Making it easier for small publishers to bolster their subscriber base
By: Michael Schofield
Tags: Journalism, Nonprofit, Publishing, UX, Email Marketing

Intro

As an RJI institutional fellowship managed by Rebekah Monson, WhereBy.Us is partnering with the Institute for Non-Profit News and the Information Experience Lab at the University of Missouri to build-out an open source app that helps small publishers grow our subscriber lists. Our new UX developer lead, Michael Schofield, is overseeing the design and development phases of the project, and has written the following update to share what we’re learning from user testing prototypes and how that’s affecting what we’re making now.

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Why did we choose this problem?

In our research phase, we learned that many small publishers have a hard time gaining a large-enough initial cohort of meaningfully engaged users to monetize through membership, subscriptions, or donations. In order to begin converting to subscription or membership services, publishers need a significant user base and dataset to make that jump.

Just getting that initial traction is a hard challenge for many. We know, for instance, that email drip marketing has been super effective for membership-driven news orgs, but just getting started can be a pain. There are suites of premium services and an industry built around this, but we think the time, budget, and sometimes tech expertise required to benefit from these tools can strain the folks who most need them — and who can do the most good — in this space

Publishers we interviewed seem to be commonly engaged in starting or maintaining newsletters or email lists already, so this seemed like the best place to start to collaborate and help solve “top of funnel” acquisition and conversion problems.

An opt-in tool we haven’t named yet

We have started designing an opt-in app, an “opt-in” being a call-to-action to sign up for either a newsletter or join a site that are strategically positioned to — well — get folks to sign up. You’ve seen them before: These are those cards that slide-in or slide-up from the bottom right on the web, or that popup in your face just as you start reading content.

I’m making this super annoying example because while there are plenty of services who offer a variety of these, there’s definitely a right way to use them. We think there’s an opportunity to incorporate engagement and user experience metrics in a service like this to ensure news orgs have all the information they need to use opt-ins effectively.

We’re interested in opt-ins not as an end unto themselves, but because they can be a neat vector to help answer the pressing questions we, and many other small publishers, have:

How might we become smarter about newsletter subscriber acquisition for small-scale journalism publishers?

How might we serve those calls-to-action in the best places and at the best times to maximize return on investment?

How might we give publishers the ability to run their own experiments, like small-scale A/B tests on messaging, to maximize their return on investment?

WordPress and MailChimp Integration

Of the publishers we interviewed, most were already using WordPress and MailChimp to manage their site and email lists, respectively. For this project, we plan to build a tool that is as easy as possible to get up and running, so we’ve committed to building this out as a WordPress plugin that is ready to connect with MailChimp out of the box.

Initial Usability Testing

In working on a tool with the end-goal of making its users better informed through good data, we’re doing our best to walk the walk.

Our front-end engineer Al Delcy mocked-up a high-fidelity prototype and user flow summarizing our best-guesses for what early adopters might want and how their setup, onboarding, and use might look, which we then turned over to the Information Experience Lab for usability testing.