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Simple ways to improve your subscription conversion rates

Last updated: September 26, 2024

A strong reader revenue model is your best insurance against platform changes, algorithmic shifts and advertising shortfalls. And it gives you a steady income base that you can use to fund the creativity your audience loves.

So you can’t afford to lose potential subscriptions to clunky payment processes, poor UX or mistargeted paywalls that decrease your conversion rates. Read on for subscription conversion tactics to guide your readers from paywall to purchase. 

Simple subscription conversion tactics for your media business 

Provide flexible payment options 

Payment technology is advancing quickly: 53% of Americans now use digital wallets (i.e., Google Pay, Apple Pay or Samsung Pay) more frequently than traditional payment methods, according to Capital One research.

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If you can’t accommodate these forms of payment, you risk losing revenue: Per the same research, 91% of Americans between 18 and 26 years old used digital wallets as their primary payment method for shopping in 2023. 

So look for a subscription management system that accommodates digital wallets and other payment formats directly within their platform. Give your audience more ways to pay, and it’ll pay off. 

Earn more subscription conversions by countering pre-purchase objections upfront 

Consumers have gotten more wary about getting locked into recurring payments — and proactively addressing those fears will help you net more subscriptions. Here’s how to do it:

Transparently communicate promotional offers and regular prices. Many media businesses use promotional offers to entice new audiences to subscribe, only to raise the price once the trial period ends. That might attract initial interest, but it doesn’t draw long-time subscribers, according to research from the University of Chicago: When a newspaper offered potential subscribers a discounted promotion that led to an automatic renewal at expiration, most consumers either avoided it or quickly canceled.

So if you’re offering a first-time or promo price, communicate the “typical” annual price, as well as the date the higher price takes effect. Make this clear in your ads and promotional collateral to minimize drop-offs.

Bonus: While you might get less interest upfront, this approach helps you identify your most interested audience and create different pricing tiers among your audience.

For instance, if 60% of your audience clicks away from your site after seeing your subscription price, consider creating a separate tier offering partial access for a reduced price. Or increase the value of your full subscription package by adding more subscriber-exclusive perks, like event access, job boards, courses, etc.

Don’t tie your promotional offers to auto-renewals: Readers who received an offer tying them into automatic renewal were 9 percent less likely to sign up for a subscription at any point during the two years following the promotion period, relative to those who’d been able to sign up obligation-free, per the same UChicago research.

Make clear that it’s easy to unsubscribe. Counter-intuitive? Maybe, but this alone can convince people who are on the fence to take the leap. 

Examine your current subscription conversion funnel to find improvement opportunities

Most likely, your subscribers find you through a combination of emails, paywalls and landing pages. One broken link anywhere in that chain means losing subscribers. So review your website analytics, paywall and email tools to see how effective each element is in guiding your audience to the intended action. 

Look for unexpected drop-offs between one stage and the next to find areas to improve. Start with: 

Website analytics tools: How much time does your audience spend on each page? If your subscription sign-up flow takes place over multiple pages, do you see significant drop-off between pages? Is the bounce rate for these pages higher than your average? (For context: Data from Siege Media suggests the average bounce rate is around 50%.) 

If that’s the case for you, simplify your menus or create separate landing pages for each offer.

Paywall measurement tools: Paywalls have a lot of moving parts — and all of them need to work in concert in order to drive subscriptions. So if you’re not getting enough reader revenue, look at your paywalls. 

Experiment with their copy, format or firing frequency: Our research has shown that even slight tweaks can have an outsize impact on clicks and conversions. For example, we’ve seen that standard modals (full-screen pop-ups) perform three times better when they appear daily v. every three hours.

Similarly, scroll-trigger pop-ups get significantly more clicks when they display every three hours on the bottom left corner of the page v. the top right.     

The best combination of frequency, position and format depends on your audience, though.

So choose a subscription management system that gives you some flexibility: On Omeda, you can display meters anywhere from one time only to every three hours — and they can appear as full-screen modals, scroll-trigger or exit intent pop-ups, or inline HTML injections. The more variables you can test, the more chances you have to earn new subscribers.

Email reporting tools: Your click and click-through rates tell you how many people are interacting with your emails. 

That’s useful, but it leaves other questions unanswered, like: Who is clicking each of the links in my message? Are these links performing better among specific audience segments, like regular website visitors, current subscribers or people with specific interests? Which CTAs are getting the most clicks? Are my emails and calls to action fully functional on every device and desktop?   

Dig deeper on how your emails are driving conversions. For instance, Omeda provides reports that lend context to those top-line conversion metrics, including:  

• URL click report: This tells you which recipients clicked on which links within your email. That’s especially helpful if you’re linking to multiple pages or products in your emails.  
• Opens by client and device: Make sure your emails are sufficiently optimized for different devices and screen sizes. 

Combine subscription conversion insights with direct audience feedback   

We’ve given you quantitative ways to discover what tactics yield conversions. But this just tells you what actions your audience is taking — not why they’re taking them. 

Unless you combine the numbers with actual feedback from your audience, you’re still not going to get as many conversions as you could otherwise. Seek out qualitative feedback on your user experience from customer feedback surveys, usability testing, and 1:1 feedback from your support and other customer-facing teams. 

Err on the side of under-monetizing your first encounters with audience members 

Consider giving new readers a few articles “free” before implementing a paywall — or targeting your paywalls only toward regular readers. This way, you can keep building trust with newer audiences without missing those that are ready to buy.

The right subscription management system makes this specificity possible: On Omeda, you can target meters toward custom-built audiences, like repeat visitors, non-subscribers, etc. And since Omeda has a native CDP, you can target those meters toward individual audience members using data you’ve collected from every channel. So you can rest assured that your paywalls are reaching the people most likely to click and subscribe. 

CTA: Struggling with siloed subscriber data, complicated workflows, or a clunky subscription conversion process? What if you could unify your subscriber data and use it to create better subscriber experiences with less effort? Discover how Omeda’s integrated Audience Data Platform helps teams like yours use their subscriber data to strengthen their media businesses.

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