Reorient your funnel to build readers’ news habit
Mark Jacob, Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University,Northwestern University researchers found surprising trends in the relationship between reader behavior and subscriptions in 13 TB of data from The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Indianapolis Star.
News organizations must get their readers into a regular habit to keep them as digital subscribers. The study showed that frequency of consuming local news is the single biggest predictor of retaining subscribers—more than the number of stories read or the time spent reading them.
Readers came back day after day for differentiated local content, the work that only these news organizations can offer.
The tactical insights embedded in this expansive study offer news organizations ways to reorient their work to an audience-first, habit-building funnel. The section on personalized newsletters outlines ideas for serving targeted audiences with targeted content, like we outline in Table Stake #1 (also, see our section on email newsletters for more ideas about using these powerful tools).
Big picture-wise, this study suggests that organizing your funnel (see Table Stake #4) around building relationships with your audience, rather than page views or time on site, better aligns your overall strategy with increasing subscriptions and undercutting churn.