Alejandro Cantarero is the Field CTO of AI at DataStax. Previously, Alejandro was founding CTO of Nami ML. He has built and run data teams at startups and large enterprises. Most recently he was the VP of Data at two large media companies, the Los Angeles Times and Tribune Publishing Company.
Explore Paywall Strategies: Check out our interactive paywall gallery for examples of best mobile paywall designs as well as common mistakes.
For many content creators, paywalls can be seen as a risky move. For over 10 years now, content publishers have gradually shifted to using them as a way to grow revenue that is more consistent than advertising. For companies that get the formula correct, the results have been phenomenal! Like many publishers before them, Wired Magazine took a leap of faith and introduced a premium content paywall last year. Since then, they have seen a 300 percent increase in their subscriber base year-over-year and have been open to sharing their results.
The paywall is simple and direct when presented to the customer. It sits at the bottom of the screen waiting to be clicked at any time the reader is ready to subscribe. It is clear and to the point. For me, the design of Wired’s paywall is an excellent example of communicating to readers that there is value in the subscription. As a mature company in a mature market, Wired has had the benefit of learning from others’ mistakes.
Let’s look at a few ways a great paywall design can help impact your subscription strategies. Here are 4 key paywall best practices:
Keep Design Consistent, Personalize When Relevant
If you publish a content-based app, most of your users will reach a point as they navigate your app that will prompt a paywall barrier as they attempt to access a premium specific page or content. When this occurs, it is important to ensure that you maintain content consistency, that can also be personalized at points of conversion. For example, if your user wants to access premium content such as an exclusive article to read, avoid taking the user away to a generic page that offers in-app subscription options. Instead, look at personalizing the paywall with one basic offer and a caption of the article the user wanted to read in the window. Keep the color scheme, fonts, and other design elements close to the original content and consistent with your brand so the change isn’t a drastic shift from what they've been looking at so far.
Keep Your Subscription Options Simple and Test
Choosing the right number of purchase options on your paywall can be tricky. Too many choices are often the most common unforeseen contributor to users clicking away from your digital paywall. Keep it basic. If your product is simple, start with one price for one option and use only one button as your CTA. If you have multiple purchase options, you may find that adding a third button performs better than just having two. Try it both ways and see what happens.
Figure out a starting price your app can be tough. Price too low and customers may think you do not have a premium product. Too high and they may not purchase. Research similar apps to get an idea for a starting point. Be sure to test. See what happens for a few weeks if you move the price up or down. You may be surprised by the results of running even a simple test on different price points.
Your Call-To-Action – Make it Clear and Purposeful
What is a call-to-action (CTA)? In digital marketing, this is simply the action you ask your users to do. It could be to access certain content on the website, create an account, or purchase a subscription. They are important because they are what is used in the paywall to drive people to where you need them to go – the subscription page. It’s critical to ensure that it is designed to keep that goal in mind.
Don’t leave any doubt with your users about the purpose of your CTA. To that point:
Keep the Focus on the CTA: Eliminate all links or design elements that may distract from the CTA.
Choose the Right Colors: Bright and bold colors are great but make sure you’ve got enough whitespace around it to stand out.
Page Placement is Key: Your CTA should be prominently displayed on the page. Don’t make your recipients scroll around to find it.
Use a Clear CTA: Your button label must be clear and direct. “Subscribe Now” rather than “click here to subscribe”.
Features, Benefits and Offers
This is a perfect time to list one or two of the best benefits users get when they make a purchase. Mentioning a couple of key points on your paywall gives that extra reason why joining would be that way to go. If your offer includes a free trial period, be sure to mention this on the paywall screen. Also, do the same if offering a discount to new users.
There is no point in promising excellent content behind your paywall if you users don’t understand the value of that content. Free trials and metered paywalls where users get some amount of free content each month are great ways to allow potential customers to learn the value of your product. The aim is to give all users a fantastic customer experience with the app. Now that you’ve created an opportunity for your users to “shop” around and experience your content, moving to a subscription model will be that much easier a decision to make.
As a publisher, the main takeaway here is that the customer experience is as seamless as possible when presented with a paywall option. Your content should be one that is both excellent and willing to be paid for. By taking the time to optimize the subscription process with Nami, we see customer signup rates increase by up to 45%. With an easy to integrate platform, designed to help you succeed, Nami is ready to help!
For an early-stage startup, the thought of tackling data privacy, security, and compliance can seem rather daunting. It may also feel low priority compared to other work on your plate.
You likely have a limited timeframe to show increased traction in your business. Prioritizing work that is directly tied to growing your customer base or revenue is very rightly at the top of your mind. Adding a lot of development time or a large spend on a vendor for data privacy and security is an easy task to kick down the road.
Three main factors can influence any business to invest in improving their product.
Customers. Who buys your products?
Regulations. GDPR, CCPA, and other government regulations around the world.
Investors. Depending on your company this may be individuals, funds, or the stock market.
Unless data privacy is putting a large stress on one of these 3 factors, the work will never climb to the top of your queue.
How these factors affect large enterprises.
Equifax suffered one of the largest and most damaging breaches of American consumers’ data in the last few years, effectively releasing everything needed to steal the identity of every adult in the United States. Yikes.
Customers. Who are Equifax’s customers? They are not the people whose data were stolen. Equifax sells consumer data to other large companies. These large companies did not have any data leaked, so they aren’t concerned.
Regulators. They are concerned, but the settlement with the FTC amounted to around $4.75 per consumer whose data were stolen. The CEO in charge at the time took home $20 million in bonuses. This hardly feels like a punishment that will have Equifax or its future leadership worried about the consequences of improperly handling consumer data.
Investors. When news of the breach became known, Equifax stock dropped by about 40%. Two years later, their stock has effectively recovered all of its value without any meaningful changes being made.
Equifax is not seeing any large pressure from its customers, regulators, or investors to correct the behavior that led to their data breach.
Facebook similarly does not appear to be under any real pressure from these three groups to be better stewards of our data.
Coverage of each of these issues can be found at the end of the article.
Customers. Interestingly, no matter how poorly Facebook treats its customers and their data, we have not seen any large movement of customers away from their platform. In fact, daily usage of their platform continues to grow.
Regulators. While concerned, the size of the most recent fine from the FTC was not large enough to materially impact Facebook’s bottom line, only amounting to one month of revenue.
Investors. After Facebook settled its latest data privacy breach with the FTC, their stock price went up. Investors clearly are not concerned.
How do these same factors affect early-stage companies?
Some of the largest companies in the world are not being forced by their customers, regulators, or investors to take data privacy seriously. What do these same factors look like to an early-stage company today?
As an early-stage company, you likely do not have a dominant enough position in the market, like Facebook or Experian, where customers have to use your products.
Data privacy can also be a key feature of what you are selling as well as a differentiator amongst your competitors.
The rise of products like DuckDuckGo, Brave, and 1.1.1.1 has shown that companies are gaining traction by positioning themselves against well-established competitors as the privacy-focused alternative.
Still, it is easy to remain unconvinced. Are customers really looking for companies to take action on data privacy? GitLab’s recent reversal on a plan to roll out product analytics based on community feedback is one example that suggests we are starting to see the influence of the customer in privacy decisions.
Regulators. As a small and young company, you may think that the regulators are focused on large organizations and you are safe avoiding compliance until your company has grown. However, in Europe there have been fines against small businesses.
CCPA opens a new risk vector to companies by allowing individuals to bring legal actions, which may create a slew of new law firms overnight in 2020 seeking to bring lawsuits on the behalf of consumers to companies around the US.
CCPA does have exclusions for small businesses. CCPA applies to your business if you have:
$25 million in annual revenue or
50% or more of your revenue is derived from selling California consumer’s personal data or
50,000 California customer, household, or device records
Some of these numbers may seem big, but let’s focus in on the 50,000 customer or device records for a moment. For a Software as a Service business, this is actually quite small.
Whether you sell to other businesses or you are a direct-to-consumer product, you are likely to have 50,000 customer records while still being well below the $25 million annual revenue threshold. For B2B companies, landing one small or mid-sized customer could create 50,000 records in your systems. In a direct-to-consumer SaaS product, 50,000 customers is likely small enough that you still do not yet have real traction in your market.
Are you actively growing email lists as part of your marketing strategy? Do you have a CRM where you track every potential lead you’ve come in contact with? How quickly do these systems get to 50,000 distinct records? It will depend on your business, but it is easy to envision reaching this number fairly quickly.
For early-stage SaaS companies, you are likely to reach the threshold of 50,000 customer records, and therefore have to be concerned with CCPA, while still being in a very early growth stage of your company’s lifecycle. This is a particularly challenging time for many companies to have to worry about data privacy and security.
Investors. As an early-stage company, your investors are individuals and funds that you are either pursuing or have already invested. This is very different from the set of investors involved with a publicly held company like Facebook or Experian.
The results of regulatory action against an early-stage company are potentially much more damaging than they are for a large and profitable enterprise. On the customer front, issues with data privacy are affecting potential future customers rather than customers you already have.
Any issues coming from these groups may make potential and current investors nervous about the viability of your company and products, and will likely have data privacy issues higher on the list of investor concerns than they are for large enterprises.
What have we learned about early-stage companies?
Customers that you are trying to draw to your products are more interested in data privacy than ever before.
Regulations like CCPA are likely to apply to your company very quickly after you start acquiring customers.
Investors are paying attention to changes in both of these areas as they directly impact their return on investment in your company.
While this all might sound a bit intimidating, the shifting data privacy landscape shows lots of opportunities for companies that can differentiate themselves from their competitors by making privacy a core value of their products.
So, now that we are all either terrified into behaving well or excited about adding privacy as a differentiator to our business, look out for part 2, where we’ll discuss easy ways early-stage companies can lay the groundwork for a healthy approach to data privacy.
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This is the first in a series of articles about why data privacy, security, and regulation are important for small and early-stage companies, and how they can start to put good practices into place.
