Top 5 growth strategies for subscriber acquisition

What is subscriber acquisition?

Future growth depends on customer or in this case, subscriber acquisition. It is a strategy that involves carrying out activities focusing on bringing in new subscribers to the website. For it to be effective, publishers would need to use systematic and sustainable strategies that have long term goals.

It can be challenging to get new subscribers to commit and the competition can make it even more difficult. Netizens are bombarded everyday with millions of digital messages, and there’s an even bigger amount of content being published every hour. With this crowd of data and netizens, it’s important to focus on acquiring new subscribers, so you have a small group you can focus on.

Subscriber acquisition is the process of getting new users coming into your website. In the digital world, it involves focusing on discoverability, shareability and impressions.

Why is Subscription Acquisition important?

It’s important to not get swayed by numbers, if the subscribers you’re acquiring are not satisfied then it will backfire. The long term revenue you collect will depend on the number of users who are loyal to the content. Active user engagement will improve brand trust, communication and understanding of reader’s needs. In order for you to grow in the industry you will have to grow your user base.

Mobilize your influencers:

Are you looking for ways to get word out about your content/brand? The easiest way is to find influencers who would have the right audience. People will listen to those who they seek information from. Understand who influences your target audience and then communicate with them. Create a good relationship with relevant influencers so that you can get magnified access to user needs and trends.

You can look into influencers on social media, those with their own dedicated channels and do a study of their reach and impact. Most often you can get success rates of other businesses they’ve promoted as well. It’s important to find trusted influencers and then create an authentic understanding of your service and brand. They would have to know your content, they should know how they can make use of it, and they should like it enough to want to recommend it to their audience.

Content marketing:

Your content will always be the driving agent but you can’t expect it to free float you into the success pool. Content is what stands out to any reader, you need to ensure it reaches them. Target and re-target audience to build an audience that shares that commonality across every channel you possibly can. Vice is a good example of this, they focus on the urban young crowd and create a sense of community through their social media pages. They come up with stories that are unconventional and these quirky stories carry readers to their website where they can access more information about a variety of topics.

If you’re creating good content, are you promoting it? Are you building links and getting your domain authority up? You need to ensure you get the most traffic out of your content and for this you need marketable content. Evaluate what would get your readers to subscribe and then give them an experience that would make them loyal visitors and then eventually subscribers.

Acquire the right customers:

While you’re trying to acquire more subscribers, at time you can get manipulated by the numbers. But are you only getting a swarm of subscribers or are you getting subscribers that plan to stay? While it isn’t unusual to have subscribers drop out of websites, it can be avoided while you build your acquisition strategies.

You can take surveys to understand your subscribers. Gauge if they’re around for the content, because of a black friday offer, for the membership benefits or more. This would help you understand what works while also ensuring that you’re simply letting a herd of paying netizens in.

Ask your most loyal users for reviews - referrals promotion:

Are your loyal users promoting you? An easy way to get promotions is through your existing reader base. Encourage them to submit reviews - you may offer coupons or subscription plan benefits in exchange to have more participation. People like listening to other people, having your most loyal customers speak about your product will help you gain the attention of passersby.

You can also provide referral codes and watch how many people come into your website through your subscribers alone. This would also help evaluate your target audience and niche.

Paid advertising:

Paid ads can be quite effective to promote your website. Once you’ve drilled down your target audience you can start to look into channels that could get you the best results.

• Social media is a great way to start. You can have targeted campaigns to find the right crowd. People are more likely to read content on social platforms, this would help you not land in the spam folder.

• Cross promotion campaigns - trade of promotion with other platforms that publish stories of similar themes as you.

• Shout outs on social media - You can pay influencers and popular accounts to give you a shoutout. The exposure to their existing loyal followers would benefit immensely.