How we converted 30 percent of our free list to paid subscription in 12 weeks

From free to pay, how we converted 30 percent of our customers to paid subscription

By Fiona Boyd |

Last Thursday I attended a really terrific event run by the Churchill Club, called Blog Smog. The focus of the event was 3 successful bloggers talking about how they cut through the plethora of content in the blogoshphere to create loyal audiences and ongoing revenue for their blogs.

The speakers included, Darren Rouse – Problogger, Amanda Gome – Smart Company and Ross Hill – owner of yabble.com.au, rentoid.com and other ventures.

There were a couple of things said by the speakers that grabbed my attention that related directly to my own experience, and I thought I’d go into these in a bit more detail in today’s post.

Firstly, the company that David and I are known for is the online subscription site for artsworkers called Arts Hub. We started as a free jobs list in April 2000, and sold as a paid subscription business with thousands of subscribers in July 2006. I’ll tell you more about that later.

We converted 30% of our membership website subscribers to paid subscribers.

But it was Amanda who really made me startle when she mentioned at Blog Smog that the only site she knew that had successfully made the transition from free to pay, was Arts Hub. It made me reflect back to the time when we actually ran the conversion process, what we did and how we managed to convert around 30% of our free list to paid subscribers.

And continuing with paid content, Darren Rouse of Problogger gave a bit of a news alert when he said that he would be launching a premium version of Problogger that would indeed be for paying subscribers and which would allow them better access direct to him, each other and to high-end specialized content.

Returning to Arts Hub then, exactly what was it that we did that enabled us to convert 30% of our freebie subscribers into paid subscribers over a 12 week period? Firstly, I must state that our whole campaign was mapped out on one page and I doubt we referred to that page more than a couple of times, clearly the success was not in excessive and detailed planning.

What on reflection, I believe was key in the conversion process, was that we made it fun, we had great prizes for those who converted, and the new site had a lot of additional value, such as up-to-the-minute news content and forums.

The Jobs Bulletin started in April 2000 and was sent to 17 recipients via email. By the end of August of that year we had around 3000 receiving the Bulletin and growing. It was at this time that David and I decided that if we wanted to be more than a weekly Jobs List, we would need to execute a way of getting the folk on the list to pay.

We had done some action research in 1999 and 2000 about what the arts industry needed in terms of information and the same results kept on being repeated – jobs and real arts news. Jobs was easy, we had built a simple website and companies were lodging their own jobs, and others were emailing them through to David and I and we were manually submitting them. News was a bit trickier. Much of the arts news reported in mainstream outlets was written in either an ‘artsy’ inaccessible fashion or the real news issues that were going on in the arts, were just not reported at all. In fact, there was such a scarcity of arts news in Australia, that most of our headline scrapes for news on the new site, which was originally called Dramaticonline.com, were from overseas.

So the new website was to have two key planks – jobs and news for the arts.

Our challenge then was to convince the 3000 people on the Jobs Bulletin list that they would actually want to pay for the privilege of joining our new site. I guess the first thing to make clear is that we were quite blunt that we would be turning off the Jobs Bulletin three weeks after the launch of the new site. Also, when we launched dramaticonline.com on 25 October 2000 we gave all 3000 members on the free list one Jobs Bulletin, and 3 News Bulletins a week. This was the taste-tester – if they didn’t like it, they weren’t going to shell out money for a paid subscription.

We also came to the conclusion that at the time those who worked in the arts viewed themselves as much ‘put upon’ and that nobody in the wider world, especially the mainstream media, took the industry seriously. So, we decided to treat our audience like your usual consumer, and that if we wanted them to pay for a subscription, we needed to give them added incentive and a chance for a benefit greater than our offering. Hence we came up with a very, very cool prize schedule – including a grand prize of a trip for 2 to Bali, Amazon vouchers each week and a couple of gorgeous IMacs (the coloured ones) during the life of the campaign. We figured that if housewives could get chances to win great prizes by watching daytime television, then arts workers could win equally great prizes by joining our site.

I must admit, none of this was budgeted for, we just prayed that enough people would convert to pay so that we could pay for the prizes when they were drawn. Talk about flying by the seat of our pants!

As it turned out, about 500 folk converted in the period between launch on 25 October and cut-off deadline, 15 November 2000. Another 500 converted in the next couple of months. And still others streamed through in 2001 though by then we stopped marketing to the free list and went on the hunt for new members out in the real world.

What were the success factors?

1) Our copy was fun. We acknowledged those who worked in the industry and created a ‘clubby’ feel that this site was just for them.

2) The prizes were compelling at that time.

3) The new website (built by David in just six weeks, from scratch) worked unbelievably well and excited everyone who joined, thereby creating word-of-mouth.

4) We had an increasing sense of urgency in our copy as deadlines for grand prizes loomed and the cut-off to the old site was about to happen. Calls to action were translated into sales very efficiently.

5) We emailed our list a couple of times in addition to sending Jobs and News Bulletins to them – explaining why joining was of benefit to them.

6) We had a complete live online transaction capability – unlike many other sites at the time – even though only 50% paid online at the start, the capability still created ‘buzz’ in the industry.

7) We had great news articles and stories, written by industry players and stars. For the first time, arts issues were being reported and written about with seriousness.

We had thrown every last cent we had at it so it had to work, David and I just kept at it until we turned a corner.

9) We were unique, we were different and we had ‘heart’. And it showed in our language and the imagery on the website.

Okay, so that’s our conversion campaign in a nutshell. Sure there are more technical elements, like exactly what time of day to send out a bulk marketing email, how many is too many marketing emails (we did find this out) and the like.

But, the above 9 points really are the nuts and bolts of how we converted 30% of the free list to paid over 12 weeks. I must tell you that this was an incredibly scary experience, there was no Plan B if the campaign failed. But fortunately, it didn’t! It probably helps that we had no-one to look to, as far as we knew at the time, we were the first to attempt such a strategy online, therefore we just made it up as we went along.

Times are different now and I’d probably encourage contemporary bloggers and niche content site owners to build much larger free audiences before they attempt the conversion to pay – and to have multiple levels to their content. General content is free, premium content requires a subscription. If your audience loves you and you provide good value, I reckon they’ll pay for your best stuff.

Look at me – I pay for content I love – Crikey, Marcus Today, Great Au Pair.

If you want to find out more about the conversion campaign, please consider purchasing our book, Niche Content Millionaire – the rest of the secrets are in there.

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