Our client was a century-old legacy newspaper renowned for its standing in a major regional community in India, and a participant of our GNI Subscriptions Academy 2022 programme. During an initial diagnostic phase of the programme, FTS identified that subscriptions growth for the publisher was not always correlated with sharp upticks in online readership. In one month where readers spiked, subscriber numbers remained stagnant. This suggested that converting new users into subscribers was proving difficult for the publisher as they sought to further expand their online presence. The FTS team also discovered that a significant proportion of subscribers were being acquired via the App.

As previous evidence showed that a large majority of the publisher’s subscription purchases occurred on their App, FTS and the publisher collaboratively hypothesised that encouraging more users to download the App via a tailored App download campaign could lead to more conversions. A cross-functional team was assembled to design and run an experiment to test this hypothesis.

Through the dedicated app download campaign:

• Users clicked through and downloaded the App at a strong, consistent rate during the experimentation period
• The dismissal rate of the nudges was low and stable, indicating that site visitors were not deterred and their user experience was not being significantly affected