Creating new value to attract digital subscribers and drive routine engagement.
Framing the barriers to digital engagement
The publishing industry continues to lose subscribers and routine engagement to alternative sources of news and information. This effort identified the barriers to routine use of digital subscription through in-depth journey interviews with current and former subscribers, and subscribers of others services. We qualitatively segmented respondents based on their unique barriers to subscription and routine engagement. The insight gained was leveraged to develop a ‘routine framework’ describing the unique reasons each segment does or does not subscribe and engage. Some of the reasons included a lack of triggers to the site, low relevance of content and price to value ratio. It was used to identify opportunities to increase subscription and engagement, while minimizing turnover.
Identifying solutions to drive subscription & engagement
Opportunities to increase subscription and engagement focused on fulfilling unmet subscriber needs. Starting from these needs, we engaged the target audience and internal stakeholders such as marketing, sales and product in a series of co-creation workshops to develop new concept offerings leveraging the assets of the organization. Concepts included content and services to help suburban families balance parenting and careers. By extending value through adjacent offerings, subscription would become relevant again.
Driving implementation of new offerings across functions
The publishing industry has traditionally been change averse. The organization first had to see why current strategies were not effective from a market centric perspective. The ‘routine framework’ was leveraged as a tool to change perspective across organizational functions and motivate leadership to pursue development of adjacent offerings. Service blueprints were then developed to help each function implement services they hadn’t previously delivered.
“Upstream was able to help us understand the way our audience sees our offering in a way that our data, analytics and existing research wasn’t quite able to capture. By understanding how our users come to visit us and what they really want from us, Upstream was able to help us develop a systematic approach to subscriber acquisition.”
- Vice President, Tribune Publishing