Monday 17th April: Personalised subscriber onboarding results in higher engagement

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Personalised subscriber onboarding results in higher engagement

Here's a nice practical start to your week. The Washington Post is underlining something I think every publisher knows, but maybe doesn't always act upon: retention begins the moment a consumer becomes a subscriber.

This report on the INMA digital subscriptions blog says that it is at the earliest stages of the customer journey that The Washington Post establishes its relationship with subscribers, going out of the way to make a positive first impression, improve the subscriber experience, reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value (CLV) . 

The article, written by the Post's Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Anjali Iyer, describes the move from a single welcome email in 2022 to an automated new-subscriber journey with defined success metrics. In just 12 weeks since launch, the new subscriber onboarding journey has resulted in a lift in retention and an increase in three-year CLV.

Spotify is shutting down Heardle

Spotify is closing down Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music guessing game it acquired last July for an undisclosed sum. Spotify's original goal was to boost music discovery - after users guessed the song, they could click a button to listen to the full track on Spotify. Techcrunch is wondering if the discovery play failed because too many users exited the game after playing. 

World’s first magazine written and designed by AI

So I just spent a full-on six weeks working on a 68-page magazine and I can imagine exactly how 136 pages done in five days by ChatGPT will read... a collection of soulless texts synthesized from the thoughts of a random collection of people writing across a variety of social media and web pages. Oh wait, that sounds exactly like some websites I know.

‘Being untactful comes naturally to me’

This is just a brilliant read. We don't often talk about the people in publishing, but this piece from Will Turvill at the Press Gazette captures perfectly the character behind those brilliant interviews. And for those of us that do interviews, it underscores beautifully the importance of background research when you're setting out to talk to anyone as formidable as Lynn Barber.

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