In an INMA Ideas blog, Göteborgs-Posten business manager Cecilia Ingman tells how a cross-functional team was created to look at retention opportunities, given that getting subscribers to stay longer is one of the main challenges.

“We want our customers to discover and engage with everything we have to offer so they will feel the value it adds to their lives is worth paying for,” she says.

The team focussed on sales, campaigns, content and communication and was able draw several conclusions about what worked including:

-increasing the relevancy and frequency of onboarding flows during the first 90 days;

-increasing the number of topic-specific editorial newsletters; and

-going from a reactive to a proactive campaign extension with a step-up product.

“While the first two points are fairly well-known and best practice, the success rate we saw with the latter was beyond our expectations,” she says.

The telemarketing team called site customers one month before their campaigns were due to end and offered them an upgrade to the e-paper product at an attractive price. “Because the e-paper is a more premium product, we managed to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) on these customers both in the short term and in the long term.

“Why,” she asks: “Because the customers also ended up churning at a lower rate than regular site customers.”

Another example of the initiatives was to create a churn calendar, highlighting periods when churn risk is known to be high, such as at the end of a big campaign, with extra initiatives in addition to automatic communication.

“We know that higher engagement means lower churn, but it also means our customers like our product,” she says. “Apart from reducing churn numbers, these initiatives also increased our NPS for the e-paper.

“So all in all, happier customers are staying longer and are increasing revenue for Stampen Media.”