Welcome to today's subscription session. I am super excited to be here today talking about driving subscriber engagement with some really awesome b to c brands that I admire personally, so really looking forward to today's discussion.
Before we dive in, a few housekeeping notes. If you'd like to ask questions, just ask them in the chat, and we'll get to as many as we can. And if we can't get to them, we'll follow-up over email by the end of the session.
So, yeah, ask your questions in there, and we'll follow-up with as many as we can.
And before we dive in, my name is Sarah McCready. I am the director of product marketing here at Recurly. I've been at Recurly about five years, so I love geeking geeking out about subscription strategies.
I've been in the space for a long time, and so really looking forward to today's discussion. And a little bit about Recurly, if you're not familiar, we power subscription management for some of the world's largest b to c brands, so Paramount plus, Twitch, FabFitFun. So we make it a lot easier to scale subscriptions globally.
And that's it for me. So I'm gonna quickly pass it over to some of the panelists to introduce themselves, and then we'll dive into today's discussion. So over to you, Danny.
Hi. I'm Danny Peterson. I work at CNBC. I've been there since twenty twenty one. They brought me in to essentially manage the revenue operations for the subscription business. I was the first direct hire.
They have had subscription for quite a while, but it was kind of a side project. They decided twenty twenty one to take it seriously, so we started hiring with me and we've hired a real business team to support our subscription business. I've been in subscriptions for over ten years now, happened upon it, started at a company called ALM, then I went over to Jim Kramer's company, The Street, where I was actually a former Recurly customer. And, since then, I've been basically managing all acquisition, retention, and customer experience while also having a brief stint as the head of content as a managing owner at The Street. So I've done a lot in the subscription economy and excited for today's discussion.
Awesome. Over to you, Tammy.
Cool. Hey, everyone. So happy to be here. Definitely happy to join this conversation today. My name is Tammy Miller, director of life cycle marketing at AllTrails.
So what that means is my team and I are really focused on driving engagement, conversion, and retention through some of our own channels, messaging channels like email, push, in app messaging.
Like Danny, I've been in the subscription kind of industry for a long time, and worked at at many subscription brands prior to AllTrails. So really focused on driving that user experience, what that means for retention, and getting people kind of back to the product for that long term engagement and stickiness.
Dhruv?
Awesome. Yeah. Hi. My name is Dhruv Sounde. I'm the director of subscription role at Beatport, primarily in charge of a music streaming and mixing service.
I'm also looking at some other subscription products inside the business as we look to go deeper into the subscription business model. And my role encompasses similar to Tammy looking at how we get new users onboard them onto the product, more of the retention tactics, churn prevention tactics, and when users churn how to get them back. So the full end to end life cycle. And a pleasure to be here.
Awesome. So, obviously, we have a lot we're gonna cover today. But before we dive in, I think it'd be helpful for the audience if each of you gave context on all of the subscription products you do have available that you're selling and a little bit about kind of your audience that you're selling into as well. So, Tammy, do you wanna go first?
Sure. AllTrails is a direct to consumer app really focused on connecting users with the outdoors. We have an audience of over seventy five million outdoor explorers all over the world, so we are global. And we have a collection of free features on the app, but also a collection of premium features under our AllTrail Plus subscription.
So what that is is just an annual subscription that allows you to have access to those premium features and what we're, you know, obviously focused on driving retention for.
I personally use AllTrails Plus, and I've been a subscriber for years. So yeah. Yeah. We'll be geeking out a little bit on today's, conversation. Dhruv, do you wanna dive in a little bit more around, Beatport?
Sure thing. So with Beatport, we have subscription products to help the user listen and then stream and mix the tracks that they would like. And this user base or target's audience segment is the the established DJ, but also the beginner DJ who's coming into and starting to mix music. So for that, we actually have three plans. First two plans are mostly focused on the user to get them to start streaming and then mixing music, whether it be on the web platform.
And the last two plans are actually for platform integration, so they can actually integrate the service with DJ software and then mix directly on their console, which is a big USB we have. Apart from that, you know, on the premium features, we also have things like Slack, which is lossless, high fidelity quality of music, and some advanced features on, you know, downloading and keeping a bunch of tracks and things like that.
Awesome. And, Danny, I a lot of people obviously are familiar with CNBC, but they might not be as familiar with their subscription products. So but, yeah, I would love to learn more about what you're focused on.
I would love to describe what we do at CNBC because I feel like there's a misconception about what we do with our subscription offerings.
We're not like the Wall Street Journal. We're not like the New York Times. We don't offer news.
Our subscription offerings are utilities.
So CNBC Pro was created really as a way for us to get the streaming of our network and the TV channel to international users. It was created back in the early two thousands.
And since then, what we've done is we've created, you know, as we we had the COVID boom of retail investors, we saw an opportunity to provide more content and access to professionals. So what we've done since our team got in back in twenty twenty one, we really focus on providing professional tools and access to those professionals with exclusive content around several different topics that a lot of retail investors are looking to gain access to. So we've really tried to provide more access to those retail investors around what top professionals are doing, what top professionals are using as far as, tool base, and so we really focus on that.
You also get this the stripping of the network still with Pro. We also in twenty twenty two, we introduced our CNBC investing club with Jim Kramer. He brought over his portfolio management tool. Essentially, what he does is he uses his he's invested his real money for a portfolio around three million dollars.
And essentially what he does is he trades, like, real real real stocks and equities and provides it more as an educational tool for investor to learn how to manage and diversify a portfolio and and really has been a great educational tool for a lot of different subscribers who are looking to really, you know, manage their their their wealth opportunities and and really retire and also create a nest egg so that they can pay for their kids' college tuition and really set themselves up for life. And then we will be introducing a streaming. We're breaking out the stream from CNBC Pro with an offering called CNBC Plus in the new year.
We'll also be introducing a couple new offerings including you can get a start now with our it's a free offering right now as a as a newsletter, but we're gonna be diving into the wealth space with Robert Frank. So we'll be doing a lot of insight into what the wealthy are doing in an offering called Inside Wealth. So we're we're not just news at CNBC. We provide a utility so people can really drive their wealth and and really, you know, generate more income and and set themselves up for for life.
So that's what we're doing at CNBC now.
I love today's discussion because I feel like on the surface, your products are all so different. Right? Like, DJing, hiking, wealth management, but then, like, you could all have the exact same subscriber, right, kind of listening in right now and subscribing to all three of your products and having it kind of, like, change their lifestyle every day. Right? Like, they could be DJing on the weekends, going on a hike, using AllTrails, and then, you know, managing their portfolio with CNBC.
So it's a cool way that showing how subscriptions are all kinda so intertwined, and it's not, yeah, this kind of one size fits all model anymore of who kind of what might be your subscriber. So let's dive into subscriber engagement. There is so much to cover. So before we dive into acquisition, I wanna talk a little bit about kind of, like, the pre sign up funnel.
And, obviously, there's a lot that you wanna think about to make sure you're driving the right engagement metrics upfront before sign up. As we all know, I think, Danny, you mentioned the COVID boom. A lot of people were like acquisition at all costs. You know, a lot of companies, I think, were focused on retention metrics.
That's even just kind of a new muscle in the last few years that we've seen shift and and kind of inflating those acquisition metrics, but now realizing the cost of retaining kind of, like, not the ideal subscriber.
So what are you all how do you think about that pre sign up funnel across channels, and what are you really optimizing for to really make sure that, like, by the time someone is signing up, that is kind of the right subscriber for each of your products. So, Tammy, do you wanna dive in first? Sure.
So my world and life cycle really starts once that user signs up. But what what we've had a lot of success in is really just monitoring the source of that sign up where people are coming from. So like Danny mentioned, AllTrails had a very large COVID boom as well. Obviously, we were all getting outside when we couldn't do anything inside.
So there was, you know, a quick shift of focus to retention and retaining these subscribers and keeping them engaged. And we've definitely seen some continued success with things like partnership, even things just like search engine optimization and thing, you know, with our content. You know, we have over four hundred fifty trails within our product and all of that content and everything that comes with it, you know, capturing on people that are looking for that type of content. And then our product teams are really focused on, you know, where are those kind of paywalls sitting, where are those sign up walls sitting, and making sure that we're tagging everything properly so we can monitor kind of the different engagement differences between them, but also maybe kind of straighten that down the funnel into how we message and speak to these users and what kind of content we show to them.
So really making sure we're kind of capturing on how they came to our product as far as, like, the the entire life cycle.
Awesome. What about you, Dhruv?
Yeah. Echo thoughts very similar to Tammy, actually. And so on the acquisition side, you know, we're still to be honest, we're still working on LTV optimized acquisition in in in, you know, for the lack of a better word. We're still working on that, but, you know, we've had much success with an audience which is primed for our subscription service.
So for example, the relevant audience that we've had quite quite decent success with is partnerships. In our in our world, that's educational partnerships, so people who are learning to DJ. In our world, it's people who are going to these kind of conferences, which talk about DJing. And then, you know, the beauty about our company is that we have with the DJ vertical, but we also have a a music production vertical.
So there's definitely parallels there, and we are now right now exploring cross pollinating these audiences and seeing the success there. And so, yeah, that's been interesting to do, some of this cross selling as such.
Danny?
So we have an advantage. Our reporting is free. Unlike Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal, we don't charge you a monthly price to get our reporting. So we get a lot of traffic in that that really helps us define, you know, potential users for our subscription offerings.
What we've done though, I was at another subscription event and an MLB executive talked about you really wanna drive value with the first touch, the first experience. It shouldn't happen post sign up. It should happen really the first time they they submit their email.
So what we did, we had two newsletters that were not live to our users that were kinda stuck in between what I would describe as a free newsletter and a subscriber newsletter.
One of which was Jim Cramer's morning, like, thoughts. He would send an email to his internal team about, like, the fifteen, like, names he's, like, looking at in the morning. And we said that would be a great thing for, you know, the the our user base. So we turned that into a a free newsletter for users.
And within, like, the first month, we drove, like, four hundred and twenty thousand new users to sign up for for that newsletter. And then we also had a evening newsletter with our internal TV team, which would send out basically, like, kind of below the frame, not the top stories of night but like things that might be affected by those top stories. And it was really internal newsletter and Jim Cramer actually sent out a note to to the team replying all which, you know, you typically don't do but he did it and he said this is this is the best resource I have. And I was like okay, light bulb went off.
Why aren't we giving this to our users? So that's kind of what we did. We turned I worked with the the TV executives. So Jason Gewirtz and he essentially turned it into a a free newsletter for our users which is kinda directly tied to our subscription offerings.
So we've done a lot of taking a lot of things that typically would be subscriber content, and we've turned that into kinda what I would say are medium. So we introduced a registration wall. We've introduced something I call white papers, which are essentially, like, you know, subscriber level content that we do is that's more evergreen and and educational. So we've really tried to drive value at our our first touch base and really get people into life cycles and flows.
So we created an onboarding anytime someone submits their email. And we've just done a lot to really engage users, you know, and nurture them prior to because it is it's a it's a luxury product we have. You know, we're providing that too. So and there are a lot of different obstacles for someone to invest.
So we wanna make sure we're also, you know, getting all of our customers through those obstacles and making sure that they're they feel confident that they can not only get the value out of our offering, but also find success with it.
Yeah. And you brought up a good point. I've seen publishers doing this really well is elevating their editors more. Right?
I think we're all seeing this, that the newsletters and the content used to be a lot more generic, but they're taking more of a point of view or, right, with Jim Cramer, like, kinda elevating these personalities within the organization to develop that relationship. I don't see it as much yet on the b to c side. I think a lot of brands are kinda makes sense, right, if someone leaves the company or whatever and then all your eggs are in one basket. But it is, I think, an interesting thing to play around with.
In the streaming space, I love Letterboxd if you guys subscribe to Letterboxd as well. Like, I find they are good at kind of humanizing the brand behind it, right, versus, like, a Netflix or something.
So I could see that being, like, a trend going into the next year is more people kinda taking bets on their employees and elevating them more as kind of, like, influencers and ambassadors within the company and having more of that, like, editorial spin.
Within the company and having more of that, like, editorial spin. But, yeah, Dhruv, do you have a point on that? Yeah. Absolutely.
I love the point on, you know, bringing value to the user at the first touch.
So something that we did, Danny, similar to you guys is we have a web based teaching platform, which was only open to premium users. And we were like, this is a this is a platform that's used by and very extensively used by our premium subscribers.
How can we open it up to our free users? So what we did was we opened that platform up where the user can DJ and mix a small selection of a track so they can still experience the platform. They can still get their hands dirty and, you know, get a fun feeling. And then, you know, classing PLG tactics, we have now inputted, like you said, that, you know, registration walls and sign up to a premium subscription right there so that when the user is ready, they're knocking on the door.
We're there to be like, okay. You know, we're here for you, and here's the full premium service where you can mix full tracks. So absolutely love that approach and going forward in that company with that approach also. Yeah.
So I know we've already started touching a little bit on it, but around obviously, that kind of, like, onboarding journey. Right? And sometimes that time to value is, like, twenty minutes. Sometimes it's thirty days, right, for certain brands.
So I'd love to hear from each of you, like, what are those kind of, like, actions you've kind of narrowed in on? Maybe you obviously don't have to give them all away, but if there's kind of a few certain actions you realize are really helping your subscribers find that kinda time to value faster, and then what are those mechanisms that you're driving that engagement kind of in those first few days, of an onboarding journey? So, Tammy, do you wanna start off? Sure.
Yeah. I think we can all agree that that onboarding and those first interactions are so important when it comes to user retention and getting them to to adopt the features and engage at all. One of the things that that we've done at AllTrails is really take, you know, what we used to have as kind of a new user onboarding program that was pretty generic and throwing at them everything that we felt like was the best features, and, you know, trying to let them learn everything at once in a very short time. We went through the exercise of really just determining what the value of each of our product actions are.
And not just each product action, but, like, the order of actions as well. So, like, kind of called it, like, a garden path analysis for us that we really looked at, like, okay. We know if they do this action, this action, then this action in that order, that's really gonna give us that higher, like, we go to conversion and retention and stuff long term. So that exercise was really helpful for us to just kind of, you know, reevaluate our our onboarding program.
We went from, you know, very squashed in throwing every feature at them in the first seven days to now kind of expanding that a bit over the first month, but really looking at, you know, what are those priority actions? Have they taken that action? Have they not taken that action? And really trying to use those user behaviors to then nudge them to the next place we wanna get them to go.
So I think that we definitely saw value in being able to focus on one thing at a time, kind of take it a little slower, try to get, you know, them to see value in something, and then continue to build on top of that rather than, you know, hope that they see the value of the whole suite of features and the whole product itself in a very short time. So we've definitely saw a lot of success in that. We actually saw our first month conversion rate go up by twenty five percent when we rolled out our new onboarding program. So definitely a huge win and something we're continuing to optimize for sure and focusing on that that early feature adoption.
Danny, what about for you at CNBC?
Oh, yeah. The I mean, well, first, you know, being in a legacy major company and really starting to focus on subscriptions in twenty twenty one, Our product roadmap is quite full of things, we wanna get done to help that engagement early on. But we've kind of, you know, in a way, we've tried to find ways where we can MacGyver onboarding together, utilizing vendor tools, email, obviously. So there are certain traits users take at at CNBC that lead to a subscription.
Obviously, those newsletters I mentioned, but also, you know, downloading or creating a watch list of stocks to follow, which led to us actually developing a new feature within CNBC Pro, which was a pro portfolio tool where people can actually integrate their portfolio into our service so they can track and get related content to all the names, involved. So we wanna basically, our effort is really to personalize their investing experience and make things easier for users. We wish we had all the tools that, you know, my my team has a wish list of things they want. And so we try to MacGyver ways to to get people to adopt a lot of those features, and then we we adjust when that MacGyver situation turns into a MacGyver.
But we we do our best to really find ways to get people to be more active, obviously reading specific types of content that is more exclusive and unique that hopefully lead to a subscription and then hopefully stay as a subscriber. So we have a lot of a lot of different we have we also our our on-site tool we utilize is a company called Zephyr, which really takes us is great for life cycle marketing. So we have related content features, but sometimes it's just like a dump stories. And there's so many stories that are put out.
It's tough to really narrow it down. So Zephyr's done a really great job of kind of helping kinda find the right stories for the right users. So we we've been doing a lot of different, you know, likelihood to subscribe, and then obviously finding the the the tools and activities that users will take engagements that will hopefully make them less to less likely to turn. So we've done a lot of that work.
Dhruv, what about for you?
Yeah. I go with, Tammy and Danny. And I think the couple of things I'd like to highlight, which are different from or additional to, you know, what you guys are doing is one of the things that we start doing is kind of like a personalization, which means looking at of course, we have the gamut of this is the actions that the user needs to take, which correlate to, you know, better trial to paid conversion and better retention. So out of that, we are now trying to actively see which actions the user has already taken and then surface the actions which the user has not taken.
So purposefully omit this long onboarding journey that we have and just go to the points which are relevant to the user. I think that's something that we're we're testing out. The second aspect which, you know, everybody is testing out is, of course, we measure or we're trying to measure what is the uptake of that action, that particular feature that we want the user to take. But also in general, what is the free to trial paid conversion rate?
Right? Is it is it actually making impact on the conversion rate? And, yeah, and the third thing that I think it's it's interesting for us to see is something we're we're looking to is holdouts. You know, just just having proper measurement, which is having a good holdout segment so that we can compare apples to apples.
What is the impact that we're having with whatever experimental journey that we're running. So I think those have been those are still ongoing, and we're we're looking forward to seeing results of that. With all of these, as we know that depending on your time period of the the trial or the time period of the onboarding, you need to let it run for a few months to actually see the results. Right?
So we're in the process of, like, now just evaluating real time results and then aggregating them and then being like, okay. This has worked. This has not worked, and this is what we'll do next.
Yeah. And I think you guys all touched on personalization to some capacity. What I'm seeing prop up, I feel like sometimes we all get in the weeds on leveraging, thinking there's a quick fix with technology and automation, right, to personalize. Like, here is the perfect journey we have all mapped out, you know, in a boardroom as marketers, and therefore, like, this is the ideal journey to take.
But then losing sight of letting subscribers, like, personalize their own experience and have that be self selected. I know, Danny, you were talking about, like, a watch list, but I remember we had Paramount plus ran a test where, you know, it was kind of like, here's what we think you should watch versus, like, hey, let's just make it really accessible and easy to pick and choose what you wanna watch and, like, that drove engagement, you know, by significant amount. So I do think as brands, it's a good thing for us to, like, balance the two approaches and find ways to make sure people also have the ability to kind of personalize that experience or that journey for them.
So I know we have so much more to cover. I wanna make sure it's something else that we haven't touched on yet is, like, that user feedback. So, obviously, you're all owning kind of, like, these life cycle engagement channels, whether it's email or the product or app. How do you feed that, like, information you're learning back to your the product team?
So, Danny, I know you mentioned, like, something you were learning in what you were doing helped actually, like, develop a feature in the product. And I know, Tammy, that probably happens a lot too and same with you, Dhruv. So, yeah, how do you guys kinda funnel that, like, user feedback back into actually enhancing the product? Dhruv, do you wanna go first?
I caught you right when you were drinking.
No. No. No worries. So, you know, the good part is the product team is supremely involved already in user feedback.
We have Qualtrics integrated right onto the platform, so we get real time feedback on what's happening. I think where it's been helpful for my team is diagnosing where users are getting into obstructions and trying to unblock that. That's where it's been really helpful for for my team. You know, to give you, like, a couple of examples, we saw simple things like, you know, user not being able to access a premium feature due to some issue with the back end, and then that gets that gets surfaced.
User not being being able to put in a discount code. So all of these friction points is something that we are able to get real time user feedback on and immediately implement. Yeah. I'll I'll actually pass it to Danny.
I think he might have some more interesting ones to share from the product side.
Yeah. Well, great timing because our CNBC subscriber survey was released this past week, so we got a lot of great findings.
And our head of customer service, Eunie Park, she's really like the the heartbeat of our of what we do at CNBC. And, you know, what I've tried to do the past years is try and elevate the importance of the feedback she's providing to our product and tech teams, and it's kinda reeducating their muscle memory because the difference between a reader who complains about something and a subscriber that complains about something, it there's a significant difference.
So like couple dollars that we may get out of ads from a reader is a lot different than someone who's paying us recurring revenue of hundreds of dollars per year. So kind of reeducation is a huge so we actually had a brainstorm this past week and a great great week to do that during the election. But we really it was a great opportunity to really, you know, help educate. I brought in not only your our TV group, our editorial group, our product teams, our analytics team, obviously, the marketing and our revenue operations team.
But, you know, using our MPS scoring, using the customer subscriber survey, you know, we our our team led by Liz Lee went into individual features, you know, what what they're finding and then getting feedback on what what's not working and then, like, issues. And a lot of it were, like, recent changes. Obviously, you know, there's a lower recency bias, but there is still some some truth to what what we were seeing and and some of those complaints. And, you know, for us, we need to limit those, what I call, cancelable moments.
So you need to be able to provide something that's convenient. You need to make sure that they're the easy things are done, and we don't make easy things hard for our users. But also really getting a sense of where the value is in their subscription and doing more of that or finding more opportunities to really provide more value and exclusive offerings to those users because that's all they really want. And then, you know, we we we saw in our our some of our other offerings, you know, potential opportunities.
So we're exploring those opportunities with our research team. So it's we love customer feedback, good and bad, and we try to do as much as we can with it.
So Awesome.
What about for you, Tammy?
Yeah. I think everything these gentlemen have hit on has been right on. I mean, I'm definitely grateful that AllTrails works really closely together. We're working with our product teams directly all the time.
We're working with our research teams all the time. We also have a really great community of outdoor enthusiasts that are always willing to provide that feedback, which is awesome. So our product teams are always actioning on those things, and then, really, we're leaning into kind of that research and those those feedback loops as well, and then really allowing that to kind of drive some hypothesis and things that we could kind of execute and learn from on the life cycle side. So really thinking about feedback, I think, from, like, both the qualitative and the quantitative approach and making sure that qualitative feedback loop is happening between teams and everything's being shared and we know what to action on.
But then also kind of taking some of those learnings and translating that into, like, more of an iterative testing plan that we could do through our direct messages and then really learn from that as well. And all of that gets shared between teams and between departments, and we're all kind of using that to drive our own strategies, which is really awesome.
Awesome. I'm gonna squeeze oh, Dhruv, do you have a quick comment?
Yeah. A quick comment. I think Danny mentioned cancellable moments. So we actually had a subscription, you know, some someone has managed subscription for this product line.
We actually put a lot of attention to the cancellation survey, and we aggregate all the data from that and not only use that to understand exactly what is that cancelable moment that led a user to cancel the subscription and understand it broke up both from a product and from a messaging side. So sometimes it's the messaging that needs to be brought out a bit more. If the user is canceled because they're not able to do something, redirect them to, you know, help topics or something on that sort, which would solve their answerable moment. Right?
And then there's the other factor, which is, like, we also put in new product initiatives or road map ideas into that cancellation survey, which also gives us this very, very robust data about what should we do further, what should we build on further, which is required by our users. So that's been really helpful both from a product and from a subscription management side.
Yeah. Danny? Yeah.
Just just wanna hop in because, you know, part of our role as well is kinda educating our our teams because there are a lot of noise in those cancellation surveys that we really have to, like, help, you know, others who are not, like, in the weeds on every single aspect of the subscription business to to really help them understand. So making sure we're finding what is good feedback around why they're canceling because a lot of it's just like, oh, it's price or, you know, they they just, you know and to be honest, you know, probably not gonna change your price because Gary down in Indiana decided he he didn't like your price.
But, you know, we need to make sure that we're parsing through those surveys to find not only trends, but also, you know, opportunities where maybe we're not meeting, you know, our customer promise. So helping parse through that, working with your research team to make sure that they're not getting, you know, putting too much of, like, the bad data out there and really kind of helping the product, the tech group, and and really the the overall business have a better understanding of where are the pain points in the business and where are areas we need to improve. So it's just there's a lot of lot of noise in those surveys, but but there's, it it's important to have the right team around you, especially your analytics team, to really help identify what are those common trends.
So I'm glad we got to the cancellation part of this the subscriber life cycle because I feel like we it's often overlooked.
Right? I think a lot of focus is on that trial conversion stage and that onboarding stage. Right? Because that's comfortable.
Like we said, a lot of people were focused on acquisition. Now we're shifting to retention. So, naturally, it was like, k. What's that first kind of, you know, say, two month journey?
But that cancellation journey, right, and or maybe that kind of pre renewal journey is just as important, if not more so. And as we know, right, the FTC just came out with new regulations. Like, nobody can make it hard to cancel anymore, which I think is a great thing as we all know because we all subscribe to products, and there's nothing worse than, you know, having to accomplish, like, nine steps to cancel. So, Tammy, is there anything on that kind of, like, cancellation journey or that experience that you've implemented at AllTrails to kinda help either save that subscriber or just to help kind of inform the product team?
Yeah. For sure. I think one of the things that keep coming up is this idea of personalization, which, obviously, like, we can another thing we can all agree on, like, personalization does work. The more relevant we can make content and messaging and be able to speak to our users that way, the more they're gonna pay attention and understand.
And one of the things, you know, we've seen success in recently with personalization from, like, a churn prevention perspective is really reminding the users of those positive experiences that they had with our product. So really utilizing personalized content to bring them back to, you know, not just, hey. We have this feature. Remember this feature that's great that you love.
More of, like, here's that time you used that feature and why it was probably helpful for you and being able to kind of relate them back to something that's super specific and super personal to them. We've seen a lot of a lot of success in just kind of driving that engagement even, you know, as they approach kind of that renewal time and understanding that continuing to to have them engage with the features and come back to the product is obviously our biggest biggest kind of fight against that that churn and that eventual, you know, complete cancellation.
Awesome. We have just a few minutes left, but I wanna make sure we talk about this because I personally get a lot of questions from merchants around pricing. So, Danny, I know you mentioned obviously, like, pricing is a whole can of worms in the world of subscriptions. A lot of brands are increasing their prices right now.
We all subscribe to, you know, six different streaming services that all just went up. And it's a it's a hard thing to balance right as the marketer is responsible for those price changes. So how do you guys navigate kind of the complexity of that? Right?
So, Tammy, whether it's pricing personalization, right, and everyone's on a different price and someone sees a different price or you're offering to communicate a price increase.
Yeah. Is there any sort of tips around messaging that that you have found successful?
Dhruv, do you wanna start with Yeah.
Absolutely. So I think it goes without saying that, you know, being transparent and telling the user in from whichever channel they most access in that your price is gonna increase is the best way to go about it. And being honest on why the price is increasing is is very important.
And most of the time, whatever reason you have, even if you call it inflation, you know, price of raw material, you know, people understand that. It but it's important to communicate that. It's also more to communicate how, you know, your subscript your your product or your experience will be made better with that price increase. So it's it's it's really important from a messaging point to do that.
I think tactically, what has been really interesting is when that price increase is happening, you can employ certain levers to make sure you still make it a a good positive experience for the user. What you can do is if the price increase happening in a few months or, you know, you can delay it for the existing user for a few months to say, you know, we're gonna keep it at the same price, for the next two months just because you're a valued customer. So that's way one way. If if you can grandfather the plan at the lower price, that's even better.
And that's actually a really good retention tactic too because the user will not churn, you know, one once they know that they have this reduced price. So those have been really impactful from our side.
Tammy, what about for you?
I mean, definitely, on the idea of just transparency, being super super transparent and explaining things in a a very simple way, alerting them early way ahead of any price changes, and often. So AllTrails did kind of go through this process a couple years ago, so definitely very familiar to me. And I think the one thing that just to add is the things like price increase tends to be like this is a very transactional message we have to get across to our users, and I think that's where, like, that transparency and really educating about what their options are, how to make changes if they want, just make sure we're empowering them with all the tools they have, not making them read in between the lines and try to guess what's happening, and then really showcase that value of, like Drew said, like, why are we raising prices and, you know, look at all this additional value and things that we've been adding and and price prices have gone up and things.
But really just being super transparent about communicating that and remembering that we're all talking to a real person on the other side of these messages. We've all been that person as well, receiving this information. So making sure, you know, putting ourselves in that perspectives too.
We don't have dive to dive into this, but Dunning emails are super important and should be treated like marketing emails, and that is my because, yeah, we see we all see that all the time. Right? And you're a subscriber for ten years, and then you get this really aggressive kinda templated email that your service is gonna be cut off or something. So, yeah, great point there. Just kind of brand messaging and empathy across, like, every single moment, right, that you have with your subscribers. So, Danny, anything around that?
Yeah. I mean, when it comes to price increases, I mean, people are feeling it across everything they do. Like, we're a luxury product. Like, what are unless we're providing, we're increasing the value of our offering, like, we should not raise our prices because everyone else is doing it, you know, just because Netflix and all the streaming services, like, and the price elasticity, you know, that that seems like we we can get people, like, do we really need to?
Like, I'm sure my my chairman would be really upset on saying this, but, like, I believe more in maybe increasing the monthly price to get people to do a annual subscription. That way you you get the the revenue in early. I'm I'm for that. But, you know, when it comes to raising prices, I prefer introducing higher tiers.
Like, give people agencies to make choices. You know, people wanna engage more with Jim Cramer. Maybe we introduce, like, a higher tier that potentially provides more access to Jim Cramer, or maybe we do that with CNBC Pro. But just raising prices for the sake of raising prices, I I don't I don't get it.
Like, you look at the the cost of living here, especially in the US, it's insane. We're making things easier. We're supposed to be, you know, the help for individuals to to generate more wealth. So, you know, penny pinching people, you know, we're not one of those companies.
I know we cover a lot of those companies that are doing those tactics and I'm not gonna call anyone out here, but there's a lot of people in the S and P five hundred that are doing that and making things more difficult for the average American and the average, you know, person globally. I don't I don't believe in raising prices for the sake of our raising prices. Provide them more value, get more money. Be innovative.
We've lost that as a country. We're just charging more just to charge more. I don't I don't believe in that. Let's be innovative.
Let's start let's get back and start providing better experiences for our users, and then you can charge more money. But raising prices for the sake of raising prices, not for me.
Yeah. And I think this also comes back because we gotta wrap up the conversation is just around personalization. Right? Like, maybe it's not a subscription plan.
Maybe it's a one time purchase because you know that is the one thing they value and make that really accessible. Or maybe it's an ad based tier or maybe, you know, we have customers that offer custom bundles every month. So maybe my bundle is smaller and looks different one month, and it's bigger and more personalized the next. Right?
But that's totally on me and my choices as a consumer. So I think, Danny, that's a good point. Like, consumers are empowered. We all have, you know, dozens of subscriptions.
We understand. We're we're more self aware. We know what's going on. We understand the tactics as well.
So I think just empowering the subscriber at the end of the day and giving them that flexibility and that transparency and empathy is really, really important. So final question, what are, like, future trends? Like, what are you guys you're all probably heads down in, like, twenty twenty five planning meetings. Right?
Is there any, like, big bets or or things you're investing in on the product side that you see as sort of, like, the future subscriptions in the next next year or two? Dhruv, do you wanna kick things off?
Sure. From our side, what I the challenge that I put to the analytics team and the product teams is basically coming up with the next best action in the best channel. So, you know, we work a lot on, you know, this is the conversion loops or the conversion campaigns that will be automated or engagement campaigns will be opt automated. So I think the challenge and and what I would like to see is it's the next best action.
I don't care if it's conversion, if it's engagement, but at that time, what's the best what's the best thing, feature, upgrade, whatever it is that should be sent to the user in the channel where they most interact with so that we can we can really engage this user. That's the challenge that I put through. Let's see let's see where we can get to that. We work in versions a lot, so I'm sure next year we'll come up with a version of that and then evolve it as time goes.
Awesome. What about you, Tammy?
Yeah. I think one of the things when I just think of, like, trends and things that have changed recently that are gonna continue to change is just the level of expectations that we see from our users themselves.
So just on the topic of things like personalization and things, you know, there's this level of expectations from our users that we know who they are. We know how they use the product. We know that, you know, we're gonna speak to them kind of very personally. And I'm most excited just about investing in more technologies that allow us to do that quicker and at scale because this, you know, operational efficiency is a real thing and being able to personalize everything you do is not necessarily super feasible, but all kinds of technologies now that really allow us to process just really large amounts of data and really just get better, like, predicting, you know, maybe churn likelihood or conversion likelihood and allow us to kind of reach the customers at the best, most optimal time we can and really just compiling all of that together. I think it's what I'm super excited about.
So Danny, no pressure, but what's the future holds for subscriptions?
I'd say there's three areas where I'm really focusing on. First being improving our discovery. There's a lot on CNBC. How do we get the right things in front of the right people? That's one. Two is introduce introducing higher tiers.
So, you know, people may wanna pay us more for more access. How do we go about innovating that and providing that type of value that really separates, you know, the basic subscription offering from, you know, a higher tier. So how do we do that? That's a big challenge.
And then really, you know, the the the third thing and the last being how do we find different audiences that are not your typical, you know, money individual, which tends to happen later in life, you know, unfortunately. For most part, you you accumulate wealth throughout your life and for the most part, most of our users are an older demographic. So what basic features, maybe it's an investment and maybe it's for to provide, you know, better customers down the road. How do we how do I convince my my board to really go in on an offering that may not, you know, set the world on fire as a huge revenue driving, but will pay off later on.
Because I think there's a lot of, you know, great money tools that are available, you know, that that really should be available to users to, you know, be better at personal finance and really be better adults. You know, there are a lot of different money decisions that even I I make in my daily life as close to forty year old that I I don't I have no idea. Like, that's you know, I don't know how to go about it. And I can read a thousand articles, but which article is the right idea for me?
So how do we get provide people more access to those professionals with more basic money things? So for us, those are the three areas, you know, not only skewing younger, but also serving those those individuals who want more access to us and then making sure we're we're we're providing the best discovery to really get people the right things. So that those are the three things that are really big for us.
Easy. You you guys got this. But, yeah, genuinely really appreciate today's conversation. Thank you all for taking the time to share your experience, you know, lessons learned with the group. This is recorded, so anyone kinda watching in, we will email you out the recording. If you have any other questions, just reach out to events at work early dot com, and we'll get to them there as well. But thanks so much for everyone's time today, and have a great day.
