2023 Silver Marketing Automation

Entrant: The Telegragh

Client: The Telegragh

Entry Title: Smart paywall project

Executive Summary

Over the past 12 months, The Telegraph has created a bespoke automated access and offer model. It’s empowered teams to deliver substantial incremental subscription revenue - while also improving reader experience. The challenge became how to display fewer paywalls but convert more free readers into paying subscribers.

Strategy

The proposed solution separated readers by their propensity to subscribe, using automation. The team then used machine learning to give each group a different level of access and a bespoke offer.

Readers could sample content. When they became a warmer lead, they were presented with the offer they’d be most likely to respond to, using a mix of annual or monthly options to reduce churn.

The task was split into two phases:

• Displaying the right amount of access to each reader at the right time, by taking over 100 data points and combining them into a ‘propensity to subscribe’ model.
• Offering the optimal subscription price based on likelihood to convert, by creating a bespoke pricing model that considered profitability and volume - and worked seamlessly with the propensity tool.

Creativity

Phase One involved a content access model based on a reader’s propensity to subscribe. The team partnered with Piano, a publishing-focused tech firm, to leverage different pre-built algorithms to help determine a reader’s optimum access level.

There followed an extensive testing programme, implemented across six months. This allowed algorithms to be tailored into a bespoke model, with readers assigned a score. Each score was then grouped into different bands, determining personalised levels of access and the types of paywall messages they saw.

For Phase Two an offer model was created. This consisted of combining propensity scores with targeted annual and monthly offers for registered users. Tests established the optimal monthly and annual pricing for volume and longer-term revenue. Once identified, prices were entered into a bespoke, internally built recommendation engine, allowing the offer to be presented in real-time to specific readers.

Results

The end result was a highly effective solution unique in the publishing industry.

Goals have been achieved with:

• Increased site traffic: 22% more page views per month.
• Increased site accessibility: 9% fewer paywalls served per month.
• Increased volume: 24% subscriptions per month across email and web.
• Improved longer term growth: 30-50% of subscriptions are now annual (up from below 5% previously).

The Team

The Telegraph - David Humber, Head of Conversion - Jason Sheppard, Senior Product Manager, Subscriptions - Emma Wicks, Head of Editorial and Product Insight & Analytics - Mathias Douchet, Director of Product - Mike Adamson, Chief Product Officer - Alex Rigg, Director of Owned Optimisation - Thomas Kelleher, Director of Technology - MarTech - Tom Hunter, Growth Director - Nastassja Findley, Senior Analytics Manager - Dylan Jacques, Group Technology Director - Peter Childs, Data Scientist - James Fieldhouse, Lead Creative Copywriter