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Anne Holland

4 Common Recurring Billing Mistakes TechSmith Makes: How NOT to Handle Annually Charged Customers

Subscriber Only /

I am a fan of TechSmith. We use their Camtasia software for some of our on-demand tutorials and I was impressed to discover their service team frequently monitors Twitter looking for customer questions and concerns to answer. But when I got an email receipt out of the blue from them this week, when as far as I’d known I hadn’t bought anything in months, it was definitely a WTF?! moment. And it’s one that I…

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What Subscription, Membership & Continuity Merchants Need to Know About Recurring Billing Declines

Subscriber Only /

A few of my notes from Insider’s webinar featuring Paul Larsen (credit card processing guru for subscription site industry) yesterday: #1. More than half of US consumers do NOT use a “real” card when signing up for subscriptions or memberships online. 52% are using a debit card. 15% (and growing) are using prepaid cards.This means more than half of your accounts may hit limits and be harder to retain than you suspected… unless you know how…

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Why Recording Webinars as Paid Content is a Bad Idea

Entertainment and Streaming, Subscriber Only, Technology /

I’m a stats monster. So, I watch usership/viewership on both our live webinars and the on-demand versions of the same. I’ve noticed some startling differences in viewership.Here’s the thing — it’s the same audience demographic, the same content, and even the same size on the screen (our video streaming allows our videos to be blown up to full-screen by our members.) The only difference is a webinar is presented “live” and often includes a Q&A…

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Do You Serve Your Readers … or Your Advertisers? The Glory of Paid Content Models

Business Strategy, Subscriber Only /

When you sell online ads directly to sponsors, increasingly these days they expect to control the editorial their ad appears next to. “My competitors won’t be mentioned in any editorial on pages where my ad appears, will they?” is a question that honest-to-god I’ve heard several times this week alone.  It’s gotten so bad that some PR people refuse to pitch stories or provide interview access unless you promise them the story won’t be on a…

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Christian Science Monitor’s Weekly Wins 60% More Paying Subscribers Than its Daily Newspaper Had

Subscriber Only /

The stats behind this week’s Case Study of Christian Science Monitor’s turn-around are fascinating. So often in the online publishing industry we assume that higher frequency is better. We ramp up the content production volume, hoping that more and more pages, and continual changing homepage headlines are the way to go. But then I remember the time when my father, a reader with a busy life, pestered the circulation department of Wired Magazine, among others, with…

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Acquire New Subscribers (or Members) for 60% Less With Referral Marketing

Subscriber Acquisition, Subscriber Only /

When Aimen Barma was VP Marketing for Audible, she discovered that referral marketing was the cheapest of all her new subscriber acquisition channels. Cheaper than PPC, co-registration, online ads, rented lists, affiliates … in fact, her financial analysis showed referral acquisitions were 60% cheaper than any other paid media. This month I asked her to come present to our Subscription Site Insider Members all the details of what works in referral marketing. (An on-demand replay of…

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Stats: Which Homepage Style Works Best for Membership Sites & Subscription Sites?

FInance, Subscriber Acquisition, Subscriber Only /

We’re in the midst of designing a new homepage for Subscription Site Insider’s main site and just like always, finalizing a wireframe is AGONIZING. I want to put everything plus the kitchen sink on there, and I want it all above the fold! Which is stupid because clutter confuses instead of converting, and the tiny type you’d need to shove more content in a small space is completely unreadable.How do other membership site and subscription…

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Classmates Launches New Email Newsletter for More Prospect Touches With Less Annoyance

Subscriber Acquisition, Subscriber Only /

Sophisticated online subscription marketers, Classmates has an ongoing series of emails that go out its membership offer abandoners — visitors who got part-way through the steps of signing up for a membership but abandoned when asked for a credit card number. (Note: our Insider’s Marketing Samples Library has several examples of email series sent to abandons by various subscription site marketers.) Classmates sends its emails several times a week — up to months after a consumer has…

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Why You Need Multiple Marketing Touches Before They Visit Your Subscription Site

Subscriber Acquisition, Subscriber Only /

Most subscription site marketers realize they can’t always convert visitors to paid content offers right away on the first visit. That’s why free offers such as email opt-ins, free offers, and cart abandon marketing programs are so important to the mix. Your site catches everyone possible with a soft offer and then you can use email or other formats to follow-up later until the prospect at last converts (or not.) The problem that I think many…

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Why WordPress Isn’t Great as a Membership Site’s Content Management System

Subscriber Only, Technology /

Both this blog and our other free publication WhichTestWon.com are built in WordPress. However, I prefer not to subscription sites on this platform. Because when people are paying for content, it shouldn’t crash on them. Ever, if humanly possible. WordPress is great because it’s (a) free, (b) relatively easy for your editorial staff to use without loads of training, (c) lots of free and cheap plugins are available for it, so your site can be cooler…

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