Funnel occasional users to habitual and paying loyalists

Launch a pop-up newsletter when you anticipate a swell in a brand-new audience to capitalize on unique news moments.

From favorite diners to long-shuttered dance clubs, readers of all ages love waxing about the way things used to be. Nostalgia is a beat that can work for any newsroom.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As a public media organization, don’t be satisfied by serving as a pass-through for PBS and NPR national programming. Expand your news reporting team and go beyond radio, creating a more robust website and digital app where people can access the latest news and information, as well as engage with your journalists.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As a digital news start-up, the Border Belt Independent partners with local newspapers to provide them with long-form stories at no cost. It helps grow our audience and provides them with in-depth reporting their readers expect.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Consider your readers not just as political junkies or sports nuts, but as multi-dimensional people who love politics and are enamored with baseball (or both). When you do that, you can open readers to a wide range of different coverage they didn’t know you had.

Here are 10 ideas to steal and adapt: From audience-focused initiatives to changing internal systems, these original case studies are the most-viewed in 2022 on BetterNews.org.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: To grow revenue, work within your means and do things you are passionate about. Hone in on your team’s skill sets and partner with third-party companies to monetize your content across platforms.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Reduce your subscriber churn by focusing on three key areas: grace period, credit card management and targeted customer communication.

To hold onto loyal readers, particularly those who read the print edition, encourage them to activate their digital access to your content including the eEdition, which often has more content than your print edition.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: If you want to maximize your digital subscription growth, you must have a focused plan on not only how to grow your subscriber base, but also how to retain and improve the engagement and loyalty of your current subscribers.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Refocus your community coverage to build trust and cultivate new, diverse audiences — growing subscriptions along the way.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Prioritize digital subscribers over page views, and provide subscriber-only stories on topics that are vital and unique to your community.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Newsday is driving digital subscriptions and engagement with targeted newsletters.

Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the KPCC-LAist newsroom has invited questions from its audience. Nearly 4,000 people have written in. More than half of them have opted into newsletters, and nearly all have received a personal answer. 

This research from the Lenfest Institute and The Shorenstein Center illustrates best practices in digital subscription, focusing on the finer points of applying funnel discipline and implementing tools like paywalls and pay meters. The result is a playbook full of tactics to adapt, regardless of a news organization’s size or familiarity with reader revenue.

These detailed case studies from Digital Content Next and the Lenfest Institute explore the finer points of successful metering and revenue-driving calls to action for Tribune Media, Slate, and The Guardian.

Gwen Vargo from API rounds up examples of well-converting offer pages to demonstrate how their design influences trust and encourages conversion. Design choices at this important stage in the funnel can make or break subscription rates.

This study by the Medill Center at Northwestern University re-centers the importance of local content in encouraging daily news consumption, which the massive data project shows is the most likely predictor of subscription and retention. As simple as it seems, this change represents a dramatic reorientation of the KPI’s for news organizations pivoting from ad-based to reader-supported models.

The first step in executing on audience funnel discipline is to learn what the funneling approach is and how each step in the audience funnel is defined in terms of actions and objectives.

Segmentation means dividing a broad group of your audience into sub-groups who have shared characteristics. Identifying the unique needs and interests of a different audience segment is enormously helpful to moving those segments through the funnel.

You must embrace a continuous cycle of test-and-learn. Here are steps you can take at each stage of a funnel to systematically move users to deeper levels of engagement.

Identify ways to seed/earn/increase revenue at each stage of the funnel, from the first stage to the last, while shaping/using different funnels for different purposes.

You must conduct well-designed experiments that help move users through the funnel.

Users can (and often do) skip stages of the funnel, move backward, or move through the funnel at various paces.