You don’t get from point A to point B without goals and milestones. This applies to most situations in life, from a cross-country road trip, to training for a marathon, to a career in publishing.
During the past two decades, my team and I have identified four strategic subscription website marketing goals that are linear drivers for success in multiplatform niche media publishing. Perhaps even more importantly, we have discovered the four key metrics that can be used to judge your progress and success on meeting these four subscription website publishing goals.
Goal #1: Attract new visitors to your subscription website with free, high-quality content that is formatted into Google-friendly website posts.
The metric you can use to measure this goal: Your success in achieving this goal is measured with a metric we call your Google Visibility Index, which can be as low as zero and as high as 100. This is the percentage of keywords you are currently being ranked for, versus the number you are attempting to rank for. So if you optimize ten posts for ten keywords, and you get ranked for five, your score would be fifty. Fifty might seem like a high number for most publishers, but many of our clients have reached that number and higher.
Goal #2: Capture email contact permission from your website visitors by making generous offers that include free subscription incentives.
The metric you can use to measure this goal: The metric for measuring this goal is called email capture rate or ECR. It is calculated by dividing the number of new email subscribers your subscription website captures each month by the number of unique new visitors passing through your subscription website.
Goal #3: Engagement is the key to retaining audience relationships. Engage your subscribers with relevant, high-frequency email newsletters that build brand loyalty, revenue, and profitability.
The metric you can use to measure this goal: The key metric for audience engagement is your email subscriber retention rate. At a macro level, it is calculated by measuring the number of email subscribers at the beginning of a period and at the end of the period. The time interval can be a month, a quarter or year.
Goal #4: Monetize your sponsor and user relationships in many ways. Monetization is the key to financial success.
The metric you can use to measure this goal: In a multiplatform publishing world with as many as 10 discrete revenue streams, revenue per email subscriber is the one metric that represents all forms of sponsorship and user revenue. The metric is simply calculated by dividing total system revenue by the number of active email subscribers. While our current benchmark is $12 per email subscriber per year, we have successful subscription websites with revenue per email subscriber that varies from under two dollars to over $100.
Many of our subscription websites start with as few as one to three revenue generation systems. Then, as their web and email audience efforts drive their audience footprint, they add additional revenue generation systems with the goal of maximizing both the number of subscribers and revenue per subscriber. This simple formula is the key to maximizing multiplatform revenue and total enterprise profitability.
To make subscription website publishing work, you’ll need a plan. We will help you formulate it.
Would you like to reach all four of these goals and learn how to improve their metrics regularly? Mequoda is the only provider in the market that specifically transforms magazines into multiplatform publishers with these four goals as their daily mantras. We have built our own Haven CXMS, a state-of-the-art SaaS tool built, owned and maintained by Mequoda to enable all the functionality that multiplatform publishing businesses need to be successful and profitable.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you build a profitable subscription website and multiplatform niche media business, please schedule a no-obligation appointment with a member of our consulting team.
