Our client was a market-leading legacy Indian publisher with strong ambitions to scale its digital subscriptions through participation in our GNI Subscriptions Academy India 2022 programme. One strong opportunity revealed through diagnostic analysis and stakeholder interviews during the first phase of the programme was to augment the publisher’s existing subscription value proposition by creating and better showcasing a clearer distinction between free and subscriber only content.

To articulate the publisher’s value proposition better, FT Strategies supported the publisher in exploring whether better targeting its newsletter audience could lead to greater conversion. After the publisher’s digital content team discovered newsletters currently contained a large amount of free content, enough for non-subscribers to lose incentive to subscribe, the team designed an experiment to reformat newsletters to include more subscriber only content.

The reformatted newsletter with more subscriber only content performed exceptionally well, leading to:

• Upticks across all of the newsletter’s engagement and sign-up metrics
• Doubled click-throughs to the publisher’s website during the test period
• A higher open rate
• Greater new weekly subscribers from newsletters than a control period prior to the test