Digital publishers need to focus on engagement because doing so will help them monetize their audience.
To gradually increase ARPU, it is possible to incorporate soft conversion stages into the user experience.
The step that will generate the most money from reader revenue is maintaining engagement with current customers and working to increase their lifetime value, not turning a user into a subscriber at the end of the funnel.
The optimization of the conversion funnel is one of the main objectives of digital publishers, and it is covered in this article. In order to achieve this goal, new audiences must be attracted, and they must be led through the conversion funnel in order to turn into paying subscribers who bring in money for the publisher.
In order to navigate the user path towards subscription, Pool, the audience conversion specialists, and Qualifio, the data gathering and interactive marketing solution, collaborated. They provided pertinent engagement and conversion techniques to use at each stage of the process.
Striking a balance between a user's level of engagement and annoyance is necessary if high conversion rates are to be attained.
If your user becomes overly frustrated, which could be caused by a wall blocking content, they will leave and look for content elsewhere.
Even though it might increase engagement, leaving too much content up to user interpretation won't help you monetize your content.
Due to this, we developed the concept of an engagement funnel, which identifies the best points to convert your visitor into a willing lead, member, and ultimately subscriber over time.
Gather compliant consent while attracting audiences
In addition to encouraging visitors to stay on a website for longer, which reduces the number of visitors who leave the site right away and raises the likelihood that they will return frequently, the addition of interactive formats to a website also encourages audiences to visit the website in the first place.
For instance, interactive content was used by the NGroup of Belgian radio broadcasters during the Covid era, a time when radio's popularity as a whole was declining. The mission included both boosting traffic and gathering high-quality data to be used in creating a plan.
The NRJ quizzes centered on TF1's streaming of the Harry Potter series attracted a total of 675,000 participants (out of the 4 million French speaking Belgian potential participants).
The next step for you and every other publisher is to obtain compliant permission by using the CMP, assuming you have already been successful in attracting visitors to your website. If you want to be able to analyze data, track your marketing efforts, and monetize even the smallest amount from your customers, you must have this capability.
However, due to stricter regulations, fewer people are consenting to have their cookies used. For instance, the CNIL in France has mandated that a website's "reject cookies" option be on par with its "accept cookies" option. These data protection laws are unquestionably excellent for users' online privacy, but because they make it easier for users to reject cookies, digital publishers are unable to monetize the content they create.
Additionally, Apple and Chrome are phasing out the use of cookies, and the cost of ad inventory that doesn't use cookies is double what it is (or even not at all).
Therefore, to combat this issue, we suggest using a Cookie Wall with Alternative in addition to a CMP.
When attempting to access website content, users who choose "Decline" on the cookie banner will be presented with a "Cookie Wall with Alternative," which will explain the importance of cookies to the publisher's revenue model and give them two options for doing so:
Alternatively, you can assist our business without using cookies by either signing up for our newsletter or creating a free account (the publisher chooses this option)
Qualify and segment in step two to boost engagement
How can you start categorizing these audiences and creating audience segments at this point, even though users may have already given their consent?
The vast majority of Qualifio's users engage in micro interactions, which could take the form of straightforward arguments or question-and-answer sessions, to make the most of this stage.
In order to both increase engagement (decrease bounce rates, etc.) and learn more about the user, Volento, for instance, published an article about the election campaign with a quiz at the end of it. While the reader's opinion on the election was sought in the first question, the reader's age and gender were sought in the second and third questions, gathering crucial information that the publisher can use to guide their strategy. This is a wonderful example of how to balance engagement (providing value) and receiving value from the publisher.
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This information may be added to your DMP in order to further your audience segmentation, which will ultimately boost your advertising revenue through targeted advertising.
You might also want to consider employing some "soft conversion methods," such as a Newsletter Wall, to raise engagement levels even further.
As a result, visitors are unable to access the content and are instead prompted to subscribe to your newsletter in order to do so.
The next step is to make these people's identities public in order to sign them up as paying members, which will be great for your subscription and advertising business models.
De-anonymization, third step
You can incorporate a Registration Wall into your content that will block access and demand that visitors create an account on your website before allowing them to continue. By doing this, you'll be able to successfully turn a sizable portion of your users into members.
Because you can now target ads, your ad income rises as a result. Since users can access higher-quality content and you can customize the user experience, it also leads to a rise in engagement. The most important advantage of getting past the wall is that you can acquire a special reader ID and gradually collect first-party information as a member interacts with your website and the content you offer. When you offer the paywall at the right time and on the right content in the future, you will be able to use this knowledge to your advantage because you will have the chance to learn about their interests and the areas in which they find value in your content.
Qualifio might also present users with a form for creating an account that they must complete in order to participate in an interactive way. In the case of Vocento, interactive advertising produces 50% of single sign-on account creations; once more, the emphasis is on establishing a value exchange.
As a result of your efforts, the users have moved further down the funnel and are now registered members, which greatly increases their likelihood of becoming subscribers. The data from one of Poool's clients is shown above, and it highlights the notable improvement in conversion rates between members and anonymous visitors.
The best way to establish a dependable and consistent source of income is to convert these people into paying subscribers, so the moment to do it is now. This strategy is the most financially sound one for the publishing of digital content. In actuality, one subscription's average revenue per user (ARPU) equates to 20 members or 300 anonymous users.
You can successfully achieve this goal by integrating a paywall into an engaged member's experience. This barrier will impose access restrictions on the content and demand that users subscribe in order to unlock it.
However, you can't just put a paywall up on your website, disappear, and hope that it will always work to convert visitors into subscribers.
You must continuously make an effort to raise its performance.
A hybrid wall strategy might also be tried, much like EBRA did. In one case, they used a newsletter wall in addition to a paywall to reduce the risks related to a paywall. With this arrangement, people who were less engaged could subscribe to the newsletter instead of going through the wall.
However, the most accurate way to identify which paywall model is best for a given company's goals, content, and target audience is through A/B testing.
For instance, France Antilles tested the impact of their value proposition's length on click-through rate (CTR). They found that version B, the wall with a more concise value proposition, outperformed version A, the lengthy original value proposal, on average by a factor of five. Value Proposition Wall is the name given to Version B. And across the board, this was true for all categories of audiences and websites (3 in total).
Le Journal du Dimanche found that yellow performed better than grey when testing the colour of their paywall on mobile devices, which is why they now use this hue. In other words, yellow is more noticeable than grey, so it performs better.
Again, interactive content could be very helpful at this point to increase conversion rates, especially forms that are customized to the user's profile.
To keep subscribers for a long time, move on to
upsell and monetize.
The cherry on top is that you should continue to engage with subscribers in order to decrease the rate of customer churn and raise average revenue per subscriber through upselling.
For instance, Pierre & Vacances and ELLE collaborated to develop interactive content for ELLE's subscribers by posing the question, "What's your favourite kind of vacation? Using this information, Pierre & Vacances can tailor its marketing campaigns and provide visitors with the vacation that is most appropriate for them.
Above all else, it's critical to avoid falling into the mental trap of thinking that once a customer subscribes to the service, the sales funnel is finished. Engagement shouldn't be neglected after conversion because it is actually much more advantageous to you and much less expensive to keep an existing subscriber than it is to get a new one.