Inside the WSJ’s subscription strategy

Aditi Sangal of Digiday talked with Karl Wells, the general manager of the Wall Street Journal’s subscription and membership business, about its subscription strategy.

Here is an excerpt:

Package the choice for best results.
“One of the biggest things we saw was around price anchoring and choice architecture, which is effectively saying, ‘how can you present the customer with choice and use parts of the equation to nudge someone into the thing you want them to take?’ When we started this journey, there was one offer: $12 for 12 weeks. There was no choice to make and no price anchoring. You see it everywhere. You walk into a supermarket, they’re using it. It’s born out of other industries that we brought into our world.”

Improve the onboarding process for subscribers.
“We’ve done a lot of work on the onboarding space because you’re more likely to start a habit in the first seven days of subscription than any other time in the subscription. How do you encourage people to take a new habit with our product suite? It’s a mixture of insight but also execution. We used to have a welcome page, which sounds great but then our scientists in our experimentation team started to think about how onboarding can feel like part of the checkout experience. The card-based approach has meant the number of people taking the action has gone through the roof.”

Read more here.