The Times and Sunday Times have added online subscription sharing as part of a range of tactics to improve customer loyalty.
The “bonus accounts” feature has been rolling out to premium Times and Sunday Times subscribers since mid-February, in a phased campaign to measure its impact on churn.
Head of subscriber engagement and retention Lisa Stevens said The Times had decided to “formalise” account sharing, given that a “not insignificant chunk” of subscribers were already sharing their digital access with friends and family.
“Of course there are reservations about risk,” Stevens said in a panel event at the PPA Festival, “but if people see value in sharing subscriptions then it’s worth allowing them to actually attribute the value to the product.”
She added: “We had this in beta for a long time to mitigate the risk [of subscriber cannibalisation], but so far the churn has been super low – less than 0.01%.
“And during the beta, we found that 76% of people who were using bonus accounts said they were more likely to stay.”
One of the major benefits to publishers of shared subscriptions is that they create a barrier to cancelling, and Stevens was open that “you’re less likely to cancel your subscription if you know that your partner or your children are also using and enjoying it.”
Extending the reach of The Times’ journalism to a wider potential audience is also part of the strategy. “We know that our price point is quite high in the market, and we’re competing against lots of other subscription services,” said Stevens. “So we think this is one of the ways we can get younger and more diverse audiences to subscribe to our product.”
Users who are invited to share a digital account get their own login, enabling The Times to personalise their experience of the product and better target them with relevant content and offers over time.
Digital subscribers for The Times, Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement totalled 629,000 as of 31 March (up 8% year on year), according to the latest accounts from parent company News Corp.
The Times uses tech developed by Le Monde, according to the French newsbrand’s chief executive Louis Dreyfus.
Speaking at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Poland two days earlier, Dreyfus explained why Le Monde had decided to stop subscribers sharing their accounts by blocking simultaneous access across multiple devices.
“A few years ago, we discovered that many of our subscribers were sharing their login and password with friends, and plenty of friends. Some of the subscribers happened to have more than 5,000 friends. And it was too much for us.
“So we created this application, and we interrupt your reading if one of your friends is within your login platform at the same time, and we manage to upsell the subscription to give you either a duo account or a family account.”
[Read more: Digital subscriber revenue will pay for entire Le Monde newsroom within two years]
The Le Monde tech was described as a “unique anti-fraud plug and play system built with the open-source Go language” that is able to handle “large subscriber bases and traffic peaks”. Aside from The Times, other clients include several French media brands and Handelsblatt in Germany.
‘Micro audiences’, puzzles and personalisation
Meanwhile Stevens said that The Times was overhauling its engagement model from one focused mainly on onboarding and early tenure (trying to get new subscribers to do things that make them stick) to one that is “relevant across the full life lifecycle”.
“We found there were some activities which we’d been promoting very heavily across our onboarding and retention programs – such as encouraging users to post comments – that weren’t as valuable as we previously considered.
“We’ve learned that it’s not the act of posting the comment, it’s the act of reading the comments that increases the time spent and the richness of the experience. That’s where the value is from a retention perspective,” said Stevens.
The Times’ data also shows that sharing articles improves retention rates in the first few weeks or months of a subscriber’s tenure, but then the benefit plateaus. “You’ve got people into that rhythm, that habit,” Stevens explained, “but then you need to know where to take them next.”
This is where personalisation comes in. “What we now do is think about someone’s organic interest or propensity to do something, then we lean into that and get them to do that as much as possible.”
The Times is one of many publishers now seeing puzzles as a way to create habits and loyalty. Stevens said three-quarters of subscribers are not currently puzzlers. “That’s a huge opportunity because we know that if we can get more people doing them for the first time, it’s going to have a positive impact.”
The Times has recently launched Quizle, its first new puzzle in ten years. It’s designed to be relatively quick and easy to play, in a bid “to target those [customers] who are not currently playing puzzles”.
Playing puzzles, and building streaks, are driving tangible retention results. “There’s actually a nine percentage point difference between someone playing puzzles once a week compared to someone playing puzzles two days consecutively within a week,” Stevens said.
“So we’ve used our data to work out which puzzles users enjoy, then we promote that puzzle to them again on their preferred channels at the right time of day.”
‘Writing for keeps’
Stevens also mentioned an initiative called “writing for keeps”, which aims to “provide the editorial team with data that looks at the cross-section between content that both creates acquisition and also retains audiences”.
The Times found that their article “Meet the queen of the trad wives“, which went viral on TikTok last year, and accompanying podcast had driven 3,000 sign-ups in a week. “But we also saw double the churn rate for that audience,” Stevens said, suggesting that there was a “misalignment” between the content and the core product.
This kind of realisation is leading to the creation of new “super verticals” focused on topics like parenting, which now has its own place in The Times’ navigation. “We’re now publishing a lot of articles in this space, and a large proportion are featuring in our top 50 articles each month,” Stevens said.
“We’re trying to shift to a longer-term strategy where we can work together [with editorial colleagues] to improve the content that we’re serving, the relevancy to our audience, and our reach to different cohorts, depending on who’s coming through the door.”
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