Over the past one year, we at Times Internet have been building a premium content subscription product - TOI+. Paying subscribers get access to exclusive stories, helping them build a nuanced and deeper understanding across a range of topics. Additionally, users get a cleaner reading experience devoid of ads. Readers can either pay for a single article or buy a 1 year subscription. We have spent the past year introducing TOI+ across multiple platforms and geographies, ensuring a clean user funnel. This has truly been a 0-1 experience, where I have personally learned a lot. In this post, I’ll talk about some of my major learning from building a B2C content subscription product.
Content is King
As Bill Gates wrote in his famous essay in 1996, “If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will.” While computers have become ubiquitous in today’s age, users (especially in value conscious markets such as India) are still sceptical when it comes to paying for annual subscriptions. It is this ‘deep’ and engaging information that convinces them and acts as the most important value proposition. Our data clearly backs this up, with more than 50% of our paid subscriptions coming directly from story paywalls. This insight has further informed our product and marketing decisions.
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Marketing: We display our best stories prominently across TOI and marketing channels.
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Product: We have made our story page for non-subscribers richer, by including additional information in the form of persuasion cards and bundles of associated stories which help contextualize the news better. Check out a sample article here
Further, since most of our users land on stories through headlines and thumbnails, they are a very important part of our stories. We have noticed a common pattern on which headlines lead to more clicks - curiosity inducing ones as compared to statement led ones. Making headlines interesting has led to higher CTRs on story headlines present in marketing campaigns/widgets, leading to higher subscriptions down the funnel.
Further, since most of our users land on stories through headlines and thumbnails, they are a very important part of our stories. We have noticed a common pattern on which headlines lead to more clicks - curiosity inducing ones as compared to statement led ones. Making headlines interesting has led to higher CTRs on story headlines present in marketing campaigns/widgets, leading to higher subscriptions down the funnel.
User experience matters
This point cannot be stressed enough. Of all the benefits that a TOI+ subscription provides to its users, providing an ad-free environment has been deemed as the most valuable by many of our readers. Having a friction-free user funnel helps increase conversion. Clear entry points, guided navigation, and succinct articulation of benefits make it easy for the user to explore and understand the products’ value proposition, thus giving them the best chance to convert to paying subscribers. There are 3 broad aspects in a free user’s journey
- Discoverability: It is important for a user to be able to be aware of a products’ existence. Hence, prominent entry points on navigation and other high traffic areas become very important.
- Exploration: Once a user is aware of the product, it’s important to provide them with the right tools to explore. These include an effective search, sections on navigation bars and a clear articulation of value proposition on a plan page.
- Conversion: Once a user decides to subscribe, the payment process needs to be as seamless as possible. Providing prominent CTAs, multiple payment modes and clear messaging during each step of the funnel goes a long way in ensuring that a user converts.
While the above talks about an effective UI/UX, having great engineering performance is critical as well. Improved page responsiveness and faster load-times further enable user understanding and navigation in a timely manner. Great search functionality helps users discover relevant content faster. Due consideration needs to be given to server-side vs client-side rendering based on user-context. We’ve developed all our templates on React, which has led to improved page performance and agile development.
Effective user targeting is a must
No one-size fits all. Effective market penetration requires identifying and targeting specific user segments across multiple channels. Though we are quite early in this process, we executed a few basic strategies which helped us increase our user-base
- Platform-wise pricing: Users across different platforms have different price sensitivities. An android user’s paying propensity is different from that of an ios user. Tapping into this insight has helped us optimise penetration
- Multiple SKUs: While a 1 year TOI+ plan helped us gain initial traction, we realised that some users might be interested in specific stories. For them, paying for the whole year might not have been worth it. Further, during our user calls, several users asked for bundled subscription packs (these provide subscriptions from multiple platforms bundled into a single pricing). They were willing to pay a higher price for these bundles. Hence, even within the ambit of value consciousness, users differed in what exactly they wanted. To cater to these, we launched two more subscriptions at the opposite end of the pricing spectrum - pay per story (where users pay a low price for a single story) and Timesprime bundled subscription.
- Strategic partnerships: Taking a leaf out of D2C ecommerce, we further increased our reach by partnering with brands. These partnerships are largely indexed towards financial organizations such as banks, payment gateways and fintech apps, where users come for monetary transactions anyway. Users on these platforms (or those who used particular payment instruments) get special discounts, which further improves discoverability.
Discounts work, Free Trials not so much
Considering our major market is in India (and most of our global readers belong to the Indian Diaspora), the value consciousness is high. Though we started at a price point of INR 999/year, soon we realised by talking to our readers that this is an especially high price point. Reducing price helped increase our daily subscriptions, but nowhere near to what we were gunning for. We got a major boost during the Independence Day weekend sale, which led to almost doubling of paid user-base. Though acquisition rates reduced post that, it was still higher than what we were getting prior to the sale. Sales which are strategic, both in their timings and spacing (having frequent sales can be detrimental in the long run) usually have a positive effect on acquisition run-rates. While it might be tempting to give a Free Trial (FT) to new users, we noticed that FT users seldom converted to paying users. The only platform where we found some success was ios, where auto-renewal led to higher conversions. However, once we started gaining traction, FT even in ios was not impactful.
These foundational learning has positioned us well to further grow the product, with a high focus on improving user experience, providing richer and personalized content, and tailored subscriptions. As a team, we are excited for our next 1-10 growth phase!