A more product-led approach at The Economist

Meg Carter of InPublishing wrote about The Economist chief product officer Deep Bagchee and his product-led approach.

Carter writes, “One example of this in action is what’s been done around customer retention by one of the cross-functional product teams over the past twelve months. Informed by data, they came up with a retention plan with a number of components.

“‘We removed our introductory 12 issues for 12 pounds offers which, though it brought in a lot of people didn’t retain them well, and went up in price, replacing it with a simple 50% off quarter one proposition,’ Bagchee explains.

“Also, when Covid-19 hit, it acted quickly to overcome any short-term Covid-related print distribution issues by offering all new subscribers the option to subscribe to either print-and-digital or digital-only. Those already subscribing to print-only, meanwhile, had their subscriptions upgraded at their next renewal date – to either print-and-digital or digital-only.

“Work was also done to ‘increase the cadence’ of customer communications – especially during new subscribers’ onboarding journey. And a new raft of subscriber-only events was developed, including a Bill Gates webinar on Covid-19 and vaccines – all of which attracted an audience of tens of thousands.”

Read more here.