Hi, everyone. My name is Mary Rosberg, and I'm with Recurly.
The real question is around retention and loyalty and really trying to understand what's working and what's not working.
So, a little bit more about me. I've been with Recurly for ten years now, and I've been in subscriptions for twelve years.
I'm very excited to host this session and to learn more from our esteemed guests. Emily, you wanna start us off with a quick intro of your world?
Yes. Hello, everyone. My name is Emily. I'm delighted to be here. I am currently at The Guardian where I am working on the US reader revenue growth.
Before that I worked at Conde Nast in the Atlantic and a few other places, always on the subscriptions, consumer revenue, reader revenue side. So, like Mary have a lot of passion for the field and, a lot of pride in, the role that that I get to play with, journalism and media and helping to create sustainable businesses. So, thank you so much for having me, and I can't wait to dig in a little bit more. Cool.
Taylor.
Yeah. Hi, everybody. My name is Taylor Putnam. I am a commercial product leader at Alaska Airlines. In case some of you aren't West Coast based or aren't familiar, Alaska Airlines, transported around forty million people throughout, the globe last year. We started out pretty humble as a kind of connecting remote villages in Alaska and have grown a lot over the past ninety years, and now that growth includes subscriptions, my role at Alaska means that I'm in charge of our subscription, portfolio, kind of introducing these net new subscriptions to the markets, figuring out what works, innovating, driving retention, all of that good stuff.
Before our last guys spent time at Boeing, Lyft, and Convoy in the tech sector.
You both have such great backgrounds. I'm really excited to hear what you guys have to share. Okay.
One last, housekeeping note. We do have chat set up for questions. So if you've got questions during the session, please let us know. We will be manning that area and looking to keep up with you all in your conversations about our conversations.
Alright. Let's jump into it. Let's start with something lightweight.
How do you define retention and loyalty, at your companies, and what are some of the bigger challenges that you're facing? Either one of you would like to jump in first.
I'll go I'll go. I saw Taylor that we both unmuted at the same time.
So I love that.
We'll figure it out. Yeah. We'll figure it out. So The Guardian has a pretty interesting, revenue model.
You know, it's ubiquitous in the United States at least, and and globally to have, those media companies are increasingly becoming paywalled. So, you must be a paid subscriber in order to access the full depth and breadth of our content.
At The Guardian, it's a supporter model. So the mission statement is free for all, beholden to no one. So, all of the Guardian journalism is accessible to anyone on the regardless as as to their relationship with us, and regardless as to their willingness or their ability to pay.
So so we have, you know, the the motivation for for supporting the Guardian is certainly different than the motivation for subscribing to access exclusivity, access journalism that you wouldn't normally be able to do, which is what a lot of media companies rely on.
So, so the, the mission based motivation of support is a big piece of, what we see attracts people and retains people. And so we still have, different classes of support, so to speak. So we have, you know, the entry sort of, like, people who are paying lower, recurring prices, and then we have people at various stages up through, you know, high value recurring, supporters, all elective and all at whatever value people want to pay.
And we also have, what we call one time support. So people who prefer not to be in a recurring relationship, but, want to give on a one time at their you know, whether they're spurred to do it once or at a repeat cadence.
So even though we have this, unique way of, attracting people and and building these revenue relationships with them. Once we have that relationship established, it does follow a lot of the same definitions and, tactics you could say that a a subscription business would follow. So, you know, we still measure churn looking at, what is our growth and how many people have left and so forth to see what the overall base looks like. And then what is our retention rate from someone staying with us from month to month or year to year.
And then, you know, looking at all of those signals that that contribute to someone's likelihood to do that. And a lot of that, I think, will probably be familiar to the media landscape of, you know, engagement with our journalists and and so forth. So, yeah. So so we have this, I oop. There goes the lights. Hopefully, you can still see me. I'm in this conference room, which this is probably a great time for me to pass the mic to Taylor anyway.
Taylor.
Yeah. Absolutely. So, loyalty at an airline, right, means a lot of different things. But, for the purposes of today's conversation, I'll frame it, in how we look at loyalty on our subscription products, both our flight subscription, which is called FlightPass, or our ancillary subscription, which is brand new and called Alaska Access. Those subscriptions are new to Alaska and really novel in the airline industry, especially in the US.
They're one of our key strategic focuses for both revenue growth as well as, customer growth in terms of market share and preference, across our competing markets.
Loyalty for our subscription products is synonymous to us with, like, stickiness or halo effects. What I mean by that is, like, being a loyal subscriber to Alaska goes beyond on just the subscription itself. And we measure the full customer's behavior with Alaska, not just on that subscription, right, to understand their loyalty. So if they're buying our answer subscription, are they also flying more? Right? And we kind of categorize our loyalty, and engagement scores that way.
By subscribing to either of our products, we want to see those people not only stay subscribed, but more frequently choose Alaska for all travel needs. Right? Cars, hotels, vacations, flights.
And those take rates or, like, your preference should also increase as your loyalty to the subscription itself increases.
And so that's why we measure those kind of stickiness effects as a key indicator to loyalty in our subscriptions.
Makes total sense. It it makes me think of, like, the short term versus long term. So short term, we see different tactics around retention versus long term loyalty building, which is a lot of what I hear, you know, Emily bringing up in terms of the Guardian.
How do you balance it between what you're doing short term wise versus what you're doing long term loyalty building wise? I I think they're they're a little different in nature. And what considerations do you really think about when you make decisions around that?
Taylor, you wanna go first since Emily took first? Yeah.
Sure. Yeah. So I think traditionally, a lot of subscription businesses measure their success in terms of breakage. Right? That's kind of your your profit indicator at times. But at Alaska, it's almost something we don't measure, we don't look at as success, in terms of retention.
We want our subscribers to use their flight credits or their Wi Fi passes.
And we've learned that the use of those credits is a huge indicator to future churn. And so in terms of short term tactics, right, if we're not seeing someone use their subscription, we will actually remind them of the benefits that they have available and to use those, which is obviously, like, takes away from breakage, but is truly what we want, and it begets a lot of that stickiness behavior.
That transparency that we provide really helps us with that long term strategy.
It's a a core kind of cornerstone of our brand identity is that trust and generosity, which holds true in our subscription portfolio. So making sure that we're clear about terms and conditions, making customer service available via phone, all of those things really allow us to keep that long term loyalty even if they may cost us things, in the moment.
We recognize that, like, that that strategy might not work for all subscription businesses. But at Alaska, we've really seen success in the more that we provide to the customer in terms of transparency and communication, actually, the more loyal they become, to our brand in general.
That's fascinating. That actually reminds me of my Cinemark membership. So I have a membership to, a movie club.
And in the membership, I get a certain number of free tickets each month, and they do try to get me to use them. Like, I I just kind of assumed they wouldn't, but they do. They do that short term thing where they're like, hey. Don't waste your free tickets.
Go. Go see the movies. Because of that, hey. I'm gonna get real value. I'm gonna get enjoyment out of the experience, and therefore, I'm gonna renew my subscription for that movie club.
But if I don't use the free tickets and go see movies monthly, I may not because I forget the joy of that customer experience. Right?
How about you, Emily? I love that parallel.
Yeah. And I think that's exactly right. And a nice segue is just, you know, the the whole, like, frequency, recency, depth. Like, we want, our readers, we want our subscribers, our supporters, whoever they are, to have a feel like they have a relationship with our products.
And, you know, at the core of everything The Guardian does is its journalism and delivering on that high quality journalism, everything from, everything from, you know, in-depth investigative pieces to, the live blog, which is, you know, chronicling things in real time.
We wanna make sure that, people are both, you know, getting, the satisfaction out of, reading the journalism, whether or not it's like the satisfaction of being informed or the satisfaction of being surprised and delighted. We launched a new wellness vertical recently called Well, Actually, and, it's been just like a delight to see all of the different avenues that that vertical is exploring.
So so I I I feel so lucky and confident that at the core of what makes the The Guardian a valuable proposition for people is the journalism because we can always make sure to deliver on that.
And, but we see, you know, the mission of both keeping the Guardian free and open to all and also the types of articles that, the the coverage that the journalism, tackles. Like, we have a really, devoted and and climate desk. And so the Guardian's reporting on climate, the environment, and so forth is, I think, one of its, major differentiators in in the the the the frequency like, the the the volume of content that we're publishing and and the the depth that it goes into.
And so people who feel really strongly about the importance of climate change also can find an avenue for supporting The Guardian and feeling that connection to another cause that they believe in.
So there's both the mission with the Guardian directly and the mission for the, the important topics that it covers and the important, you know, this being an election year, the consequence of of the politics of of everything going around in the United States and the global impact of that.
Like, all of those can be motivating factors.
Yeah. I'm not even gonna touch elections.
It's gonna drive a lot. It's gonna drive a lot this year in every part of the world, at climate change as well. I mean, we're we're in such a time. When I think about short term and long term, The Guardian has a long term game, not just with its customers, but with the world at large. And I think the mission is just totally fascinating, to be honest.
To create observation, I'm gonna have to take that back internally. Please. Please.
Because I I am I am truly moved thinking about that.
It's like, woah. It's a lot.
Onboarding and renewal journeys. Let's let's talk about the beginning of the relationship, like, when you're starting with your customers and bringing them in.
Apologies for my light going on and off randomly as well.
Let's talk about which parts of it are, like, really critical for you. Are there things that you think about that you could share as the tips that have worked best for you when you were building out onboarding and renewal?
Emily, why don't you take us in on that?
Yeah. Absolutely. I think, a good philosophy to have is just for every action someone may take with your product, your site, your app, whatever it is, what is your reaction? And sometimes your reaction is just to sit back and let them do the thing they wanna do.
So if someone is on the site and they want to visit another article from an article that they've landed on. Yeah. The best thing we could probably do action is no action at all. It's just let them take that, let them get more familiar with the journalism, complete these onward journeys that they wanna take. But if someone gives us their email address, that's an action we do want a reaction to. And so that's where I think really smart onboarding comes in.
If we know that someone has, automatically recurring payment coming up, giving the surround sound of reminders of how much it, you know, your support matters and how much, the the the type of journalism that we've published since the last time you've supported. Yeah. Things like that are really essential. So, so I like to think about it that way. It's just what's the action?
Do we do something? If so, what's the best possible thing that we can do?
I like that. Kayla, I'm seeing you nodding as well.
Yeah. Now I'm gonna take that and, bring it back, the action reaction piece.
Yeah. So to be candid, right, Alaska is new to subscriptions. And like I said, we're, like, kind of one of the only airlines playing in this space, which means we're still learning what's best to do in terms of onboarding and renewals.
But what I feel very passionate about is making sure that everything comes with, like, true experimentation early on in the journey, so AB testing or multivariate testing. Like, if you think removing the address field at sign up will get you more customers, more subscribers, then test it, right, versus just going with your gut feeling. If you think investing in, like, rich and robust guided onboarding content, would keep people more engaged or get them engaged from the start, and prevent that churn, Build an MVP and test that before we're committing teams to building out a full, like, development plan and committing to ongoing maintenance of onboarding. Right? Maybe people are just as engaged without it.
It like, it this also may sound simple, but starting off, I think benchmarking has been incredibly important to me. Right? What does good onboarding look like? You you know, you were talking about another subscription you have.
So kind of pulling from real world examples even if they're not in your industry to understand what others do. Just like I'm gonna steal the action reaction piece from, Emily. And, like, I frequently ask, recruiterally all the time, like, what have your customers tried? What have they learned?
Like, to try and leverage like, leverage other expertise where you can, because subscriptions are really plentiful. So there is a lot that's already been tried, and you can just kind of adopt those those benchmarks, as best practice.
I like that. You know, when you were talking about being new to subscriptions, it makes me think of, like, the beginning of the journey for a lot of different companies that that I've worked with.
And for them, it came down to what are the metrics that I really want to drive right now in this stage of my business?
And sometimes it's what are the metrics I wanna drive? What are the metrics my board wants to see? What are the metrics my investors wanna see? So oftentimes at the beginning of subscription businesses, they're looking for customer acquisition, and, like, that's the holy grail. They don't have a lot of subscribers yet, so they're not really tracking churn yet. They're just they wanna know how many can I acquire, how quickly can I acquire?
And that drives that AB testing. It may be, well, if that's the goal, then I'm gonna set up a free trial and I'm not gonna require a credit card.
So then layer in maturity becomes how valuable was the customer that you acquired? What was that conversion rate for that? Was that customer without providing a billing card at the beginning of the trial, was were they really invested? Did they stick around? Did they renew in the future, in the in the next month? So, yeah, I always find it's it's what you measure that that ends up driving the AB testing and ends up driving what you focus on, any given quarter or really any given year.
Let's talk about personalization. So one of my favorite topics, because it just keeps cutting up. Every year, I think this is the year that personalization doesn't end up being top of the heap in terms of themes, and every year I'm wrong.
Tell me a little bit about what personalization means to your company and how it shows up in your subscriber business.
Taylor, you wanna start? Yeah. Sure. I would say for Alaska overall, personalization is a huge strategic focus right now.
Right? Personalizing recommendations or, kind of curating a trip for someone. In subscriptions. Since we are so new, it's really hard to personalize without a lot of that data.
But something that we've learned pretty early on is that we maybe leaned a little too far into personalization in our original offer, meaning we tried to give all these different segments of customers an option for a flight subscription.
And we actually saw a big hindrance in acquisition because customers were confused. There was too many options trying to personalize to them. Totally. And so we lost people in the side up flow. And so that really meant to me that, like, when you're innovating or when you're let's say you're already an established business and now you're releasing a subscription, like, simple is best to begin with, then layer on personalization and additional options because you want people to first, like, understand the core offering, and then you can make it more tailored to them, at least in in our industry.
And it and it may be like that not just in terms of your industry or your company in terms of growth in subscriptions, but also your individual customers' maturity level or growth within your brand.
I I know when I think about something like a box of the month, they start a customer out with something very basic just to not confuse them to your point, just to get them in the door. And then once they're in the door and repeating another month after, then come the personalization offers. Like, I know you love our product now. You've gotten it two months in a row. Have you ever considered this? And then, you know, it it layers in a little bit later in the customer journey. How about you, Emily?
I think all of that is exactly right. You you want to have experiences that enchant people and make them fall in love with you and wanna come back to you. But, a lot of times too, people like the discovery and they wanna explore on their own and they don't you can over personalize in super serving something that you think someone may like, but that could take away from the joy of discovering this whole other Yeah. Area of of of your, in our case, journalism.
So, like, in addition to personalization, I really like to think about, like, what I've what we've talked about, at previous jobs is, like, the difference between personalization and customization.
So, you know, if we know someone is coming to us from their mobile device, from a newsletter, going to a live blog at lunch versus someone who is coming to us directly, on the weekend on a tablet and reading a law enforcement investigative piece. Like, we know a lot about what that person's, you know, how much time they probably have, what how much time they're willing to give to us in that moment, what kind of information that they're looking to get. And so, I haven't, unfortunately, can't share any examples of, like, how we've, you know, put this into the fields. But, I'm really eager to explore that piece of personalization in a more, in a more profound way because it is so, I think, also just so much more scalable. Mhmm.
Because you know what Mary specifically calls out she likes and what Taylor specifically calls out she likes may be much more nuanced, and there may not be a lot of ways to to bring that forward and have that be something that works at a at a, you know, at a mass levels.
Yeah. I I I was listening to a piece on NPR, a public radio station here, around personalization and whether we've crossed over the threshold of people finding it creepy that you're getting offers that are really tailored to you. I personally feel that we have crossed the threshold, but I live in this bubble called San Francisco. So I I don't think my opinion matters. Do you guys feel like you're you're there personally, and do you feel like your cohort that you're selling into is there?
I think it depends on the customer themselves. Right? So if you're looking at kind of that that next generation of customers or the young Gen z's, like, that's what they expect. They they expect it to be personalized, and they want kind of that burden of planning when we're thinking about, like, taking a trip taken off their plate.
Right? And so in our research, we see that they like the per the hyper personalization. But if you look at some of the the older generations, they do find it creepy or intrusive or they have the time. Like, I think Emily's talking about, right, how much time do they have?
They they expect to invest time in finding the right thing for them. So I'm not sure, at least, from my experience, that there is, like, a a one size fits all in terms of how maybe intrusive is a strange word, but, like, how intrusive that that personalization should be.
What about you, Emily?
Yeah. I agree. And also just as, you know, the way that we use data and the way that data is governance by the various places that we're operating in is, something that the Guardian considers, you know, takes the utmost care with. And, so that's also, I think, worthy of saying in this conversation is, you know, we wanna always be ethically responsible and and communicate clearly as as Taylor said earlier about, like, the terms and conditions of, like, what is establishing a relationship with us and make sure that we're within the bounds of what that relationship is.
So this is another, like, action reaction, I think. Like, we're all more comfortable building those personalizations and so forth. When people have taken the action to let us know, like, yes, I'm opting into this experience. Yeah.
They're into it. Yeah. Yeah. They they want it. And otherwise, it's, you know, are there other ways to enrich the experience that aren't at a personalized level?
Like, I certainly think there are.
Yeah.
It actually makes me think of a few weeks ago, I was on TripAdvisor and they just gently suggested, hey. Have you ever considered AI to help you plan your next couple days in Portugal?
And I thought about it, and I thought, no. No. Actually, I haven't.
You know, whereas if they had forced it or hidden it, I think I wouldn't have liked it as much. It it is that opt in, even for someone like me where I I do think I want more personalization.
I mentioned something earlier. I mentioned community and building community and how different companies find it really important to establish trust. Obviously, that's at the forefront of both of your brands, which I find fascinating.
What are you doing to really foster that sense of community amongst your subscribers?
What do you do to create and nurture that?
Pardon the off camera moment. I had to wave again to turn on the lights. Thermostat. Alright. Good. Alright.
Why don't you reverse Taylor?
Go ahead. Yeah. Sure. Yep. So what's interesting for us is that, like, we don't think about, establishing that community at the subscriber level, and that's because our loyalty, like, programs are are much higher, like a a bigger umbrella for us.
So Alessa has the mileage plan program, which is kind of world class in terms of earning miles. So what we do is make sure that, like, when I'm creating a subscription product, how does it complement and amplify that overall broader community that we are trying to establish? So we do a lot in terms of, like, local community engagement as well as, like, keeping our general Alaska flyer feeling like they're part of a community at that higher loyalty program level.
And so it's important for me instead of trying to figure out how to generate a community of subscribers to figure out how do I make sure that they kind of ladder up to our broader strategy around fostering community?
I think one really interesting, question too when we think about community is, how much do people want community with other Guardian readers, other Alaska Airlines flyers and so forth? And how much do they want community with you specifically? You know, they feel a connection to you. So, so The Guardian has a lot of really, voicey and powerful, opinion writers who sort of create these communities of readers that want that connection with the with the journalist, and it's given permission to all of the journalists to have points of view within their reporting and to, you know, to to let their personality show through. And so, I think that's like that can be sort of an undervalued or at least not that it should be very valued. The piece of, like, the con the community, the connection with your with your core, and also thinking about how does your your, your readers, how do they create their own micro communities?
Your model, Emily, reminds me of Twitch, actually, because they've got streamers. And each of those streamers have a whole community to themselves. Right? And, of course, there's there's crossmogination going on amongst those channels, but it's just like having a really favorite writer or editor or or person who's creating content about what you care about and in the voice that you care the most about. So definitely reminds me of that.
Yeah. And and, like, you know, the the Guardian has commenting, as well. So you can sort of hit both of those notes, which is you could read a really great Margaret Sullivan, column and feel really inspired and moved by what she writes and then see the community commenting on it. One thing that I also think about there's gonna be the active participants of your community, but there's gonna be the lurkers too.
People who just get a lot of satisfaction out of reading through the comments. So, before the Guardian I was at, I mentioned at Conde Nast, one of the brands I worked on was Ars Technica that has a really, really rich community. And we did some very fascinating audience research and found out just how how large the size of Larkers was. People who really were, you know, didn't comment very often, but were very, very invested in, in in the in the really rich debates and the, you know, the forums and the articles.
So it was fascinating.
And I count myself as as a lower curve personality, so I really resonate, like, with with that sort of thing. But your community can take a lot of different shapes. People who are reading you and reading the comments are can be just as active as the people participating and actually contributing.
That's super interesting.
I never thought about it that way.
The the lurker community is not something that's typically measured. So I'm glad you did that research and shared that with us.
We're we're coming close to time. I wanted to wrap up around retention and loyalty, of course, our primary themes.
Are there any key insights or lessons that, that you can share around what's really shaped your approach to retention and loyalty at your companies?
Yeah. So retention for us, like I said, we we really strive since we don't have kind of that always on model. Right? It's not a not a video streaming service, let's say.
Yeah.
But we have to balance that breakage with our, like, product offering and and revenue, because that is what has allowed us to drive retention. Right? Use of the benefits then has a much higher propensity to stay, like, retained, and renew, at that next billing cycle.
We also have found that it's really important to not overlook the importance of reliability when we're thinking about, about retention. So, you know, a flight subscription like Flight Pass is taking people on either, you know, unforgettable vacations or to see their family members when they really need to. And as such, like, we we can't afford to have that that system not be functional or not be available for people. Right?
And so I think sometimes it's easy to see the product as separate from maybe the platform or, you know, uptime. Right? If you were to click on a link to read an article and it and it failed to load, right, like, when you really were invested in in reading that article, that can drive churn just as much as the product offerings themselves. And so really focusing on that kind of reliability of your platform, we see direct correlation with retention.
I love that. It really resonates for me, just being at Recurly.
We call it the brilliant basics. It's you've gotta nail your brilliant basics, and you've gotta always be refining and improving your brilliant basics. Because all the bells and whistles on top of it kinda don't matter if the brilliant basics aren't there.
So I'd love that. Emily, what are your thoughts?
Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And I think that, when you always make the quality of your product the center of the proposition and you can always deliver on that, then, that's that's the key to success. So, you know, making the the Guardian's journalism, I said this earlier, but, to repeat myself, just making the value proposition, the mission of the Guardian, the quality of The Guardian's journalism, and the role that you play in supporting The Guardian and supporting the kinds of, the the reporters reporting on these issues that you really care about.
That has been a consistent thing that it the Guardian has delivered for two hundred years, and we will continue to deliver. So, I couldn't agree more that it's about the basics and it's about the core value of what your product is. And if you start to stray too far from either of those things, then you can get into some really risky spaces where churn becomes, something that becomes a greater focus area. So yeah.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for both of you for spending time with us today and to the audience for your questions and your engagement.
I really appreciate it and I've learned a lot. So thanks so much.
Thank you. Really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Take care.
