👋 Hello there! It's Tim at Blue Engine. Thanks for joining us for this third edition of a five-part series on subscriber/member retention. If you missed Parts 1 and 2, you can find them here. If you're just joining, welcome to Blue Engine's newsletter, The Boost 🚀.

In Part One, we shared a strategic framework for how to organize your work on subscriber or member retention. In Part Two, we walked through the first strategic pillar: Focusing on retention at the point of acquisition, before it’s too late.

Today, let’s dive into the second strategic pillar: Driving habit throughout the subscriber or member lifecycle.

Why focus on habit?

To oversimplify: People generally don’t like paying for things they don’t use. There’s certainly a case among a meaningful group of people to support journalism as a philanthropic cause – to shine light in dark places, to play the critical role we play in society – even if they never read/watch/listen to it. But, generally speaking, it’s pretty clear that frequency – how often a paying supporter connects with the journalism you create – is one of the best predictors of retention.

Another reason? Most of the actions you take to help subscribers build habit also helps non-subscriber engagement and loyalty, meaning your likelihood of acquiring new subs is significantly better. A win-win!

We often cite the fascinating work of Amy Jo Kim and “the player’s journey” to illustrate this point: A good game is habit-forming. It “doles out just the right amount of challenge and learning to keep the player engaged and on the edge of her ability. … It offers up skills to master, and rewards you with greater challenges and opportunities.” Would you rather subscribers view your site like checkers or chess?

Here are five ways you can make your news experience habit-forming to improve subscriber or member retention:

1) Understand virtuous behaviors

“Virtuous behaviors” are how we describe the actions and attitudes closely associated with your most-engaged and best-retaining subscribers or members. Look at usage data to identify the behaviors most associated with retention. Talk to and really understand your new subscribers (why did they subscribe? what are their expectations?), current subs (why do tenured subscribers continue to pay? what do they value most?) and former or lapsed subs (why did they cancel?what needs or expectations were not met?)

As an example: The New York Times’ churn model identified that the following behaviors are most correlated with retention for digital subscribers:

• Frequency (active days visited)
• Depth (article page views)
• Newsletter consumption (range and usage)
• Other product consumption (other parts of the bundle, like games)
• Breadth (range of content consumed)
• Visits to the home page

Of course, your data may be very different, and the first step is to determine what drives retention for your specific audiences. Also note: Are there particular “sticky” features for your site that drive out-sized habit, like obituaries, recipes, advice columns, message boards, puzzles?

2) Get onboarding right

Ever subscribed to a news product and … nothing happens? You have access, which is good, but that’s about it. This is a huge missed opportunity to start building habit right from the start, and yet it’s often a poorly designed or robotic and transactional experience. Particularly in the first 90-120 days, you’ll want to make sure you are thoughtfully educating your new supporter about your brand, your content, your services – essentially this is where you get to explain in more detail your organization’s reason for being. You should be accelerating her habit with your product. You should be deepening her relationship with your brand. You should make her feel welcomed and comfortable with her decision to support your work.

Most publishers experience a significant drop in subscribers during the first 90-120 days or so, and that’s often because they haven’t yet developed a habit or don’t get enough value from the product. Improving retention during this early tenure can push out long-term retention which increases customer lifetime value.

Good onboarding should accomplish a few things:

• It should be helpful. It should help new members address their needs quickly.
• It should be more laser, less shotgun. Don’t try to explain everything you offer in a single post-purchase email!
• It should reflect a distinct, relatable, and friendly voice. Most onboarding we see is stiff and arms-length; use onboarding to represent who you are as a brand and with your unique personality! (More on why it’s important to show gratitude in next week’s edition of The Boost 🚀.)
• And it should be omni-channel and coordinated. Just handling onboarding via post-purchase emails? That’s a great start! But starting the habit-building process immediately after confirmation on the site itself is the next place to turn. From there, build out a more coordinated approach, with lots of touchpoints.

Ready to level up? Ideally your onboarding should be tailored rather than one size fits all. Segmentation plays a key role here, where the onboarding experience may be very different depending on acquisition factors (winback vs. first-time sub, mobile vs. desktop purchase, etc.)

3) Prioritize content and features that build habit

Different stories, topics, formats, and authors can and should contribute to your audience goals in different ways. Some have broad appeal perfect for top-funnel/reach. Others are conversion magnets. But growing your suite of habit-driving content and features – those that prove to be an essential part of a member’s daily routine – is not easy. Three suggestions:

First, gather insights about the content subscribers/members care about most. There are lots of ways to do this, depending on your data gathering and analysis capabilities:

• Level 1: If you’re just getting started, gather member engagement insights through basic qualitative and quantitative research. In other words, go ask your members what content they find most interesting and valuable – then pair that feedback with what your site and newsletter analytics tools tell you about general engagement. Better yet is if you can use your analytics tools to evaluate what local and/or return users are engaging with as they can often serve as proxies for your paid supporters.
• Level 2: Next up, delve into engagement analytics tools such as Chartbeat and Parse.ly, focusing on filtering real-time and historical views to exclusively track subscriber engagement with content. These tools automate reporting and customization sparing your team hours of manual analysis and offering consistent insights.
• Level 3: Ready to get more advanced? Predictive analytics allow you to forecast subscriber engagement. By analyzing trends and applying statistical models (a great way to start getting comfortable with AI), teams can anticipate which content will resonate, guiding future editorial decisions. It transforms data into dynamic strategic planning, keeping content aligned with evolving subscriber interests.

Next, apply all those insights to how your reporting and features are produced, presented and promoted. When you hit on content that resonates, it’s worth digging into the why. Was it the compelling headline? The impactful visuals? The way it was shared across platforms? These learnings can inform how you approach future stories. If certain journalism consistently engages, consider whether investing more resources, like assigning additional reporters or launching dedicated newsletters, could amplify its impact.

Lastly, stop producing (or produce less of) the types of content that don’t serve your subscriber wants, needs or expectations. When content doesn’t seem to land with your audiences, it’s critical to question why. Is there room to tweak and test different presentation or promotion strategies? If adjustments still don’t move the needle, it might be a signal to shift your focus toward more impactful work.

4) Ensure the newsroom is the engine of habit

Underlining all of our habituation work is the “+1” concept. We encourage every team member – whether you're a journalist, marketer, product lead, or CEO – to ask “what can I do to get people to …

• come back to the site one more time?”
• read one more article?”
• open one more email?”
• listen to one more podcast?”
• etc.

We're turning to our newsroom to take the lead on this, focusing on a few key actions to encourage deeper engagement from our readers by:

• owning the mid-funnel and constantly running tests aimed at guiding audiences toward +1 behaviors;
• heavily and deliberately promoting sticky features to all audiences;
• utilizing subscriber engagement data and insights to plan coverage, prioritizing stories that subscribers care about most; and
• setting newsroom goals oriented around subscriber engagement.

5) Wake up sleepers

Sleepers (or if you prefer the more vivid term, ‘zombies’) are subscribers who are paying you but may not be aware they even have a subscription. This is, obviously, dangerous territory. For the parents in the club, you probably know it’s best not to wake a sleeping child (or, if this were a post-apocalyptic world, we would certainly advise you not to poke a zombie.) But doing nothing is also an unappealing option. What can you do?

• First, define what a sleeper or zombie means for your organization. What are the thresholds for inactivity?
• Look for signs that a subscriber or member is on her way to becoming disengaged and intervene.
• Target them as a segment with content, products, and features that will help bring them back.
• Re-onboard resurrected zombies and continually monitor for sleepiness.

Your Metric Moment

Subscriber Engagement Rate = the percentage of active subscribers who visit your site within a given timeframe (say, one month) is a helpful way to gauge your subs’ habits and the effectiveness of your recent content and audience tactics to engage them. Newsrooms should set goals for a Subscriber Engagement Rate that are in line with their publishing cadence. For example, those publishing daily may want to consider setting goals that set the threshold for healthy engagement at three visits or more per week (about 12 per month).

Coming Up

In Part Four, we’ll share some ways to think about how to continually improve – and articulate – the value of the subscription or membership. This does not necessarily mean lots of new things – but rather making sure your paying supporters are aware of all the great work you already provide, and thanking them for making it possible for you to do great journalism.

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