How Data Helps Make Decisions for Digital AND Print Products
AMA with Mike Orren, Chief Product Officer, The Dallas Morning News
As you and your team continue to accelerate the subscription-based digital transformation, we want to focus on discussing proven and adaptable acquisition and onboarding strategies that not only drive growth, but ultimately lead to a better full-journey subscriber experience and an increased customer lifetime value. Our goal was to deliver actionable insights and provide connections for your continued success.
Mike Orren, Chief Product Officer at The Dallas Morning News
“One of things we’ve found is that we were over-complicating a lot of our efforts and have settled down into broader, but more effective data points. Are you a local and what’s your favorite section? Much more nuance than that tends to be wasted in our world.”
Full Transcript
*Questions submitted by community members
Please join me in welcoming today's AMA speaker. Mike Orren is the Chief Product Officer of The Dallas Morning News and a board member at The Local Media Consortium. He has worked in digital and print local media for thirty years, including leadership roles at D Magazine and American Lawyer Media; consulting stints for CBS, Examiner and many locals; and founding PegasusNews, the largest startup of the “hyperlocal” movement in the early 2000’s.
Question: How do you ensure softer, more qualitative research is translated into specific actions and tactics?
First, we generally tend to follow a discipline in which we always do quantitative research first and then use qualitative to answer the questions that research raises.
Readers like or don’t like X, but why? What are they looking for that we missed? We tend to do more of our qualitative research around print, where we have (or used to have) less data.
While we’re playing offense on digital, we tend to be playing more defense on print where it’s more of a game of retention of longstanding subscribers. We’re risk averse there, and so we do a lot of qual on print moves to make sure we aren’t alienating big spenders by moving a crossword puzzle. As a standalone local, we have limited budget so don’t do as much digital user testing as we’d like, so we rely on quant data there.
Question: Do you have a set budget for research and do you consider that effort as "always on"?
We do have a modest annual budget, and in some cases (like this year) when we have specific questions, we will find additional budget by saving elsewhere.
Pretty much any change in print is going to drive research spend
That’s been reduced with better ePaper replica data.
Question: Have you seen a change in subscription volume or shift in digital vs print due to Covid?
First, let me explain how we think of our product suite. We have print, and then digital being the website and native mobile apps. But then there is the ePaper digital replica of the print edition. It is technically a digital product, but is used more by print and former print readers. We saw growth of more than 30% in digital subscriptions during Covid as people needed lots of reliable local information. Our print patterns didn’t change much because we never missed delivery, even during the winter storm that took our power in much of Texas. That said, we saw an increase in usage of the ePaper among our print readers when delivery was late or they didn’t want to go outside.
The pandemic also caused us to evaluate our packages because we saw early on we weren’t getting the digital bump some of our peers were.
We were only offering term plans at the time (three month minimum) which kept churn low, but was retarding our volume growth. The larger volume of the pandemic allowed us to prove quickly that a monthly plan, even with a little bump in churn, was superior.
Question: Did you notice a shift in the devices that were used to consume media during the pandemic eg) switch from mobile to desktop?
Not as much as you would expect. As I mentioned, ePaper grew. I suppose desktop might have grown more as a percentage, but early on we saw that we were not performing as well as we’d like in Google News and attacked that by quickly adding Google AMP.
AMP by nature increases your mobile traffic and so overall traffic growth times a mobile enhancement muted any device impact.
To the reader it’s not super-obvious. It’s ostensibly built for speed, so leaves out some of our (mostly advertising) features. We thoroughly believe news search is weighted to AMP today, and that will soon translate to core web vitals. But if you’re like us we can’t beat AMP on CWV with our mobile, so we still have to do it.
Question: What are the top 3 data points you monitor for retention efforts?
I think the customer journey is another great differentiator from a traditional lease. The key difference is that tSubscriber engagement. How much time are they spending with us and how frequently do they visit? This is really the main one.
Do they subscribe to at least one newsletter? Interestingly, multiple newsletters don’t make much difference.
Have they engaged with our rewards program or events?
We have more actionable reports, including a generated list of at-risk folks and their needs.
Risk vs LTV. And risk is based on consumption; high risk - high LTV get most attention.
Question: What are the top 3 data points you monitor for engagement efforts?
Frequency of use
Time of use (more so than volume of pages)
Do they “lane skip?” Do they (like most readers) only dive into one section (metro, sports, business, entertainment) or do they read across multiple sections? The first lane skip is the best indicator we’ve found of readiness to buy.
Question: On the first page of the check-out process, we noticed you present prices on a per-week basis (e.g. $0.99 per week) even though customers are billed quarterly. Have you always presented prices on a per-week basis? If not, what other presentations (e.g. per month, per quarter, etc) have you tried? What drove the decision to present per week? Is this something you continually test?
Great questions that will let me explain a few unique things about selling digital in the local space…First, welcome to legacy publishing. Print newspapers have been sold “by the week” for time immemorial, so when we went digital that was the default. Some of that is a habit. Some of that is that legacy subscription systems work that way.Second, one of the great things about local is that by and large we aren’t in competition with other local papers so we share tremendous amounts of data quite freely, sometimes through third-party consultants who anonymize the data; others directly.
To to an extent, we cheat some testing by learning from our peers. Not to say we haven’t at some point tried everything, but there are some key offers that consistently win.
So, as a default, we’ve all learned that couching it weekly generally works best. That said, what offer you saw depends on a number of factors: where we think you are geographically; what you’re reading; or in some cases a richer propensity. For instance, if you’d clicked on a “member-exclusive” article, the offer would have been $5 for three months; then $3.99 / week billed monthly.
Question: What has the print business looked like for DMN? Is it growing or shrinking? What do you see as the future for print and how it serves as a sticky subscription product?
The print business is always shrinking, but it is still a massive piece of our revenue. The good news is that our subscription and delivery teams have done a great job of slowing down the decline by reducing churn. The pandemic took out a lot of print advertising prematurely and most doesn’t look to be coming back — advertisers who were within a couple years of moving on broke their habit early during the pandemic. So on the one hand, speaking of the local news industry overall, print as we know it has a finite life. I suspect that within a few years, most locals will print Sunday only. We’ve already seen some big chains cut a day here and there and both Tampa (Wed-Sun) and Little Rock (Sunday only) have pioneered that world.
However — and I can’t stress this enough — the ePaper is the bridge on which we will live or die. You will see ePapers still produced daily, just not printed. Just as I’m not counting on turning on any 25 year-olds to print, I’ve learned that the web experience, no matter how good, does not serve the habit of the 67 year-old print subscriber, who remains among our best customers both in terms of rate and loyalty.
It’s been hard for me to come to this conclusion — I’ve always denigrated the replica as the worst of both worlds, with all the liabilities of print and digital wrapped up in one product. But you can’t break habit in a subscription business. As long as the print readers live, we need to feed their habit, even if it’s on a tablet. So you’ll see a lot of our focus right now on “digital readiness” with our print folks. This doesn’t mean getting them on the web, but getting them to log into the ePaper more often. We’re starting that by adding ePaper exclusive features (bonus page of comics, extended box scores, etc) to that product, and making sure that anything we cut out of print survives into the ePaper.We have a dashboard where we track KPIs around digital readiness that really winds up being all the numbers that roll up to digital subscriptions or ePaper use by print readers. That said, our colleagues who have taken the leap tell us that most print readers won’t move until we don’t give them a choice. When to make that move is probably the biggest decision any of us will make in our careers.
Question: What introductory rates have done well for DMN? Do you try to hook new users on attractive introductory offers?
We are a little bit of an outlier here because we’ve always focused more on maximizing revenue. So we shy away from aggressive intro rates. They tend to churn and if they don’t it’s a longer road to pricing them up. Fearing we’d gone too far we tested some free trials and low prices this year and that didn’t go well churn-wise.
We would rather sell one subscription for $15 than three for $5. The higher price one is more loyal in our experience.
We’ve seen some of our colleagues (notably The Boston Globe) really hit large subscriber numbers and then discount once they hit the natural ceiling. That makes sense to me.
Question: Do you run A/B tests? What have been some of your big wins or key learnings?
Sort of? We’ve done a lot of infrastructure work the last couple of years (new CMS; new subscription platform) to enable that. We have a lot of that in the roadmap for the back half of this year.
In the meantime, we sort of hack A/B tests on key things like paywall offers; loyalty results; etc by mining our data and / or triangulating the experiences of our peers in other markets.
That's really key in fine tuning your product and adapting it to meet consumer demands.
Question: In the current post covid climate, what data points are you using to collect the most relevant information to acquire, onboard, and retain your online users?
Overall, we’re back to more of a normal, where national politics and covid aren’t eclipsing the typical drivers. All news sites we track have see softer traffic post-Covid and post-Trump, and that top-of-funnel reduction hits sales too.
We very closely track engagement, path to conversion (both direct and influence) and related topic behaviors at a very granular level.
Local is a vector that always changes the game a bit, meaning that even in a market as big as Dallas, it’s hard to get enough data on a less-engaged reader to customize retention, onboarding or even sales. One of things we’ve found is that we were over-complicating a lot of our efforts and have settled down into broader, but more effective data points. Are you a local and what’s your favorite section? Much more nuance than that tends to be wasted in our world.
Question: After clicking on an article on Dallas Morning News, a pop-up prompted me to sign-up for the News Roundup Newsletter. Has this proven to be an effective way to acquire email addresses of non-subscribers for your newsletter? Also, are there any off-site campaigns that have been effective in acquiring nonsubscriber emails for your newsletter?
Newsletters are our most effective channel for driving (and retaining) subscribers and The Roundup is our best performer, save for during the pandemic when our Covid newsletter was tops.
I think it’s just the reminder to go seek out the content. It’s a usage ping.
We have about 2 million newsletter subscribers to a total of 53 newsletters, which we purge for non-activity every 60 days. Open rates are in the 40% range; CTRS around 16%.
Question: If you could change one thing about the way you and your team handled the Covid situation, what would it be?
We would have reacted more quickly by dropping our term plans for monthlies. And I think we would have been more measured in throwing open our Covid coverage for free outside the meter.
Opportunity cost vs public good - certainly a dilemma in the world of local news.
That sounded great in March, but we were kicking ourselves by September.