake.
Similar to The New York Times, AJC has embraced e-mailed newsletters as a key
piece of its engagement strategy: “The more they engage with and open newsletters,
the more likely they subscribe,” Dakake said, adding that the focus now is on
measuring the performance of each newsletter. The team started with 48, but
eliminated six that weren’t meeting the criteria for adding value.

In July 2018, the company also introduced AJC Hub, an online destination for
customers to manage subscriptions and preferences; engage with content, e-paper,
and newsletters; and find loyalty events, contests, deals, and discounts.
Coupons have long been successful for adding value for AJC print subscribers.
With the launch of AJC Hub, it became possible to offer this same value to digital
subscribers with more than 100 discounts ranging for car rentals, restaurants, and
other local businesses.
Loyalty events also have been a big focus, ranging from a partner event with a local
history museum to a luncheon for loyal subscribers to a TV station tour.
In addition, AJC revamped its pricing strategy to focus more on retaining the most
loyal subscribers with a big push to get more subscribers set up for autopay. A
surprising 45% of subscribers were still receiving printed bills.
To reduce stops, AJC established a white glove team for personalised attention. “We
have a live data feed that goes to this team to contact [the subscriber] immediately
after they stop,” Dakake explained. “Over the past year, we have contacted 42% of
stops and saved about 35% of them.”
D. Aftenposten
Aftenposten in Norway finds algorithms useful for identifying content that leads to
conversion and high engagement, which in turn supports the journalistic mission.
During the last 10 years, Aftenposten has flipped its business model from 70% of
revenue generated by advertising sales to 70% of revenue coming from subscriptions.
“Next year it will be 80%,” CEO and Editor-in-Chief Espen Egil Hansen said.
“Subscriptions are approaching an all-time high in Norway. Part of the story is decline
in advertising. The other part is growth in subscriptions. This strong growth period
comes with new challenges.”
News media companies must redefine relevance in this age of algorithms, Hansen said.
There once was a time when the newspaper was both the habit and the reward. “It was
all in one package. We are not in a monopoly situation anymore. There are so many
ways of getting information and using our time, so now relevance is really important.”

Aftenposten CEO and Editor-in-Chief Espen Egil Hansen explains how important relevance is to audience
habit.
Hansen believes the algorithm strategy needs to be owned by the newsroom.
Aftenposten uses an “editorially guided algorithm” that takes into account user
behaviour and preferences, but also is influenced by editorial staff deciding what
content is important. This helps to avoid filter bubbles or echo chambers.
Aftenposten also is building relevance and loyalty based on its journalistic tradition “in
a time when news institutions are being attacked all over the world,” Hansen said. As
a symbol of its commitment, the original newspaper logo from 1861 was at the center
of a recent redesign.
The addition of a new podcast is driving engagement and subscriptions with a new
audience, Hansen said: “After five weeks, it is incredibly popular, reaching younger
listeners — and 70% are already subscribers. They are well educated and female. It’s a
dream group. We are on the brink now of understanding that Aftenposten cannot be
about one channel. It’s about being who we are in different situations.”
Events are also a key part of Aftenposten’s engagement strategy. The company now
organises about 30 events per year, Hansen said. And the Aftenposten Jr. children’s
newspaper is proving a good engagement tool with 30,000 subscribers, mostly 7- to
12-year-olds.

E. Dagens Nyheter
Dagens Nyheter in Sweden is similarly fighting churn with quality journalism and data
— lots of data, according to Martin Jönsson, head of editorial development.
Total print newspaper subscriptions in Sweden fell by 11% in 2017. Yet during the past
four years, digital-only subscriptions have grown steadily, and in 2017, digital reader
revenue increased by 92%.
“People are more willing to pay for content now, whether it is journalism or music or
film,” Jönsson said, adding that there still is a fairly low threshold for the price people
are willing to pay, topping out around US$11, for these subscriptions. “Price increases
are a challenge we face.”
This has led the company to emphasise quality of digital products and improve their
offerings. Dagens Nyheter offers three main subscription levels:
l Base (about 60% of subscriptions are base level).
l Medium, which includes e-paper, crossword, and archive access.
Martin Jönsson, head of editorial development at Dagens Nyheter, explains how data and data tools are
helpful to digital subscription success.

l Bundles with other publications such as The New York Times, audiobooks,
and another local newspaper.
The company also has three kinds of paywalls:
l Metered model (three free articles per week), which represents 10% of all
conversions.
l Premium model (select content with two to three articles per day), which
represents 35% of conversions.
l Dashboard model, in which successful articles are put behind a paywall

after several hours once they meet certain indicators set in the algorithm (15
articles per day), which is 55% of all conversions.
Part of Dagens Nyheter’s success thus far has to do with involving the newsroom in
engagement and retention efforts. “Now we are agile and truly cross-functional, and
integrated with the newsroom to get them involved in the entire process,” Jönsson said.
Journalists receive reports for each article showing metrics that measure how
successful it is. Editors can see dashboards and top lists that track the most important
KPIs. Everyone in the organisation can see such measurements as total engagement
scores, pageviews, external traffic shares, and other data that helps to identify the
most successful and promising content.
The data collected has helped to predict churn by looking at such indicators as
methods of payment and how often or how long a reader spends on the page. Risky
segments receive extra communication and attention. This combination of efforts has
reduced churn to a record low level of 8.2%, Jönsson reports, and 1.5% churn among
longtime subscribers. n

CHAPTER 5
The role of paywalls

in audience
segmentation and
growth
Media companies can acquire more paying customers by lowering their meters
and segmenting readers in different ways, according to Grzegorz Piechota, INMA’s
researcher-in-residence and a senior researcher at Oxford University.
Piechota is studying the way people acquire and renew subscribers in 37 countries.
The availability of digital premium content is changing consumer behaviours, he said.
Throughout the 33 Western news markets, 32% of national news outlets charge
for online content. In areas of the world where Netflix and Spotify have significant
penetration, people are more willing to pay.
What convinces people to pay for content? According to Piechota’s research:
l 32%: Convenience.
l 23%: Good deal.
l 17%: Exclusivity of content.
l 16%: Paid-for content is better than free content.
l 13%: Desire to fund journalism.
A. Paywall options
The many paywall options — freemium/premium, metered, hard paywalls/membership

models, hybrid/dynamic models — serve as segmentation tools:
l Premium models (which 45% of news media companies use) filter out people
who have a particular interest.
l Metered models (11%) filter out heavy users, limiting content by the volume of
articles.
l Hard paywalls (8%) appeal to people who have a strong and trusting attitude
toward the brand.
l Hybrid (2%) and adaptive (1%) models mix it up, limiting access to free content
by demographic, behaviour, interest, and other factors.
Paywalls are becoming increasingly acceptable as readers understand they offer access to premium
content, research shows.
l Other models, such as paid access to e-replica (32%) and the donation/
membership model (1%), appeal to different types of readers.
News media companies go through phases of their subscription analytics:
l Passive reporting includes canned reports and generic dashboards.

l Proactive reporting includes customised reports and dashboards and business
KPI tracking.
l Predictive analytics include dynamic future scenario modeling (scoring

propensity to buy or churn) and future-oriented KPIs such as customer lifetime
value (CLV).
l Data-driven automation includes automated data-driven editorial and business

decision-making (recommendations, channels, offers, price), next-best actions
initiated automatically by machines based on set KPIs, and automated two-way
communication such as chat and voice bots.
“If you think about the future of these paywalls, maybe they will get more predictive
of their consumers. Then the automation system will choose the best option for these
people,” Piechota said.
Media companies need to be flexible with paywalls to effectively gain more digital
subscribers, according to Piechota: “Once you get early adopters, growth stops. You
need to appeal to more mainstream readers so you need to change your marketing
mix, maybe your products.”
Aftenposten in Norway tweaked its paywall to target new subscribers in 2013, switched
to a hybrid model in 2015, tightened its paywall and tweaked paywall articles in 2016,
then enjoyed the “Trump bump” in 2017. Team members found when they set the
paywall meter at 20 articles or more, 9% of visitors hit that limit. To grow, Aftenposten
needed to:
1. Lower the meter: Stop appealing to heavy users and start appealing to
medium users.
2. Change the way of segmenting people: Introduce premium articles or look

at demographics (such as young people or women, for example).
Aftenposten used a hybrid model of segmentation criteria, changing from targeting

heavy users to targeting those who have certain interests but are not necessarily heavy
users. By lowering the meter, it started appealing to those medium users.
The New York Times is another successful example. Their meter was at 10 articles in

2010. Since then, it has added new products and lowered the meter twice. It is now at
five articles. The global news company just reached 3 million digital subscribers.
“The niche of the readers who are interested in news is actually somewhat exhausted
for them, so they need to go after lifestyle customers to keep growing. New York
Times is perhaps going to disrupt magazines,” he said.
B. Nurturing buying habits
Piechota partnered with Cxense on a study to understand the propensity to buy. The
bottom line of that study: “People who are more likely to buy were viewing many more
pages and staying much longer on the page. People who don’t actually see many
articles are not likely to buy,” he said.
He also noted that “behavioural signals are more predictive than interest-based signals.
Statistically speaking, it’s easier to predict somebody will become a subscriber by
looking at how often they come to the site and how much they read rather than trying
to guess what stories they are going to be interested in.”
This is why personalisation is so important, Piechota said. Stories that might convert
INMA Researcher-in-Residence Grzegorz Piechota sits with a small group during an unconference session
at the end of the Summit discussing, customer value nurturing.

people may be different from the ones that actually keep subscribers. There is a
growing need for different shades of experience.
Working with Chartbeat, Piechota surveyed 500 people who had visited news media
Web sites in the past eight days: 250 were users of news media companies with
subscription models and 250 were users of companies that offered free content.
“Web sites that enjoy more direct visits to the home page also enjoy more loyal
patrons. Web sites that enjoy more traffic from social or search actually enjoy less loyal
patrons,” Piechota said. “It’s intentional use that drives purchase. People who come
to your Web site, they have an intent. … People who use other means to get to your
content — like social, aggregator apps, search engines [by topic] — are less likely to be
loyal, and therefore, less likely to become subscribers.”
Piechota identified three best practices for nurturing customers:
1. Acquisition: This includes notifications, alerts, newsletters, apps, podcasts,

encouraging comments, an option to save to read later, retargeting ads, and
adblock alerts.
2. Activation: This includes onboarding on site, in app, and in e-mails; pushing

users to log in, get apps, follow newsletters, and participate social; and
retargeting ads.
3. Retention: This includes community features, advocacy rewards, upsell offers,

win-back offers, and retargeted ads. Not many organisations are doing this,
Piechota said. n

CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
After two days, 12 case study presentations, two keynotes, a benchmark study, and
an engaged unconference session during the INMA Consumer Engagement Summit,
here’s what we see as the truths to guide the industry in the next year or two on
the topic:
l Engagement is king (sorry, content).
l Retention trumps acquisition, and investment in resources should mirror that.
l A North Star (pick what suits your company) must guide the company-wide
effort.
l Newsrooms are key to engagement efforts.
l Too many metrics spoil the soup.
l The lifetime relationship goes both ways: Readers need trusted content that
becomes a habit, and media companies need to focus on the lifetime value of
readers.
l Personalisation is everything.
l Don’t overthink your paywall.
l Do overthink your audience segmentation.

l Consumer revenue follows consumer engagement.
This is industry-, culture-, future-changing hard work. Those attending and

presenting at the summit showed they are up for the challenge. We believe the rest of
the industry is, too, and hope this report appropriately explains the urgency and the
journey ahead. n

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November 2018

Unpacking the Reader-

Unpacking the Reader-Subscriber-

Authors About the authors 3

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 2

Dawn McMullan is senior editor at INMA, based in Dallas, Texas,

Carly Price is a freelance writer and editor based in Austin, Texas,

Robert Whitehead is a board member of McPherson Media

About the International News Media Association (INMA)

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 3

Finishing up two days at the INMA Consumer Engagement Summit, fighting

The session was led by INMA Researcher-In-Residence Grzegorz Piechota, who

Participants brainstorm about how to create a community to encourage subscriber longevity.

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 4

1. Onboarding subscriber: E-mails must be more than transactional.

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 5

5. Rewarding loyalty: Dividing rewards into online and offline experiences.

6. Paywall models: Tech hurdles such as incognito search continue to be a

8. Newsletter best practices: Consider time-based newsletters (morning

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 6

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 7

This is what we know:

l Consumer engagement is the most important factor in consumer revenue

l The leading companies invest more in engagement than acquisition.

l It takes a whole-of-business mobilisation.

l It needs one clear goal.

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 8

l Personalisation and loyalty are fundamental to usage.

l The buck starts with editorial.

It’s a compelling story and worth stepping through the detail.

Robert Whitehead, co-moderator of the Summit, speaks to attendees in Miami.

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 9

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 10

Which brings us to the imperative of tracking higher quality engagement metrics to

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 11

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 12

l Demonstrate the value of the content.

l Loyalty and personalisation will drive usage.

l Usage will drive purchase.

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 13

Excellent customer service has to be an aspiration of the engagement plan.

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 14

Key to building engagement is understanding the power of habit, according to

Building engagement is about playing with the reward.

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 15

The same applies to news consumers.

Furthermore, a habit such as exercise is considered a “keystone habit,” which means

INMA | UNPACKING THE READER-SUBSCRIBER-LIFETIME CUSTOMER JOURNEY 16

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A. The Wall Street Journal

Two projects came from this focus:

l Habit Project: Stolen from medical profession research looking at survival

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l Project Canvas: There are limited places to engage with subscribers —

“How do we [shift] from top-of-funnel acquisition focused to really thinking about

To overcome this challenge, Zanoni focuses on three things:

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2. Quality: After WSJ transitioned journalists from a focus on pageviews to a

3. Habit: When the habit is built, the cycle keeps going.

B. The Globe and Mail

Audience engagement is all about building relationships. And understanding those

l Sophi: A real-time dashboard available to the entire company shows how

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