It reduces the urge to churn.
The Post, The New York Times, and a few other major outlets have found real success signing up digital subscribers. But subscribers become un-subscribers with alarming frequency.
Churn — the rate at which paying customers cancel — is a problem all across the subscription economy, from Netflix down to your local daily. It’s a lot cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to find a replacement when she cancels. For subscription businesses, there is no higher goal than reducing churn.
A study by the media consulting firm Mather last year found that, for newspapers, the average weekly digital churn rate was 0.85%. In other words, if you have 10,000 subscribers, you can expect 85 of them to cancel each and every week. Over a year, that’s 4,420 cancellations — nearly half of your subscriber base! You’ll have to sign up that many new customers each year just to break even.
Part of the reason cancellations happen is that they’re easily reversible. I mean, it’s not as if Hulu won’t take you back if you change your mind in a couple months, right? If anything, you might luck into some sweet new introductory rate better than what you were paying before.
But a 50-year promise suddenly makes canceling the Post something that will affect your life decades down the line. It’s an asset you can’t get back if you change your mind next week. If things are tight and you’re debating which sub to kill, losing your permanent Post discount miiiiight be the little nudge that makes you cut something else.
So yes, it is just one discount promotion. But it’s one that plays to the Post’s distinctive strengths and raises the stakes for anyone considering canceling. If your goal is “to broaden the newspaper’s reach,” that’s valuable stuff.
There was, of course, no digital subscription to the Post back in the days of the Watergate Three. But 50 years ago, a seven-day print subscription, delivered to your D.C.-area home, would have cost you 98 cents a week, which adds out to…$50.96 a year.
Wow. Maybe fifty bucks — a dollar a week, more or less — really is the eternal price.