When it comes to converting your audience into members or subscribers, striking the perfect balance between frustration and engagement is key. But, like many things, that’s easier said than done.
Too much frustration and a user leaves your site to find content elsewhere. Leave too much content open and you may well increase engagement but not increase revenue.
And, to complicate matters further, this “perfect balance” is different for each publisher depending on audience, content, and strategy. So where do you start to find your perfect balance? Let’s dissect the problem.
What causes engagement?
Although engagement is measured differently by different publishers, a well-known definition of engagement is the RFV score (the combination of recency, frequency, and volume):
Recency – The number of days since a user last visited your site
Frequency – This metric can relate to how often the user visits your site or how often they actually consume content.
Volume – The amount of content consumed and interactions made with your site. In other words, are their visits of high quality?
To augment these metrics, you may consider employing engagement strategies to counterbalance any frustration your user feels with the paywall. The decision to use depends on your strategy, content, and audience, but examples include:
- Access to content, simply leaving content open to non-subscribed users (e.g. freemium or metered approach)
- High-quality content, including opening access to premium content to allow users to experience the value of your subscription offers (for example, discovery passes or free trials)
- Interactive content, including comment sections, the possibility of debate, quizzes, etc.
- Personalization: an account space, UX features that allow the user to follow topics or an adapted homepage, like Netflix
- Soft conversion steps, including newsletter sign-ups (a great habit-building tool) or registration (which lets you collect first-party data to target marketing campaigns)
What causes the frustration?
Quite simply, frustration is created when a user cannot achieve something they planned to do or is interrupted in their journey to do it.
For example:
- Interruptions, such as advertisements and pop-ups
- Content blockages, whether it’s just the presence of a paywall or the paywall being too high on a piece of content, making it difficult for the user to know if the content is valuable to them
- Too many clicks/scrolls needed to get something
- Having to fill in too many form fields
- Bad copy on the paywall or in the conversion process that does not clearly convey the value of the subscription
As you’d expect, these factors offset any engagement you may have developed from the user and may deter them from frequently returning to consume your content.
However, without these small points of frustration, your user may very well continue to consume content for free and never see the need to convert (limiting your ARPU – average revenue per user).
The pressure created by a paywall and premium content impacts both reader frustration and on conversion rates. Clearly, engagement and frustration, in the right amounts and in the right situations, are critical to successful conversion strategies.
What makes the perfect balance?
In addition to looking to increase user engagement, there are four key things to consider and test to find the ideal balance between frustration and engagement.
Visibility of premium content
In a Pool study, analyzing the premium content strategies of 75 digital publishers, we found a correlation between premium content traffic and reader-to-subscriber conversion rate, but only up to 40% of premium content viewability. This means that 40% of your visitors would be exposed to premium content.
This implies that increasing the share of traffic on content reserved for subscribers, by making this content more visible, will positively influence conversion rates. For this, you do not necessarily need to produce a greater number of premium articles but to increase their visibility on the home page of your site, within your newsletter, on social networks, etc.
As the limit of this correlation is 40%, according to our study, we recommend aiming for visibility between 10 and 40%, performing tests to find the optimal visibility of premium content for your strategy and your audience.
Food and sustainable development editor Featured Bio, for example, has been working on the visibility of premium content and the team is now aiming for a minimum of 10%, increasing this percentage on weekends when they have the highest number of visitors. For them, it’s not just about conversion rates, but about demonstrating to their audience that well-researched, quality content doesn’t come free.
Yellow banners on Featured Bio denote premium content to reduce frustration when a user is blocked
Paywall visibility
This is the visibility of your paywall on premium content. After analyzing Poool’s customers, we found a benchmark of 30-60% visibility on paywalls, but we see publishers performing at the extreme ends of this scale.
Financial Times Full Page Paywall
These three successful digital publishers, for example, all have close to 100% viewability on the walls, achieved in different ways: while FinancialTimes presents a full-page paywall, showing only the title of the article, The Washington Post uses a pop-up hard paywall and The New York Times blocks the entire article with an anti-scroll paywall. This means that every site visitor sees the paywall.
The New York Times anti-scroll paywall
The Washington Post pop-up hard paywall
While these paywalls likely lead to higher click-through rates, the design does not encourage recirculation and could increase the publisher’s exit rate from the site due to user frustration.
As usual, it’s important to experiment with different wall visibilities to find the optimal percentage for your strategy.
Soft conversion strategies
Instead of jumping straight to a hard paywall, how about guiding your user through stepping stones, gradually increasing their engagement and propensity to subscribe?
These are called soft conversion stages and can be extremely beneficial in balancing frustration and commitment.
For example, “newsletter walls” require newsletter sign-up to access content, which increases engagement through the regular sending of habit-forming content via email.
Sign-up walls, another valuable conversion step, require a user to create a free account in order to unlock content. Again, this increases engagement and collects valuable data points to personalize a user’s experience, target ads for higher ARPU, and inform your strategy to later present the paywall at the right time, from good manner.
The Independent’s sign-up wall
Even a measured paywall strategy could be considered a soft approach, where users are offered a quota of content for free before being blocked, giving them the chance to see the value of the subscription.
Dynamic wall strategy
Perhaps the most effective strategy to employ is one that is tailored to the user’s level of engagement. After all, how can you perfectly balance frustration and engagement when no two users are the same?
At Poool, we segment audiences into four engagement groups; volatile, occasional, regulars and fans.
Volatile users, who only visit your site once or twice a month, will be very frustrated with a hard paywall and will likely leave to find content elsewhere. However, by presenting them with a newsletter or a sign-up wall, or allowing them to discover premium content for free, you will gradually increase their engagement and, subsequently, their propensity to convert into a subscriber against the paywall.
Fans, on the other hand, are already highly engaged and perhaps can be converted to a registered member first, to inform your strategy, and then presented with a custom hard paywall to increase frustration just enough to encourage conversion.
Magdalene White is Head of Content Marketing at Pool, the audience conversion platform for digital publishers to convert anonymous users into leads, members and subscribers. His work focuses on revenue, engagement and conversion strategies for digital content producers.
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