Working with our Membership in News Fund partners has helped Membership Puzzle Project understand some of the gaps that can become major hurdles for member-driven newsrooms. Some of them are smaller or younger newsrooms without dedicated audience development staff or resources. Here, Membership in News Fund coach Federica Cherubini outlines a simple way she has helped some of our partners collect and use data to make strategic membership growth decisions.
“We’ve launched our membership program. Now what? What do we need to know about our audience? How can we develop and implement a data-informed strategy for growing our membership program? And how can we do all this in a small newsroom without a dedicated audience specialist?”
A pillar of every successful membership strategy is information on how and why audience members come to the publication. This is even more critical for member-driven news organizations, who rely on a strong relationship with their audiences for sustainability and impact.
But for smaller newsrooms, the sophisticated audience strategies presented at conferences and in news industry reports can be daunting.
As this post will show, getting a few key data points about your audiences can actually be quite simple. Here, we’ll show you a low-cost, low-labor way to grasp what you need to know about your audiences, and track interactions and membership conversions to make better decisions. These methods are especially important in this moment, as many organizations see a surge in members, subscribers, and donors.
Although the examples offered here are geared toward membership programs, the same process of crafting questions and gathering data can be applied to newsletter subscribers, paid subscriptions, and even donors.
What data do you actually need?
The number of things you could track can feel overwhelming, especially when you hear from large organizations with dedicated audience teams about all the data they have and how sophisticated their analytics tools are. The Atlantic, for example, has been able to divide its audience into four audience segments based on the levels of interactions readers have with the site, and developed independent digital conversion strategies for each segment. Other publishers, like local German publisher DuMont, have created their own metrics and categories to drive a customized strategy.
But you don’t need all of that to make a few smart, informed decisions, especially in a young membership program. If you have to focus on one thing to track during a growth phase, I suggest the conversion paths of members – in other words, the acquisition funnel. (More established programs are increasingly focused on tracking retention, which MPP researcher Emily Roseman has explored. We’ll talk below about how to lay the groundwork for an eventual shift to retention.)
Of course, membership appeals made when someone has no relationship with your publication will have limited success. Before you get to that point, you’re likely tracking their engagement with your news organization through things like commenting behavior and newsletters subscriptions. (Learn more about how The Economist uses newsletters to drive engagement and subscription from their newsletter editor, Sunnie Huang.)
To get started, outline what questions you have about your audience. This will help you zero in on what data to track. These are some basic questions that will help you grow membership after you’ve launched:
Where are your new members coming from? Of all the places and platforms where you’re publishing a call to action (CTA) inviting them to become members, which one is converting best?
Is there any correlation between the platform that converts better and the level of engagement of your users on that specific platform? In other words, is your engagement level higher on your newsletter than on social media? Or on one social platform more than another one? Does that higher level of engagement lead to a higher membership conversion?
Are you seeing high engagement on a specific type of content (longreads or investigations, for example)?
Is there a specific message, in terms of wording, that resonates better with your users and is therefore more effective in turning them into members?
Other things you might want to track, if you have the capacity:
Is there a difference in conversion between organic distribution and paid acquisition strategies? (For advice on how to make smart investments in paid lead acquisition to grow membership, read Phillip Smith’s research published with Membership Puzzle Project, Pico, and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.)
What drives repetitive visits and multiple sessions per visit? (Again, we’ll refer you to Emily Roseman’s loyalty and retention research.)
When carrying out a test, it’s important to remember to introduce just one variable at a time, so you can understand which strategies are working, and which ones need tweaking. For example, if you’re testing which platform is converting better, make sure the wording on all calls to action is the same, or quite similar (while wording might vary a bit, you’ll want to make sure the tone remains consistent). Once you’ve tested for platform, then you can test what messaging works best, by trying different wording on the same platform.
You want to allow enough time and sample results for the test to be meaningful – comparing only two results, for example, wouldn’t be representative. Give yourself a set time period for a test. If your newsletter is weekly, you might want to run a test for a month so you can compare four different issues. Campaign Monitor has additional advice on developing A/B testing campaigns.
One low-budget, low-tech way to track membership acquisition
Tracking member acquisition helps you define the most “valuable” real estate on your owned platforms. Here’s how I did that with the Paris-based local newsroom StreetPress, a Membership in News Fund partner.
Step 1: Review all entry points
What are all the possible places users can sign up to become a member? Think about your site, newsletters, social media accounts, and even event registrations (including webinars). All you need is a spreadsheet in which each entry point has its own row, grouped by different channels. Find a template here.
It will be tedious at the beginning, but once you make it a habit to keep it updated, it will be easy to monitor.
Step 2: Assign a specific tracking code to each entry
A UTM tracking code allows you to track source, medium, and campaign referrals. Plugged into your analytics system, it makes it easier to track the performance of each, allowing you to compare each single post or call to action.
This is an example of what the code might look like: https://www.websiteaddress/?utm_source=nameofnewsletter&utm_campaign=d3a5ba7854&utm_medium=email
The tracking code begins after the “?” “Utm_source=” indicates the brand of your newsletter (in case you have more than one, it might be something like “daily briefing”), “utm_campaign=” is the unique identifier for a specific campaign, and “utm_medium=” in this case is e-mail, but could be Instagram, for example.
Although email service providers (ESPs) will often automatically add a UTM tracking code to any link you put in a newsletter, you can add one manually to any URL to make it uniquely identifiable. You can read here how to add UTM parameters to a URL and track it on Google Analytics.
ESPs will also often make it easy to create multiple newsletter signup sources with unique tracking so that you can compare their performance. You can see an example of how to set that up on Mailchimp.
Every time you add a new entry point, make sure you generate a new UTM (i.e. if you send a membership appeal to everyone who attended an event, make sure to generate a UTM for the membership signup page linked from that e-mail.)
Polish news organization Outride.rs, whom I coached via Membership Puzzle Project, partnered with local influencers to promote their newsletter on the influencers’ Instagram channels. They generated a unique UTM for each ambassador in the form of a simple bit.ly link to determine which influencers resonated most with potential newsletter subscribers.
Step 3: Regularly, consistently review the performance of each entry
Add the rate of conversion for each entry to the spreadsheet, and compare and review them periodically. Be sure to choose a regular cadence for calculating and recording performance of each entry point (ex: every Friday or the 28th day of the month) and stick with that rhythm. Again, it’s about controlling the variables so that you can isolate the cause of the different results.
It’s important to maintain a holistic view of your audience and membership. If your audience data is in more than one database, make sure that different tools are connected to each other.
For example, newsletter subscriber data in your ESP must be linked to your membership database or customer relationship management system (CRM). You can use API connectors such as Zapier or IFTTT to link up systems and automate some workflow processes. API connectors can also be used to create alerts and notifications if you link them to your internal communication platforms (e.g. get a daily analytics report via a dedicated Slack channel).
Turn acquisition data into a plan
We’ve established why it’s important to measure your audience interactions, what to measure, and how to track it. But that data is just noise if we don’t use it to inform decision making. Once you know how people are becoming members of your organizations, you can use that to design future acquisition efforts and to decide which strategies to abandon because they’re underperforming.
If you’re seeing higher membership conversions from your newsletter than social media (which is typical for many news organizations), that helps you build a plan: use social media to grow your newsletter list, and use your newsletter list to grow your membership.
As you analyze the data, focus not only on the best performing sources, campaigns, and calls to action, but those at the bottom: Is there any pattern to low performing strategies? Before discarding them as a failure, is there anything you can try to tweak them? If not, add it to your “stop doing” list, like the Philadelphia Inquirer did when it realized composing tweets (rather than automating them) was just not worth the effort.
Building a relationship with your new members
Now what? The moment someone becomes a member is not the end of the journey, it’s the beginning of a deeper relationship with them. What happens after someone has signed up to become a member?
Your first step should be to set up a welcome email and an onboarding series. A good welcome email arrives right away when a member signs up. An onboarding series is automatically sent over the course of several weeks, and helps readers understand your value proposition, what you’re about, and what they can expect to receive from you. These two pieces create a strong foundation on which you can develop a relationship with your members. Here is a guide by Pico’s The Byline on writing your welcome email, with examples.
After laying this foundation, you’ll want to track and map the full user journey through the onboarding process. Study how many people go through the entire onboarding series to determine the ideal number of emails to send. (A steep drop-off in open rate on later e-mails in the onboarding series might indicate that your onboarding series is too long, or earlier e-mails were thin on value.)
Now that you have established a more direct relationship with your members, add some qualitative data to the quantitative insights. You might consider periodic surveys to get a better picture of what your audiences value most from your offerings. Be careful to not overwhelm them with long, detailed surveys. Keep them focused and brief. Membership Puzzle Project has a guide to e-mail surveys, including a bank of 70+ example survey questions and a survey form designed to help you learn what members value about their membership.
Similar to the process of choosing which data to track, start your survey design process with questions: what do I want to know about my audience members, and what information will help me answer them?
Adapting for disruptive forces
Having a clear map of your acquisition and onboarding process will be particularly important in case an external disruption (such as coronavirus) forces you to change the tone or content of your campaigns and onboarding material.
Many outlets have changed their messages in response to the coronavirus pandemic to acknowledge how the situation is impacting them and the readers. Remember that list of entry points you made back in Step 1 of tracking membership acquisition? This will help you make sure you haven’t left any tone-deaf language lingering on any of your entry points. Plus, having mapped and recorded all responses to different language you’ve used will help you make decisions about how to adapt your messaging for the moment.
News organizations who have seen surges of new readers, members and subscribers in the last two months should think about how to present an accurate picture of their value proposition during non-emergency times, and how that is reflected in their COVID-19 coverage.
While members typically join after building a relationship with your organization over time, those joining during the pandemic are likely joining on a much shorter time frame. They will be less familiar with you, and they will have different expectations of you than the typical member, once the peak of the emergency passes. Mission-aligned orientation is key.
To keep an eye on the data around people who joined during a disruptive situation such as coronavirus, create an audience segment according to the date joined. This is an imperfect definition, since maybe some people who joined in the last couple months didn’t join only because of coronavirus, but it will help you see patterns and monitor their engagement levels over time.
If you see a drop in their engagement, you might want to reach out to them with a targeted campaign, re-state your value proposition, ask them how you can help them now, and remind them that what brought them to you in time of crisis is still reflected in your journalism. Setting up this segment now will help you make stronger bids for their continued support later on.
RecaP
In this simple process, there are six key steps to making data-informed decisions about your audiences:
Figure out what question you have about your audience, and what data will help you answer it
List all the places you can collect that data from
Develop your tests, using only one variable for each test
Develop a cadence for reviewing your results
Assess what worked and what didn’t, and edit your strategy accordingly
Use surveys and other user research methods to add context to the quantitative data you’ve collected
Additional resources
The Audience Explorer Dashboard helps small newsrooms build an audience funnel by providing a set of 10 Google Analytics that pull the kind of data small publishers need to grow a relationship with their loyal and potentially-loyal readers
The SMART Goals framework helps organizations set product goals that can help drive better performance. You might find this helpful when you’re trying to design your experiment and figure out what to measure.
Membership Puzzle Project’s user research process and materials can help you design surveys, user interviews, and other efforts to gain qualitative information about your members.
Membership Puzzle Project’s advice via Poynter on audience segmentation will help you identify different types of audiences and figure out the right approach for serving them. Pico’s The Byline has also covered this.
Phillip Smith’s two-part exploration of how to use paid acquisition to grow your membership program (Part 1, Part 2)
If your organization applies this framework and finds it helpful, we’d love to hear about it. If something is unclear, or you have questions, we want to hear about that, too. You can reach us at ideas@membershippuzzle.org.
FEDERICA CHERUBINI
Membership in News Fund coach
@fedecherubini