Ensuring the best possible user experience is crucial to moving potential subscribers through your digital checkout line. Every step matters. Yet publishers often overlook — and undervalue — the registration and subscription pages they rely on to sign up these readers. That is a costly mistake. The importance of user-friendly registration and subscription pages should […]

While publishers should seize on the opportunities offered by email marketing, they should not view email — or any single approach — as the magic bullet to gaining subscribers. Wherever possible, news organizations should be using multiple touch points to connect with prospective subscribers, both on and offline. Email campaigns, while effective, rely on having […]

Nothing is more important to the brave new world of building subscriptions than the relatively old world of email. An email address gives publishers ways to target and connect with potential subscribers that are much more effective than metrics like “unique visitors,” a potentially misleading number due to the fact that the same person may […]

Revenue that comes directly from readers in the form of subscriptions, memberships, donations, events and more is crucial for the long-term sustainability of news organizations — especially those serving local communities. To help create that future, the American Press Institute maintains the Reader Revenue Toolkit — practical guides and resources to help publishers get started […]

Digital Paywall Converters are people who bought a digital subscription because they hit a limit of free stories they could read online and wanted unlimited access. Their willingness to subscribe is highly driven by seeing many interesting articles over time, as well as wanting to support local journalism. Demographically, they stand apart in many ways—Digital […]

Topic Hunters are highly interested in one or two certain subjects—such as local politics or local college or high school sports—and this interest was a major motivation for them to subscribe. They look around for the best news available on these topics. They tend to be well educated (three-quarters have a college degree) and are […]

The Locally Engaged are a group keenly interested in content about the community and its institutions, and they want to be engaged and informed locally. They say that access to local news is a major reason they wanted a subscription to the paper, and they closely follow news about local politics or their immediate town […]

Social Media-Mobile Discoverers are subscribers who engage with the newspaper and its journalists on social media and read the paper on mobile devices. They get news on a cell phone often and use social media often, and they also interact with the newspaper through news alerts, following it or its journalists on social media, or […]

Journalism Advocates are motivated by wanting to support journalism, and for many, their immediate trigger to subscribe was either a concern about verbal attacks on the press or a response to messaging about quality journalism. Many Journalism Advocates rated their paper as reliable, noted the paper’s accuracy, and cited concerns about accuracy of other sources. […]

Life Changers as a group decide to subscribe because of a transition in their own circumstances, not because of something the newspaper itself recently did. In many ways, this is a group publishers can take clear steps to identify. Many have just moved to the area, and they picked up their new local paper when […]