The Growth Playbook You Haven’t Heard
Rethinking Blog Subscribers:
CAUTION: minions at work inside
Hi, I’m @anum.
I love telling stories, pretending I’m Beyoncé, and sipping chai tea.
Let me quickly walk you through a typical scenario.
1
APPLY USER ONBOARDING TO CONTENT
Meet Dan Wolchonok, Senior PM for Sidekick.
Leading growth efforts for our product, Dan became obsessed with user retention.
So his team launched 60 onboarding experiments to figure out a new user welcome flow that contributed to greater retention.
They tested, reiterated, and tested again until something clicked.
This got me thinking about current content subscription models:
reader subscribes
receives “subscription complete” email
receives next published post
… wait a minute. If an optimized user onboarding flow leads to longer user retention, wouldn’t an optimized subscriber flow result in a similar impact?
We began experimenting and eventually end up with new content onboarding. (and are still actively learning how to improve …)
READER SUBSCRIBES
READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN
READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS
READER SUBSCRIBES
READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN
READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS
Standard step. A visitor on your
website fills out a form to subscribe to your content.
READER SUBSCRIBES
READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN
READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS
Hypothesis: The higher the engagement with subscribers early on, the longer they’ll retain as monthly active
subscribers.
Approach: New subscribers enter 4-week workflow that sends them top performing posts.
READER SUBSCRIBES
READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN
READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS
These workflow emails generate 2x the clickthrough rate as our normal sends – an indication that first
impressions really count – and were a vital contributor of our most valuable metric, which we’ll show soon.
READER SUBSCRIBES
READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN
READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS
Once the workflow is complete,
subscribers join our email list to receive new content as its
released.
READER SUBSCRIBES
READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN
READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS
Of course, this onboarding flow uses technology in it’s simplest form: setting up
smart drip campaigns.
2
MEASURE SUBSCRIBERS LIKE USER RETENTION.
Most growth teams seek authentic growth through active usage.
DAU: DAILY ACTIVE USER
unique amount of users who are
"active" within a day.
WAU: WEEKLY ACTIVE USER
unique amount of users who are
"active" within a week.
MAU: MONTHLY ACTIVE USER
unique amount of users who are
"active" within a month.
We measure HubSpot Sales Products in WAUs. We use a set of criteria that shows if users are getting value from our product every week. That core metric helps us monitor the success of our product growth.
To support this authentic growth, we set on a mission to turn content into a meaningful revenue channel.
We applied the same authentic metric behind product growth …
MAU: MONTHLY ACTIVE USER
We applied the same authentic metric behind product growth … to content.
MAU: MONTHLY ACTIVE USER
MAS: MONTHLY ACTIVE SUBSCRIBER
MONTHLY ACTIVE SUBSCRIBER:
noun 1 an individual subscribed to content and clicking
through on that content through emails
2 definition used by Sidekick content team to monitor authentic audience growth
11,870 12,698 12,489 12,990 12,495
14,217 13,675 13,176 13,616
16,794
19,159 20,697 20,636
24,108 23,906 24,967
While we aim to rapidly grow our email list, we focus more on how many subscribers are actively engaged.
Looking purely at “views” can fog our vision. Measuring active engagement allows us to assess our content’s true effectiveness.
3
ALLOW SUBSCRIBERS TO CHURN JUST AS USERS.
When users stop using freemium products, we consider them churned.
When users stop using freemium products, we consider them churned.
… but when subscribers stop reading our blog, we keep emailing them.
In the early days of our new sales blog, we invested heavily in growing our
subscribers and grew quickly.
At one point we reached 60K subscribers, But only 22K of them were actively reading our content. So we removed the others from
our subscriber list.
We sacrificed subscribers for success.
Our goal isn’t to shove content into inboxes, it’s
to provide something worth reading.
Thank You. More Presentations: ANUMHUSSAIN.COM