Washington Post’s Research Approach

“So much research”…

3 million subscribers, that’s the number behind The Washington Post’s subscription success story, and last week we were fortunate to have Nicole Orders join us for an AMA — here’s what you might have missed.

Nicole Orders, Product Lead
The Washington Post

Yesterday I sent a note about the core principles of sustainable subscriber growth being Empathy & Adaptability which got a massive response. So I wanted to follow up with these insights from Nicole’s AMA and her team’s use of customer research to achieve the staggering and sustained growth of The Washington Post.

Below is a snippet from the AMA, SubscriptionWorks members click here to see the discussion. (Not yet a member? Click here to join)

“Overall, from a product standpoint, we are hyper-focused on the reader experience”

This is such a great example of applying the empathy & adaptability priorities to better understand the customer and form hypotheses for testing experiences that will better meet their needs. Nicole’s team is using a mix of behavioral, attitudinal and competitive research to round out their understanding, but the empathy doesn’t end there. Research is also used to validate the efforts and hone the experience further — a compliment to the quant KPI performance analysis that ensures a learning outcome even if there’s not a significant performance gain — building a sustainable growth flywheel.

Sounds like an expensive effort, right? Well, thankfully we are living in a time when customer research is cheaper and faster than ever before. There’s myriad ways to improve our understanding of customers to inform optimizations that will deliver strong ROI and unlock growth where it seems to be stuck. In our experience, it does require a specific subscriber journey perspective to understand how each stage of that long-term journey represents different jobs to be done and contributes to net growth. These are important nuances to be considered in the research strategy to get the most value from it.

On May 17 & 18 we’re hosting a workshop on our Sustainable Subscriber Growth Framework that demonstrates how we use research to achieve an 83% test success rate and build momentum for growth that can sustain challenging markets. We’re also planning another workshop specifically on our research methods, so let me know if you want a heads up when that’s available.

If you’re looking for more insights like these, our SubscriptionWorks membership gives you access to live events like this AMA (plus 3 years of historical AMA transcripts, too) along with discounts to our workshops and all the benefits of networking and learning from each other in a private peer community. Learn more here.

On may 23rd, Eric Hellweg of One Medical will be our next AMA, where I’m sure we’ll be treated to lots more valuable insight and experience.

Thanks
- Matt