A content paywall is often a no-brainer for publishers to implement from a commercial perspective, but adopting a paywall is a delicate customer journey moment. Plus, there are some tricky technical and conversion considerations to balance.
Keen to get more results from your content paywalls? Here’s our pro tips for better, higher-converting paywalls for publishers.
Adopt a strategic experience-first approach
Content paywalls can be frustrating and disruptive for users, and they are often the source of high bounce and drop off rates. But like it or not, content paywalls are a part of being a publisher in today’s landscape.
It’s important to consider how to make your content paywall experience as positive as possible. Paywalls can be a relationship building tool: view them as another key moment in the customer journey and invest in your paywall experience.
- Could a paywall be a vehicle for improving your customer experience?
- What sort of data can you capture at this moment?
- Can you enrich your data capture?
- Can you offer a gradual paywall experience?
- Are there any incentives you can offer now?
- Is your “ask” good enough?
Approach your paywall experience like a check-out experience: be strategic and embrace them as a growth tool for your brand.
☝️Remember: There is no getting around the fact that sometimes a paywall will not convert, and users will not move ahead in the purchase journey. Figure out your drop-off and abandon rates and make those your paywall benchmark.
Check your trust and authority: is the user reassured enough?
A paywall can often be a jarring experience. Even if you try hard to make it the next logical step of a user journey, eventually the user will be confronted by an interstitial that they are likely to find jarring and disruptive. You have to accept that some people will click away.
But the ones that stay will need to be reassured on a couple of pointers. Firstly, are you building trust?
- Can the user trust you, and how is that made evident?
- Can they trust that you will treat their data, payment, and financial information correctly?
- Are you asking for too much?
- Can they trust that you are going to reciprocate in this relationship?
Adopt a stepped paywall experience where you are not immediately asking the user to sign up for a long-term commitment, or even to pay. Offer a free trial and have a soft approach to collecting data.
Building trust is a multifaceted process that will come down to design, the copy, the “ask”, the content, the entire approach. Rigorously test and benchmark your paywall experience to see how you stack up, tweaking it as you go. (Read our publisher copywriting tips here to get some ideas on how to engage through words).
Another important element to consider is authority:
- Does your content and its quality warrant a subscription?
- Have you actually got a product worth paying for?
It can be difficult to communicate your credentials, especially with a paywall that is better kept streamlined and simple. But there are small, subtle ways you can show authority such as badges, certifications, professional endorsements, social proof etc.
You may get more people to subscribe to your content if you create a sense of exclusiveness or urgency. People like to feel like they’re joining a club of people in the know.
If you are primarily a professional publisher and are trying to attract professionals and industry leaders, consider the ways in which your content paywall is just one spoke in a larger relationship building strategy that also includes a membership portal, an engaging website, networking events, exclusive launches, etc.
‘Stickiness’ and what happens next?
How interesting is your content? Think about how the paywall interacts with your content on the page: how much it conceals, and reveals can really help seal the deal.
You want your content to be compelling and interesting, but at the same time most publishers are also not looking to fall foul of clickbait trends. Think about how you can balance revealing and concealing on the same page to create a sense of ‘stickiness’, a sense of I want to go further, but also, I’m stuck here.
What happens next after the user engages with your paywall experience is also incredibly important. Even if they don’t convert, you should still offer them some sort of message and end the experience on a positive note. If the user does decide to subscribe, they are now part of your customer base. How do you celebrate that milestone? How do you offer value to them as a new user? What is your user on-boarding like?
It is much more rewarding to invest in existing customers than go out and find new ones. So, once you’ve gone through the difficult path of getting someone to access your content behind a paywall, make sure that what’s on the other side is compelling.
Smooth and easy is the benchmark: get the right tech to make it right
It’s the little details that count with paywall tech. Users need to have a smooth login experience with a form that is effortless to fill out; they want seamless digital experiences and clear and detailed guidance.
- Ensure that people can very quickly sign up for your service and that they have a clear way of selecting the individual levels or the products that they need. Tiers are a smart way to go.
- Ask people less questions. Get them to subscribe to a more basic level, and then, later, you can always send them an email to clarify, fill in a survey, etc. Without data on your users, you will struggle to offer good personalised marketing, but, at the same time, asking too much can seem invasive.
- There are some good reporting and analytics tools that you can use to collect data on your users, but always be transparent on what you are collecting and why.
- It often makes sense for the paywall technology to be separate from the rest of your digital ecosystem, but this can also create challenges when it comes to integration and version control. Whether you choose an existing paywall experience that you modify, or you create your own and integrate it with your content database, make sure that it is very well tested, that it is benchmarked, and that the whole process is as smooth as possible. You also want to make sure that it not only looks good, but that it seamlessly hooks onto your back-end so that people get access to the right pieces of content at the right time.
Review your barriers to conversion
Reading up on conversion rate optimisation will help you understand some of the psychology that goes into buying and subscribing. Think about all the little things that may stand in the way of someone making a purchase (top conversion killer: a slow load time), and remove those barriers.
- Think about how you can streamline and simplify the form experience, and remember, form conversions hinge on good error management! Use integrations to offer things like social log-ins.
- Organisational logins are great idea if you are mainly selling to professionals and are a B2B publisher. (Our guide to identity access management here).
Managing paywalled content is a balancing act
From a SEO and visibility perspective, paywalls offer their own challenges, as content behind a paywall is sometimes in a non-indexable format.
- Consider how you want to sell your paywall content. Do you perhaps need to create a separate marketing website?
- Think about granting access to some of your content so that it can get properly crawled and indexed or create guides and summaries of your content and make those available. (Note: metadata doesn’t necessarily solve all your problems if your content is blocked).
- Partial indexation of content or managing crawlers through documentation such as robots.txt files are not perfect solutions, but it is worth reading up on SEO best practices to control indexation.
Content paywalls are not necessarily popular, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be done well. Focus on how you can create value to convince your users that they are worth it. A paywall can be a relationship dealbreaker for publishers and their readers, so don’t drop the ball on this one.
