Know your audience. Now, more than ever before, that piece of advice is a key to success for publishers.
Audiences increasingly want personalized experiences when consuming media, and publishers that can provide such offerings see the best outcomes. For example, the return on marketing investment is up to eight times higher for personalized content, and sales are as much as 10% greater, according to the Harvard Business Review.
These statistics point to an immediate need for publishers to know more about their audiences. If you’re a publisher, more knowledge of who’s consuming which types of content — and how — helps you better cater to the readers, viewers, and listeners who are most likely to hit that subscribe button.
In this blog post, we’ll outline the four types of subscriber personalities that publishers need to know, and look at how data-driven tech can be used to identify them — and ultimately raise subscriptions and revenues.
The 4 main types of subscriber personalities
Subscribers can be categorized in countless ways, from location and age to income bracket and marital status. By looking at audience behavior, we can classify audiences into four main types of “subscriber personalities”:
1. Brand enthusiasts: These loyal subscribers are a main revenue driver. They pay 13% more than average customers to support their favorite brands. They’re also much more likely to make purchases when one of their favored brands recommends a product or service, which keeps a media company’s advertisers happy. Basically, they’re a boon for both the ad and subscription sides of a business.
2. Followers: Less loyal than brand enthusiasts, followers are nevertheless another valuable subscriber personality that media companies can’t afford to ignore. They frequently engage with your content. They’re already registered, and often they’ve made a small purchase in the past. For instance, perhaps they paid for single-day access to get behind a paywall for a specific piece of journalism. There’s a willingness to spend if publishers can nurture that connection.
3. Casual visitors: Unlike brand enthusiasts or followers, casual visitors typically haven’t purchased anything — yet. They do return to your website occasionally, and that should provide more than a glimmer of hope for publishers.
4. Surfers: These users have the lowest potential for conversion. That’s because they may only ever visit your website once. Someone they know could have shared a link to your website, or perhaps they arrived by accident. While it’s worth developing a strategy for surfers, this segment shouldn’t be a publisher’s main focus.
Technology’s role in leveraging subscriber personalities
Of course, publishers can only benefit from these subscriber personalities if they can identify them in the first place. That requires harnessing technology to take a data-informed approach.
With that in mind, here are three main functions that publishers’ subscription tech must be capable of today (and what each ideally entails):
1. Audience segmentation: The right tools let publishers group their audiences into different segments based on each user’s previous engagements, but that’s just the beginning. To maximize the value of these segments, publishers need a 360-degree view, including every user’s full history with the media organization’s content.
You should also be able to calculate how much different segments are worth to your organization so that you can target the biggest, most lucrative opportunities. We know that followers, for instance, offer the highest chance of conversion — at least with the right, data-informed offer.
2. Crafting custom offers: Naturally, segmenting is really the first step to delivering subscriptions and content that cater to specific subscriber personalities. This has become even more important with the rise of first-party data collection amid the death of third-party cookies.
Your subscription platform also needs to inform you of where your audience members are within nurturing loops, based on behaviors observed among a specific segment. That way, you can deploy new custom campaigns or offers when it looks like you’re losing engagement from certain users. Don’t let bad tech force you to wait for renewal time, when it may be too late.
3. Deploying and testing campaigns rapidly: Publishers need to be able to act on the fly. Whether it’s a change in the newscycle or an emerging trend among users, a personalized approach to subscriptions requires dynamic responses. “We’ve found the best way to achieve meaningful personalization is by systematically testing ideas with real customers, then rapidly iterating,” reads a Harvard Business Review article authored by several marketing experts.
“Until recently, however, the tools and capabilities to execute this operation — delivering truly relevant personalized offers and content to millions of customers and prospects, across channels, content formats and touchpoints — have not existed,” the article continues.
The lack of options available for publishers is what inspired us at Lineup to create Amplio, an innovative subscription management platform that enables fundamental audience segmentation, custom offer creation, and rapid deployment — and more.
Amplio helps publishers know their audience — and much more
With Amplio — developed by those from the publishing industry, for businesses in the publishing industry — audience segmentation, targeting, and campaign testing (in just a few clicks) are only the beginning. Here are three of its many powerful capabilities:
- Generating intelligent reports: Housing all kinds of valuable data, Amplio lets sales and marketing teams generate detailed reports on any subscription scenario.
- Enabling customer self-service: Amplio helps media companies lower subscription barriers via customer portals that display personalized content based on what the analytics suggest. Subscribers can easily sign up themselves, reducing subscription friction.
- Automating manual processes: Amplio can automate time-consuming tasks like data entry, saving publishers time and money and increasing data accuracy, too.
Knowing exactly who your audience is has become crucial for any media company that seriously wants to move forward into this digital era of making news. Taking maximum advantage of the capabilities offered by digital analytics is one very important tool at the disposal of the publisher.
