Month: November 2018

Fifteen years since launching its first paywall, Nordic publishing giant Schibsted Media has over a million print and digital subscribers, with reader revenue accounting for 40 percent of revenue for its Media division, according to the company.

Schibsted has a goal of getting to €100 million ($114 million) in reader revenue by 2020. But with a monthly churn rate of 9 percent in digital, Schibsted has a retention problem.

“You don’t get money from conversion, it’s from retention,” said Kjersti Thorneus, director of product management at Schibsted Media Group, speaking at the Association of Online Publishers event in London this week. “You’re starting off each month at minus 9 percent. That’s still a lot of leakage. We have to make sure the paid experience is perceived as much better than the free one.”

To improve retention, Schibsted has been trying to predict when people churn, building more topic-specific customer journey models and learning what content drives retention.

Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, with 57,000 digital-only subscribers, found that content that converts (need-to-know news like world events) is different from content that drives retention (nice-to-have like art reviews). As such, it has hired two cross-departmental editors who are each responsible for one type of content.

This has led to cooperation between departments when covering the same story from different content types and perspectives. For example, a series on the Swedish housing market from the financial point of view will come from the business department, and from a psychology angle from the arts and culture desk. The publisher said the number of popular articles has doubled year over year as a result.

Recency, frequency and volume are the three factors that identify willingness to pay and propensity to churn, and like other subscription publishers, Schibsted is testing ways to prevent customers from canceling their subscription by re-engaging them with things like emails. People who signaled they would cancel the subscription at a certain date will get an automated offer in the days leading up to it to extend the subscription at a reduced price. In other cases, a green, amber and red flagging system next to subscribers helps customer service reps tailor their offers.

The Nordics have a tradition of paying for the news. In countries measured by Reuters’ Digital News Survey, Norway and Sweden had the highest share of people who paid for online news in the last year, with 30 percent and 26 percent, respectively. In contrast, the U.K. has 7 percent.

Schibsted created a new cross-departmental, groupwide team a year ago to focus on driving subscriptions with a new focus on retention. The team, run by Tor Jacobsen, svp consumer business, includes top consumer business management from Schibsted’s subscription titles, plus people in finance, human resources, product, tech, strategy and print.

Schibsted’s monthly digital churn rate of 9 percent is good relative to the market, said Greg Harwood, director at strategy and marketing consultant Simon-Kucher & Partners.

“Schibsted is now focused on the metric of customer lifetime value,” said Harwood. “There’s no silver bullet to manage churn. It is ultimately about becoming more data-driven in order to deliver an improved consumer experience that is worth paying for. What distinguishes a good from a great publishing team is the ability to embed this mentality throughout the organization with collaboration and alignment on objectives being the key success factor.”

The post ‘You don’t get money from conversion, it’s from retention’: Readers drive 40 percent of Schibsted’s revenue appeared first on Digiday.

Target is trying to solve cart abandonment by pushing customers who have left online shopping carts behind into stores with a special promo code.

Target now emails a customer when an item they left in a cart goes on sale, in addition to offering special promotions on items, a company representative said. The deal could be either online — the traditional approach — or good for in-store pickup, where data show average checkout prices are much higher.

Online cart abandonment is a persistent problem for retailers. More than 70 percent of all online shopping carts are abandoned, according to Matt Schlicht, CEO of Octane AI, a company with more than 1,000 clients that operates a bot to chat with consumers and drive down cart abandonment. At the end of 2016, cart abandonment was estimated to amount to $18 billion a year in lost revenue. A typical solution has been to try to patch up an online problem with an online solution, in the form of email reminders that aim to pull shoppers back to the site. But online sellers are challenged to replicate what makes sales in physical stores so successful, he said.

“When you’re in a physical location, it’s really easy to pick up items, put them in a cart,” said Schlicht. “If you have any questions, you can talk to a sales associate. It makes it much more likely that you’ll go through with purchasing it. How can we bring the same level of customer attention to someone who’s shopping online as they would in a retail store?”

Target wouldn’t elaborate on how it sweetens the deal for online cart ditchers to go make purchases in store, but a consultant who works with Target said the company is trying to capitalize on data that show consumers tend to spend more in-store than online. Target stores are notorious for their “go in for one item, leave with 20 more” allure.

Customer data capturing helps drive this strategy. The consultant noted that carts tied to addresses make it simple for Target to suggest which of its more than 1,800 stores are close by, and have a certain product in stock.

“Say you’re shopping for something, and you don’t check out,” the consultant said. “You can say, ‘Hey, that shirt is available down the road. I’ll give you 10 bucks to go get it.’ Target can offer the incentive to get you into the store, where you’ll spend more.”

It goes back to eliminating the divisions between shopping online and shopping in a store as retailers try their best to create a blended, cross-channel model that will drive the most revenue. There are also logistical considerations. Because retailers ship much of their online goods from warehouses or stores throughout the country, each store doesn’t necessarily match the inventory of what’s online, so it has to ensure inventory accuracy before sending a promotional prompt.

In making up for cart abandonment, a personalized message, even one that’s automatically generated, that ties into a customer’s shopping history to suggest new buys at low prices works well to generate new sales, Schlicht said.

“The more that retailers know who you are and where you are and what your preferences are, they can target you with more contextualized types of offers,” the consultant said.

The post Target is dealing with online cart abandonment by luring customers into stores appeared first on Digiday.

Twitter is doing its part to keep its users in the U.S. informed about the 2018 midterm election Nov. 6. Starting Thursday, people in the U.S. began seeing Election Day countdowns in their timelines, and clicking on the Get Started button will bring up information from Get to the Polls on where their polling place…

Apple reported another quarter of record revenue and profit, but its shares fell in after-hours trading following the company’s lackluster sales guidance for the key holiday quarter.

Google employees around the world have staged a series of walkouts to protest a workplace culture that they say promotes and protects perpetrators of sexual harassment.

The shared office-space company has begun putting daily limits on the free alcohol it offers New York City tenants.

The Justice Department unsealed charges Thursday against a Chinese state-owned firm and its Taiwan partner for allegedly stealing trade secrets from the U.S.’s largest memory-chip maker, Micron Technology.

Shares of Japan’s top mobile carriers including SoftBank tumbled on fears that government pressure to lower fees would curtail profit growth in one of the world’s most lucrative mobile markets.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is suspending its future work with a nonprofit chaired by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, reflecting the unease of Western entities in dealing with the kingdom as it struggles to explain the killing of a dissident journalist.

College programs will talk about “erring on the side of safety” – but at the end of the day, it is about the money.