Keeping subscribers for Het Laatste Nieuws and De Morgen

The context

DPG Media publishes Het Laatste Nieuws and De Morgen, among others. From 2020 to 2021 I worked in its retention team, within the subscriptions department. Our goal: making sure subscribers stay. We wanted to keep churn as low as possible.

It was a small team of three. So everything we did, we did together with other teams. With data and insights, with the people responsible for the brands, with the studio that made campaigns and designs, with CRM, which sent the emails, and with legal, which checked everything. For building things we worked with IT or with external partners, for example for video and for a website.

Why does a subscriber stay?

Just before I started, the team had asked data and insights which factors go together with subscribers who cancel, or who don’t. That turned up a number of behaviours that went together with staying, such as using certain products and services of the paper. They did not prove cause and effect, but they gave a direction.

For each of them we designed campaigns to encourage that behaviour, and we tested them. With the testing team we set up A/B tests: one group of subscribers gets a campaign, another doesn’t, and the difference shows whether it works. We followed the results in dashboards. Reading them takes care, because many tests are always running at the same time.

An onboarding for new subscribers

The largest initiative was an onboarding for new subscribers: a series of steps that introduces a new subscriber straight away to what the paper has to offer. I designed the flow, made a prototype of it, briefed it for the build and tested the result. From then on, every new subscriber went through that onboarding first. We brought the same elements forward in print too.

Behavioural design

If you want people to do something differently, you have to understand why they do what they do now. For that we went into behavioural design, using the SUE method. It looks at what someone is actually trying to achieve (the job to be done), and at the forces between the current and the desired behaviour: what bothers people about the current behaviour, what the new one brings, what keeps them comfortable with the old one and what holds them back from changing.

We applied it to new emails, letters and campaigns, and to emails that already existed. We also rewrote mandatory service emails, such as a message about a payment, so that they are clear and reassuring.

Emails went to CRM, which built and sent them. What was missing was a formal test: does every email go out at the right moment, to the right people, with the right content? So we set up a test flow, with QA and acceptance testing, even for something that is ‘just’ an email. That way we caught errors before they reached subscribers.

The right moment, the right channel

Together with data, we divided subscribers into segments, so we could address them more specifically. In a customer journey map we laid out every step a subscriber goes through: before subscribing, the onboarding, as a subscriber and after. On it we placed all our initiatives.

We used the websites too, with small pop-ups in the bottom right corner, now and then and at the right moment. That way we invited readers to the newsroom’s in-depth sections, tied to current events, such as a major sports tournament.

Many levers, a small team

Segments, channels, moments in the customer journey, messages, tests running side by side: there are a great many levers to pull. Managing that complexity, with a small team and many partners, was a large part of the work.