How to leverage these three subscription website systems to dominate your niche
When you charge a fee to access the content within a subscription website, the site needs to provide specific and immediate benefits to your subscribers. Are you doing that?
Choosing your content focus is a business-critical decision, as the focus you choose pretty much dictates your chances of success with a subscription website. However, more serious than the focus on content for a subscription website is the business model. It’s necessary to know the most ideal subscription website system you should build, in order to develop your strategic plans for CAROTME (content, audience, revenue, organization, technology, measurement, and economics). Not considering the subscription website system is a major mistake some publishers make.
The Magazine Subscription Website System
Purpose: To generate paid subscriptions and revenue for a premium magazine business with a robust subscription website.
Our most popular subscription website system is designed to take consumer magazine publishers boldly forward with a multiplatform 21st-century strategy. In addition to a unique and revolutionary HTML web-magazine edition and tablet-based magazine editions, these systems often include a Directory, Calendar, and Classifieds that serve your audience and can also be revenue-generators.
If you choose to use Mequoda’s Haven CXMS to build your magazine subscription website system, it features all the functionality of our signature website portal that can be leveraged for both premium-subscription development and third-party sponsorships using native, scarcity, exclusivity, and alignment sponsorship programs.
Haven CXMS is also fully compatible with many state-of-the-art subscription fulfillment systems such as Strategic Fulfillment Group, CDS Global, and Palm Coast Data. Our cutting-edge, multiplatform contrast-pricing program, coupled with our Six Sigma direct-marketing program, allows you to dramatically increase your subscription unit sales and average price per subscriber, boosting overall revenue and profits.
A magazine subscription website system can maintain the strong traditions of a dual-revenue strategy, powered by subscriptions and sponsorships and with new revenue streams that can include an online shop for stand-alone products, an event marketing system, and multi-product consumer clubs or memberships.
A prime example of Haven CXMS in use is New England Network, built for Yankee Publishing to promote their venerable and popular regional magazine named Yankee. Like all of these types of systems, Yankee’s website is built to attract, convert, engage, and monetize visitors that results in growing the list of paid magazine subscribers.
The Membership Subscription Website System
Purpose: To generate paid memberships to an all-inclusive ecosystem of magazine media for a single or multiple brands.
Publishers everywhere are adopting magazine clubs, an all-inclusive membership revenue model that can offer access to multiple editions of your magazine, and also upgrade to a super club. A super club is an all-inclusive membership revenue model that can offer everything from total access to print and digital magazines, to video training, to digital access to books and archives, to event discounts, VIP registration, exclusive discount packages on other products and any other club benefits that seem appropriate to the audience being served. If you already offer a series of other clubs, a super club might include a magazine club, book club, pattern club, recipe club, video club, course library, reference library and any other subscription-based product you offer or can imagine.
A prime example of a membership subscription website system is Ceramic Arts Network. The American Ceramic Society is a 100+ year-old organization that serves the ceramic and pottery world. Their goal when launching their system was to optimize revenue by leveraging existing premium content and products with an all-inclusive, all-access membership product and offer.
They called it ICAN (International Ceramic Artists Network), with a price point between $4.99 per month for a Standard Membership to $9.97 for a Silver Membership $12.97 for a Gold Membership. The higher the tier, the more it includes, like their magazines, video streaming service, ceramic recipe archive, and discounts to events. The only difference between Silver and Gold memberships is access to the beautiful print editions of their magazines, and the cost increase simply covers the cost of fulfilling it.
The video streaming service, CLAYflicks, is a huge draw for the bundled product. It’s where ceramic artists can go to learn techniques for making glaze recipes, stamping, molding, sculpting and more. It’s a total on-demand source of how-to videos, and the archive is robust. When purchased alone, an all access subscription to CLAYflicks is $8.97 per month, so it’s a no-brainer to choose an ICAN Silver or Gold membership, which ultimately turns a “maybe” buyer into a “definitely” buyer.
Orders for ICAN now account for 34% of all subscription/continuity orders. 72% of those are Gold membership orders, 26% are Silver, and 2% are for their Standard membership.
The Advisory Subscription Website System
Purpose: To generate paid subscriptions and revenue for a premium newsletter or advisory service with a robust subscription website.
Many publishers and trade associations conduct educational programming through premium magazines, newsletters and advisory services. Advisory services represent the pinnacle of subscription pricing, often commanding annual membership or subscription fees that range from hundreds to thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars, especially in the B2B space.
If your legacy business is powered by premium newsletters or premium advisory services (as they are now so often called), an advisory subscription website system is what you need to build. Through a free portal, which is a part of your system, you can build a massive email database of free subscribers that can be up-sold and cross-sold to all of your premium products.
Our Haven CXMS system supports individual premium subscriptions and a revolutionary all-access pass that empowers you to sell a high-priced premium product, or bundle several together in a single offering. Mequoda clients routinely have used this strategy to increase revenues by 50-100% with virtually no additional time, cost, or effort to create new or additional editorial content.
A prime example of an advisory subscription website system is The Successful Investor’s TSI Wealth Network, the online home of Pat McKeough’s highly successful family of investment publications. These newsletters drive revenue up the funnel, where more active investors may subscribe to Pat’s premium advisory service TSI Inner Circle, or his newest membership subscription website system, TSI Inner Circle Pro. And from there, they may reach the top of Pat’s revenue pyramid to become wealth management clients.
What do all three of these subscription website systems have in common?
They were all built using Mequoda’s Haven CXMS.
If you think you need custom CMS development for your subscription business, think again! We’ve already done it for you—and for dozens of other multiplatform publishers. And forget about hiring an agency to start from scratch—we’ll save you 80% of what you’d otherwise spend for a custom solution, because we already have custom CMS development that’s specifically designed for subscription website publishers and that can be specialized for your needs, your products, and your brand. If you want to learn how we can help you do that, let’s chat.
