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Background
About The Post and Courier
Based in South Carolina, USA, The Post and Courier is the South’s oldest daily newspaper tracing its roots back to the 1800s. It is the flagship property of 11 news properties owned by The Evening Post Publishing Newspaper Group, including Aiken Standard, The Kingstree News, Georgetown Times, Moultrie News, Summerville Journal Scene, The Gazette, Berkeley Independent, Georgetown Times, The Star and Free Times.
About Fewcents
Fewcents provides low-friction, micro-access solutions for publishers. It brings users who would normally not subscribe, into the subscription funnel, by allowing them access to individual units of content. Users can choose to access content with money or consent to share their data.
The Challenge
Like many other digital publications, The Post and Courier saw that 99% of their users were not signing up for subscriptions. They were looking for innovative ways to accelerate their subscription base by converting a larger portion of the 99% into subscribers.
The Solution - Fewcents Micro-Access
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Fewcents allowed Post and Courier users, who were not subscribing, the option to pay for individual articles without any recurring commitment. The solution integrated easily with their existing subscription solution (Piano), making it quick to set up, and surface the pay-per-unit option based on certain rules to ensure no cannibalization. These rules included:
- not showing Fewcents on categories that had high subscription conversions like Food
- having a price high enough so that frequent users would find it cheaper to subscribe but low enough that users are willing to pay
- being more aggressive with Fewcents on low subscription conversion, non-US traffic
Fewcents’ data analytics was able to pinpoint conversions by content categories and articles, allowing the business team to adjust pricing, the editorial team to understand what content users are willing to pay for (and what they are not), and the marketing team to promote content that had high conversions.
Most importantly, the number of users registered through Fewcents gave Post and Courier many new user email addresses. By automatically feeding this data into Post and Courier’s CRM (Hubspot) via APIs, the marketing team could build custom marketing campaigns for different segments - e.g., those that had purchased individual content were given subscription offers.
The Results
- The Post and Courier was able to collect 3x more email addresses every month
- 4% of Fewcents users converted to subscriptions
- There was no material cannibalization detected
- Overall, users acquired via Fewcents have grown net new monthly subscriptions by 4.2%
- Quick integration with Subscription Solution
Learnings
- Constant experimentation based on Fewcents data improves performance
- Build different communication strategies for different segments of users enabled by Fewcents
- Involve cross-functional teams to make the best decisions for the business
