Ben Draper, Digital Marketing Manager, Shaw Media shared successes with growing digital subscriptions and improving subscriber retention.

1. 2018 LEAP Summit

2. Company Overview
• 450+ employees in 13 markets
• 10 daily newspapers
• 44 weekly newspapers
• 100+ specialty pubs/magazines
• 50+ websites
• 40+ events annually
• 13 million avg. monthly pageviews
• 2.3 million avg. monthly unique
visitors
• 133,000 paid subscribers
• 180,000 additional distribution
• Reaching millions of households
through print, digital and
broadcast

4. LEAP Markets

5. What I do for Shaw Media
Editorial dept. From 2003-2016
Moved to digital ad operations mid-2016
Moved to audience development in early 2017
Shifted to a focus on digital subscriptions almost exactly 1 year ago

6. Digital Subscriptions
SUCCESSES (YOY)
• 40% Revenue growth in 2018 (chart)
• 20% Unit growth YOY
• Email acquisition growth up 117%
CHALLENGES
• Retention(but looking better)
• Bandwidth & Testing

7. Challenge 1: Retention
Qs 1-2 2018 saw
5.6% more stops
than starts
So even though we were getting more starts than ever before, we
were losing others out the back door at a faster rate.

9. So far, here’s what’s worked:
• Fixed some billing issues
• Started telling our subscribers “we love you”
• Built actionable reports for editorial teams

10. Billing issues we addressed
I noticed an uptick in stops from expired or failed payments.
In May:
● We upped the grace period to 16 days, which allowed us to attempt to charge
the user up to 5 times before they were moved to cancelled.
● We tweaked our automated credit card expired emails to be more urgent in
nature.

11. Tell our subscribers “We love you.”
QUESTION:
Are we doing enough to show/tell our digital-only
subscribers we love them?
Probably not.
They don’t get the magazines, special sections, etc. directly like a print
subscriber would.

12. Tell our subscribers “We love you.”
I brainstormed a document of ways to say “We love you” and..
Started monthly subscriber-only newsletter
• First sent in June
• Goal: Promote subscriber engagement
• Give exclusive content/promote highly-engaging content
• Create trust
• Subscriber-only sweepstakes/giveaways
• Personalized

13. So far, the newsletter has seen averages of:
18.31% open rate
2% click thru rate
0.01% unsubscribes

14. Actionable reports
Every monday, we deliver an audience dashboard to our editorial
leaders.
The goal is to work with them regarding the types of content that is
converting the most.
• How many people have been on the site, and what stories had the
most engagement
• How many converted a digital subscription
• What article/category made them convert?
• What reporters converted the most?

15. Challenge 1: Retention
January-June, we had 5.6% more stops than starts.
YTD we’re now up 10% on new starts
Since July? Starts are up 50% to stops

16. Challenge 2: Bandwidth and Testing
Our goal for 2018 was simply to figure out what works and what doesn’t in an
effort to capture the low-hanging fruit.
We have recognized that there are a lot of opportunities for us, but need to pick
our spots.
Ultimately, we have had to build more of a
roadmap to continue our growth goals.

17. Challenge 2: Bandwidth and Testing
More testing we’re hoping to do before the end of 2018:
● Worked with Stephen and Danielle to create custom TGM segments in Active
Campaign
● Automated subscription offers for Newsletter signups
● More meter customization around audience
● Do more targeted social campaigns
○ From top-of-funnel to retargeting and reacquisition
● Active subscriber surveying
● Registration for free day of access (email collection | probably Q1 2019)

18. Success: Email acquisition
Through studying data from LEAP, Chartbeat and Google Analytics, we’ve found
that generally:
If a user comes from an editorial email they:
● average 87% more pages/session
● spend 76% more time on the site
And if we can get the user’s email address they are between 5.5x and 6x more
likely to subscribe
But only 3-4% of our traffic comes from emails we send.
(but this is growing!)

19. Success: Email acquisition
● Contests & Sweepstakes
○ Big (Best of) and small (Gift cards)
○ Targeted and non-targeted
○ To Print Subscribers (we don’t have emails
for all print subscribers)
● Athlete of the Week Voting
○ Moved from online poll on website to
contest in Second Street requiring email
● Editorial Newsletters
○ Daily updates/breaking
○ Exclusive-content newsletters (Ex: City
Government)
■ LEAP’s Tableau data was used to
help us focus what to do
● Future: Registration for free access
○ 20% more likely to subscribe, according to
Piano
What we’re doing to get more emails:

20. Ben Draper
bdraper@shawmedia.com
630-703-9201