Monday 5th February: Want to keep subscribers? Make it easy to leave

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A new INMA report has found that many media companies have not developed the kind of cancellation process that is designed for retention. Author Robert Skrob even suggests that it’s a function that should be moved to the marketing department as an aspect of subscriber-retention, rather than being relegated to accounting or administration.

Common sense would dictate that making it harder to cancel would reduce the number of people who go through with it. But in reality, at the point someone has decided to cancel, obfuscating the process only leads to frustration and a determination never to come back.

Instead, cancellation processes can be an opportunity to upsell, downsell, communicate the benefits of a subscription, or point subscribers to things they might have missed. There are also plenty of opportunities to reengage, even in cancellation emails themselves. “Cancellation management is a critical piece of subscription growth,” concludes Michelle Manafy.

Seemingly learning from the looming legal troubles of some rivals, Apple is asking permission to use news content to train its version of GenAI - and offering hefty payments for doing so. Not everyone is welcoming the deals though, with many wary of past broken promises with tech giants, a lack of clarity around the products it will be developing, and expansive licensing terms.

We’ve included stories here of plenty of publishers blocking generative AI web crawlers. But Politico is going the opposite way and has actually given some of its websites a redesign which improves readability for LLM web crawlers. VP of product and design Max Leroy thinks that the newer versions of AI answer formats will increasingly cite different sources. “We want to be in those,” he notes, saying that publishers will move from SEO to AIO.

Some interesting nuggets in here which nicely tie into that first story about cancellation policies. Bloomberg’s digital subscription strategy is "prioritise valuable users, let go of those who do not want to stay, and make it simple to leave.” US startup Puck sends alerts when annual subscriptions are up for renewal to keep readers on-side. It’s all part of a longer term strategy of building trust and loyalty, even when people don’t want to pay you money any more.

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