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Target your free and premium subscribers in your newsletters so you can optimize your messaging based on audience type. Watch the webinar video on YouTubehttps://youtu.be/_s_Qze7nUuI
We discuss paywall strategies for content publishers. With over 1000 news, magazine, and content publishers running our Leaky Paywall platform we have learned quite a bit about what works (and doesn't) in digital publishing. Join Pete and Tyler for a deep dive that will help you grow your paid audience.
Welcome to the Paywall podcast where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more at leakypaywall.com where you can download leaky paywall for free. And now for today's episode.
Speaker 2:Today, we're gonna talk about how to easily offer a premium newsletter to your paid subscribers. And welcome to episode number 31 of the Paywall podcast. I'm here with Tyler Tyler Channel, and he's from Paywall Project. And we're gonna talk premium newsletters. Welcome, Tyler.
Speaker 3:Hello. Hello. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Okay. So when we were gonna record this, episode, we were going to discuss how to build a proper newsletter. It really dawned on me that, yes, you need a newsletter as a publisher to drive your visitors back to your website. But what you really need is the ability to target your readers in a nice way better. And you have 2 types of readers, essentially, right?
Speaker 2:You have, like, your free readers and that they're they're on your general newsletter, and you have your paid subscribers. So how do you deal with that? And this is the opportunity where you can provide, the right messaging to your free readers and the right messaging to your paid readers. Right? Now the problem is that if you have a newsletter like a one size fits all newsletter, you don't really have the ability to message in a really targeted way, which hurts your ability to convert paid subscribers.
Speaker 2:Right? And what I will say is that if you don't have a newsletter at all, and I talked to a publisher last week who just started paid subscriptions. They have 700, mixture of 700 free registered users and paid subscribers, and they haven't sent out one newsletter.
Speaker 3:Woah. Yeah. Yeah. The free registrations virtually, you know, why do it without without the newsletter?
Speaker 2:Right. And and to be fair, he was very well aware that
Speaker 3:he
Speaker 2:need to start doing it. But, yeah, I think he just needed to literally pick himself in the butt and say, okay, I need to start sending it out. Busy, you know, starting to to have some success with his publication. And, also, we talked about automation quite a bit, which we can talk about at the end as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Alright. So let me just let me just dive into this. So you have, we're gonna assume that you have a newsletter, and it's going out to all your readers regardless. What I'm gonna suggest here is you start you split it. And you this this is so easy to do.
Speaker 2:You can totally automate it, and you absolutely need to do it because you can speak more clearly to your free registered readers and your your your your casual readers. And you can speak very clearly to your paid subscribers. And we're gonna call that a premium, newsletter or paid newsletter. And the paid newsletter trend is always worked. And with the advent of sub stack and others, the paid newsletter world is really exploding at creators are and content producers are seeing that readers are willing to pay just for a paid newsletter, you know, that has has that information.
Speaker 2:And why? Well, because the newsletter is a package of helpful information that gets delivered to you. You don't have to go anywhere, right? It's just that package. And, and it works.
Speaker 2:And it's worked forever in paper and print, and now in digital. So as a publisher, content publisher, you need to have and I'm gonna argue that you need to have a paid newsletter. And you can take your free newsletter that you have now and very, very easily with just a couple of tweaks, make it your paid and premium newsletter. And the benefit you get is, yes, you get to speak to the free crowd better and you get to speak to your paid crowd better. But you also end up with a paid product essentially.
Speaker 2:Right? So when you're encouraging your readers to upgrade to pay, essentially, not only they're gonna get, you know, let's say, full access to your great content, but they're gonna get your premium newsletter as well. So they don't just get their free newsletter. They get the premium newsletter. That sounds pretty good, I think.
Speaker 2:Or call me crazy.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yep. And the messaging part of it, being able to, you know, send different offerings through the free newsletter.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Even different content than the paid, obviously. Mhmm. It's not premium. Maybe it's whatever it is. So there's not to go too far down a rabbit hole, but I there's a newsletter that I follow that sends houses, that are for sale that are under a $100,000, and they're like old mansions in the US.
Speaker 3:So they're like, a lot of them are in upstate New York, in the middle of of these small towns, and, and it's something you have to pay for. Could I go on Zillow and find it? Yeah. But it would be a nightmare to go through and sift through all that. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And they just send it to my inbox, and it's there.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah. It nobody wants to spend the time to comb through anything.
Speaker 3:That's right. I want it to be curated. I want someone to have spent the time on it to save me time on having to go scour the web. And quite frankly, I'm not gonna buy a house, hopefully not, in the middle of nowhere, America. But I like I like I like to see them.
Speaker 3:I'm interested in in this list. Yeah. For sure. For
Speaker 2:sure. And I I will say that your your comment about you can offer different content to, you know, your paid subscribers versus free absolutely is a strategy. But I I'm also gonna suggest that you don't even have to do that. Yeah. But there's just a couple of tweaks to make.
Speaker 2:Maybe one tweak, and that's it. So let's break this down. Let's talk about what your free newsletter looks like. And then after that, let's talk about what your paid newsletter look looks like. So right now, you have one newsletter.
Speaker 2:Goes to everybody. Right? Your free newsletter should essentially be the excerpt of your articles and the link to your article. So you have your title, you have your excerpt, and a link. Right?
Speaker 2:That takes the reader back to your website to read the article. And, of course, the strategy here is you wanna send this you wanna collect as many free registrations, which we won't talk about in this episode, even though we talk about it in every episode. Drive people back to your website, chew up their free allotment, trigger the upgrade to pay message to subscribe. Right? So you have your your free newsletter has your, excerpts.
Speaker 2:And then very critically, let's say using Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor or some other email tool is you wanna make sure that when somebody registers for free, or, just just gets added to your newsletter, that the that person is tagged as free on your let's say your Mailchimp list or whatever list you're using, and that's critical. So this is how you start segmenting, the free newsletter. So you know who to send the free newsletter to. That person has to be tagged as free. And just as an aside, like with with leaky paywall, we mirror tag.
Speaker 2:We, you know, we do tag mirroring. So, if someone registers for free, they're tagged as free. As soon as that person pays, the tag changes to paid. So you when you're automating your newsletter, you know the right newsletter is going to the right type of person. Right?
Speaker 2:Free is going to free. Pay is going to pay. Now so you get that free tag. So that's critical. Got it.
Speaker 2:You have to that's how you target. Right? The second thing you wanna do is you want to do what like, I have this newsletter up on my screen now, which is from Small Boats, and I'm on their free list. And I get I get their nice newsletter, and you can see that there's some messaging on here. Join today and receive unlimited access to them.
Speaker 2:Right? So they're messaging me as a free registered reader that I need I I should upgrade. Right? And they can do that because I'm tagged as free on their list. So on your free news on your your free newsletter, you have a section which promotes your paid subscription.
Speaker 2:Newsletter only goes to free. That promotions they're seeing it every time. Right? So if it's a daily newsletter, weekly newsletter, every time you send that newsletter, you're seeing all your great content, and they're seeing that message to upgrade to get full access. Right?
Speaker 2:So that this is how your free newsletter is is coming together. And then and then another thing, I don't know if it's the last thing, but, you probably have some ads, and those ads can go into the free newsletter. Maybe it's all your ads. Maybe you have a sponsor. You wanna be clever about it and find a sponsor for your free registration, which, we talk about a little bit, which I I think, you could put a nice package together for a publisher where they could get their branding on the actual free registration form on your website, as well as their branding into the newsletter that goes out to free, the free subscribers.
Speaker 2:Now if you're doing that, we have a publisher in Australia that does that. But, if you're doing that, I'd love to know about it. Something I don't see very often, but it works for them in Australia. Okay. Did I miss anything on the free, like, the free newsletter construction?
Speaker 3:I don't think so. I will say I had I had one publisher that I worked with, that had, like, a local bank sponsor their free registration. Oh. Yeah. And it worked quite well.
Speaker 3:They actually I believe they named the plan after the bank or whatever. So, like, whatever hometown bank, subscription level, kind of a brought to you by kind of thing, and it worked quite well. People people responded to it, and they, you know, got to see the the sponsors, messaging. And, and then, I don't know if they actually advertised inside the newsletter or not, but, it's quite it was quite clever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's great. That's great. Yeah. I I think it would make sense.
Speaker 2:You could do it for a period of time. You know? Yep. Whatever whatever your however long your sponsorship runs for.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay. So that's your free newsletter excerpts. Make sure that all those folks that sign up for free are tagged as free so you can target them. Make sure you have a section that promotes your paid subscriptions and then maybe have a sponsor for your free. Okay.
Speaker 2:So that breaks down the free newsletter. Now let's talk about your paid or premium newsletter. This is gonna be your new yes. So most publishers we work with, when when I go to their sign up pages, you know, they they they give you a few benefits. Hey, get full access.
Speaker 2:Hey, get our newsletter. Well, this is gonna add some value to your paid subscription where you're gonna be able to promote your premium newsletter. So get full access and get our premium newsletter only for paid subscribers. Right? I think that sounds more compelling to me.
Speaker 2:I don't know what you think, Tyler.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yep. I like it.
Speaker 2:So as a, you know, as a paid subscriber, it's like another thing of value that I'm gonna get. And we as we have seen from print to digital, we as humans love good packaged products like newsletters. So there's value there. Okay. So, I'm gonna break down some ideas for how you can, again, quickly, easily create a paid newsletter.
Speaker 2:Copy your free newsletter. Remove your your your messaging to upgrade because this is going only to paid already upgraded readers. Right?
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:When somebody pays for this when somebody pays for your subscription, make sure you send the paid tag into Mailchimp or your whatever email service you're using. And, with Zapier and with our Mailchimp integration, super easy to do. So somebody goes from free. They change to paid. Now you know that the paid newsletter is going to anybody who's tagged everyone who's tagged paid.
Speaker 2:And now your messaging could be specific to your paid subscriber. Okay. In no particular order, here are a couple ideas, that I've seen in the past that work. One is maybe you want to offer the convenience of having a full text newsletter for your readers. So, remember, I know I politics does this where part of their benefit of subscribing is you get a full text newsletter instead of just excerpts.
Speaker 2:So the feedback they got was, hey, you know, our readers want the morning news. I think they send it out at 6 or something like that. They're getting ready in the morning. They're, you know, brushing their teeth, whatever. And they wanna be able to, you know, basically have their phone, like, on the counter and just start, like, read the full article instead of having to, like, click and log in.
Speaker 2:Right? And then you can do so you can do that with this setup because, you know, only a paid subscriber gets the full text. Right? You don't need to send folks back to your website if they're already paying, but you may want to give them the experience of the full convenience of the full article.
Speaker 3:That's super clever too. You cut down on the password, you know, having to log in and people complaining about not remembering their passwords and then messaging your support team. And so, yeah, that's that's super cool, actually.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just
Speaker 3:give it just give it to them in the email. Just stop all this nonsense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Easy to do. You just just set up your email service to to display the whole article if you're gonna automate it or when you're producing your email and just drop in the full text. Time is another one. So early delivery.
Speaker 2:I know that I politics, gets these premium emails out at 6 or some very early time. And and then the free, registered users, free newsletter subscribers to get the news later. So time can be a a very simple and you can schedule. If you're automating, you can schedule when your newsletter goes out. Easy to do.
Speaker 3:And for you traditional print publishers who still have the the edition or epaper or whatever you you call it, You know, typically, you're you're finished with that a day before it's sent out in print. Send it out early. Send it a day early to these people Yeah. That are on your paid plan, and on your paid newsletter in this case. Yeah.
Speaker 3:People will will really appreciate that, and they'll see a lot of value in that being able to essentially see what the newspaper looks before it comes out.
Speaker 2:I like that a lot. Special value. That's good. I like that. I'll just keep going here.
Speaker 2:Make sure there's no messaging to subscribe. I mentioned that before. But you you do have the opportunity to message to upgrade if you have another upgrade path for your paid subscriber maybe it's a different product a special product maybe it's maybe it's other products that you would buy you could do that or our favorite is donation. If you have a publication that's very mission based and you you you do take donations then your your paid subscribers are really your your best target for having them donate and you know this might be like a donation campaign you run for a month or whatever. Just have it there for a month but you you now you know you're dealing with paid subscribers.
Speaker 2:It's easy to just insert donation messaging.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And if you're doing that, you can, obviously, you can use leaky paywall to do that, but a very effective way to to get people to donate, and it's super simple without any kind of logging in or anything like that. Our our Stripe, payment links, super easy
Speaker 2:to create.
Speaker 3:Create a button linked to it, and, it works. People will do it. They can change the amount that they wanna give you. If they wanna, if they don't wanna give you $25, they wanna give you 500, they could type it in and and then off they go. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a great idea. Do you happen to have a website with an example of that?
Speaker 3:I sure do. One second. Let me send you a link.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's let's take a look. And what this means is Stripe payment links essentially just a singular purchase through your existing Stripe account. So you don't really need to set up anything except for the payment payment links. Okay.
Speaker 2:So here, pulling up the Salem reporter and okay.
Speaker 3:That's gotta go away, but that's the the pico vortex.
Speaker 2:Yes. You're, you're I know you're migrating. Okay. So here's some buttons. 50, 100, 250, 500.
Speaker 2:Okay. So if I click on 50, I go straight to the Stripe checkout, and it's a nice simple form I just pay
Speaker 3:and and off
Speaker 2:I go.
Speaker 3:And every option, they have the the option to change the amount. So if, like, $50 is not what I wanna give. I wanna give, like, a random amount or or even more than what's preset for me, you can do that in here. And it's super simple. No logging in.
Speaker 3:It doesn't mess with their current subscription system Right. Inside of leaky paywall. Yep. And it works. In in the case of Salem Reporter, they were after some documents, from the city, and it was I believe it was, like, $4,000.
Speaker 3:They put out a campaign, and they exceeded that campaign, like, fairly quickly. And this was how they did it with with these payment links. It it just worked. It worked, better than than PECO's, system. So
Speaker 2:That's great. So they they they're doing some reporting. They had a need to raise money to to finish their reporting and execute. It's important to the community. That's right.
Speaker 2:You said, you know what? We need you to look at this this, you know, bad behavior in town. So here's some money to do that, and it worked.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And they had they they had a call to action and a newsletter, you know, letting people know about the situation. Mhmm. I don't know I don't know if it was the cost of the FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, or or what it was. But but whatever it was, it costs $4,000 for them to obtain the the documents that they were after, and the public had interest, and they exceeded that $4,000, amount quite quickly.
Speaker 2:So Fantastic. Yeah. Yep. That's great. Yep.
Speaker 2:Stripe payment links. Easy easy
Speaker 3:Clever clever easy way to to Yeah. To get funds Yep. Directly
Speaker 2:into Stripe. Yep. And if you wanted to if this is if this is a very regular thing for you and you wanna make the donation level, sort of permanent in leaky paywall, you can do that. You just create a new subscription plan, call it donations. You can you can even select a range, like, you know, from low to high, how much to donate, and then assign access on that donation level.
Speaker 2:So you can keep it all in leaky paywall if you wanted to. Yep. Kinda depends on your application.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Cool. Alright. So I think that's, what I have as far as the free news structure, and the paid news structure. So, it's really easy to to essentially, you know, clone your existing newsletter, change the language for the free subscribers, change the language for the paid subscribers, and you get you get a you have a create a better experience for both sides. Right?
Speaker 2:You know, the the the free readers, you know, they get the newsletter, they get, the messaging to upgrade, they get maybe the right sponsorship on there. And then the paid subscribers, maybe it's full text, maybe it's an early, delivery of the newsletter. Maybe it's a special sponsor. You can you can target them for donations, and it's everyone wins in this. And you get yourself a you get yourself a premium newsletter to promote as part of your subscriber benefit, which I think is a huge plus.
Speaker 2:If I were running a publication, then that's that's what I would do. So I guess I'll go tell Dan at T Journey to do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And for those of you listening who haven't really played around with your newsletter, maybe you don't send the newsletter, maybe you don't have time for a newsletter, set up RSS, automated sending through, Mailchimp. You know, maybe it's not the prettiest newsletter in the world, but at least you're sending it out. People are getting the information. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And you're you're you're you're moving forward with that. And, you know, maybe down the road when you do have time, if you ever do have time, you can start customizing it a bit more, with with what Pete's talked about here.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. And and regardless of how much customization you do, you can absolutely target the free with with the right messaging and your paid list with the right messaging. So you set up 2 RSS email campaigns, one one that targets your tag free, one that targets your tag paid, and then you have your appropriate messaging on on each newsletter fully automated. You know?
Speaker 2:You know, I think you can lift a finger.
Speaker 3:I think every podcast for me, it comes back to just do something. You know? Move the ball forward Right. Regardless of whether you do all of these things, which you should. Right.
Speaker 3:Just getting the ball rolling will will will get you there. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Start start with your free and create a create a, a a paid. It's once you once once it's done, it's done. It's it's really very little extra workflow to send both of those messages out. And leaky paywall keeps it totally totally clean with with tagging too. So you know that your readers are getting the right the right messaging for your free newsletter and your paid newsletter.
Speaker 2:Okay. Awesome. Alright. Let's go to work with those newsletters. And, Tyler, thanks again.
Speaker 2:We'll catch you next time.
Speaker 3:Alright. See you guys later.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription strategy, go to leakypaywall.com. See you next time.