How The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times Will Retain New Subscribers

News publishers experienced a tremendous spike in new subscriptions at the onset of the coronavirus crisis. Now the challenge is retaining the readers long term.

At the recent Facebook Publisher Showcase, senior managers from three major US publishers — The Atlantic’s Emilie Harkin, Chicago Tribune’s Kimberley Abernathy, and Los Angeles Times’ Katie Gray — discussed the emergent strategies they're employing with Facebook Journalism Project’s Accelerator program manager David Grant. Here are a few key takeaways.

Use a welcome series to build reading habits. The Los Angeles Times welcomes new subscribers and starts building loyalty with an engaging, three-month onboarding process. Katie Gray, director of digital subscription marketing, said the process is designed to help new subscribers become deeply familiar with the brand as well as identify recurring content they enjoy and want to keep coming back to. A welcome email series invites new subscribers to download the mobile Los Angeles Times app and recommends articles and virtual events they may be interested in attending. Over the course of the welcome series, content featured in the series is tailored to the reader’s content interests, which they check off at the start of the welcome series.

Use a variety of tactics to keep your subscribers engaged. Once paying readers are out of your formal onboarding series, industry experts recommend a wide range of tactics for keeping them coming back. Of the Chicago Tribune’s many newsletter tactics, they send customized emails to their paying subscribers to get them to read widely across their offerings. (Read four newsletter strategies you can use today.) These emails have a high 39% average open rate and a click-through rate around 10%. For subscribers that may be in danger of cancelling, the Tribune targets subscribers with low engagement using Facebook, looking to re-engage readers through articles promoted in their Facebook feeds. Newsletter readership in general is a powerful predictor of retention: The Los Angeles Times’ Katie Gray echoed the usefulness of emails to converting readers to paying subscribers in saying, “We’ve found people who subscribe to our newsletter are more likely to subscribe to our content and stay.”

Track your retention curve, not just the retention rate, to fix churn pains. Publishers can find and address their biggest retention challenges by looking at retention curves, not just overall retention rates. Katie Gray from the Los Angeles Times explained that by segmenting retention by types of offers and different lengths of subscriber history, for example, publishers can determine what cohorts of subscribers are most likely to churn and react accordingly. Read more about retention curves and other retention lessons from publishers in the Accelerator program here.

The newsroom is a key contributor to retention. Teams across The Atlantic work together to assess metrics and develop subscription strategies, said Emilie Harkin, executive director of customer growth. She emphasized that collaboration is paramount for success, particularly because quality news coverage is the source of (and sets the editorial standard for) all of The Atlantic’s marketing content. Similarly, the Los Angeles Times asked editorial staffers to write subscriber onboarding emails, making the welcome series more personal.