The past year has been a busy one at TownNews—in the last 12 months, we’ve unleashed more than 230 new features and upgrades. At this breaknec…
Our biggest focus for audience development at TownNews is providing the best-in-class solutions and support you need to drive reader revenue. In 2021, we added a series of features to Audience+ that have already been incredibly successful at accelerating growth for our partners.
We’ve also expanded Audience+ beyond the subscription paywall to support membership models and overall engagement. Here are six enhancements we made last year that you won’t want to miss.
The biggest improvement for 2021 is the frictionless one-page payment workflow. End users can complete a subscription or membership checkout, including payment, without being redirected to a separate landing page. This allows users to remain on the article, getting them back to your content quicker and easier.
2. Offer Builder gives you the power to personalize the paywall
Audience+ now includes the tools you need to fully customize user experiences—you can even target different offers and messages to each audience segment. Called Offer Builder, this marketing tool inside of BLOX CMS gives you control over every aspect of the paywall.
At our July customer webinar, Bridget Sibthorp-Moecker, director of audience for TownNews, showed off the new and improved Audience+. Our upco…
Your readers are diverse and unique, and your paywalls should be too. With Offer Builder, you're able to construct different user journeys, paywalls, registration walls, and experiences that relate to a user’s engagement with your site.
With these updates, you can have unique pricing offers set up for each group, such as:
Limit a special introductory offer to targeted audience segments.
Offer free registration to anonymous users to collect email addresses.
Show a print offer to users that are inside your metro area.
Show digital-only offers for those outside the area.
For the people that visit your site almost daily—Brand Lovers—offer them something even more enticing to encourage them to subscribe.
Customize messaging and price for users with an Ad Blocker or private browsing.
3. Customize your onsite promotion with new opt-in points
With Audience+, you can run a subscription or membership model. Whether you're a digital-first organization, broadcast, radio, newspaper, or everything in between. Although the Audience+ paywall is effective and advanced tech, you don’t have to run a paywall to launch an effective membership program. Use landing pages and buttons, along with different opt-in points throughout the site, to customize packages and offers.
You can dynamically control pricing, messaging and offers on these promo widgets with Offer Builder, or create custom messaging right on the block.
Create custom landing pages with special messaging to promote subscription or membership deals in emails.
Use the Offer Button in your main navigation to promote subscription offers using one-page payment.
Add an offer to utility regions in articles for a mobile-friendly, non-intrusive way to highlight subscriptions.
Promote a membership offer in the side rail of your website.
Leaky paywalls can be a big problem for reader revenue programs. That’s why we significantly improved ad blocker and private browsing detection in 2021.
With our latest technology, we can anonymously identify a user for the purpose of enforcing a paywall when a user attempts incognito mode or private browsing. It's a never-ending battle as browsers change, and user privacy is very important to us, but we believe when users circumvent the paywall they are stealing revenue from our partners.
5. Admin improvements make it even easier to update your settings
On top of adding the Offer Builder tool and these new features, we're striving to make it easier to use. We’ve also built Audience+ to grow with you as your program evolves. That’s why we’ve made improvements to the admin so building and managing rules, bulk editing, and customizing experiences is easier than ever.
Coming soon: A syndication tool that will allow you to create rules on a single site that can be mirrored on multiple sites. This feature will be especially useful for groups that manage similar rulesets on multiple sites.
6. Increasing first party data and encouraging logins
In the same way you can subscribe or become a member without leaving an article, Audience+ comes packed with user login improvements. Getting more users to login and create an account is the crucial first step to increasing first party data and reducing your dependency on third party cookies.
For readers, members, and subscribers, we want to make logging in as painless as possible. That’s why we’ve highlighted our “Email me a login link” feature in a recent update. Subscribers and registered users can click this button to instantly log in from their email, without using a password.
Bonus: Additional features that give you more control over reader revenue
In 2021, we have also brought the power of Audience+ paywall into BLOX Now apps and AMP pages. With just a few clicks, you can extend your crafted rulesets and experiences to platforms outside of your website.
With our new redirect support, you can:
Choose to redirect to a landing page instead of using a modal.
Point the reader to a sub-section or landing page when they close the paywall. This is especially useful for umbrella sites that host multiple publications on one domain.
Our popular one-page payment can also be used for print offers! Grow your newspaper print edition subscribers with the same fast and easy presentation.
The renewal subscription form has been streamlined with fewer form fields and clicks.
Stay tuned for many more retention features coming soon!
Our focus is on driving consumer revenue by improving the end user experience. With Audience+, we’re giving you the tools to really customize the offer and hone in on your audience strategy. To learn more about Audience+ or for help implementing any of these features, please contact your sales rep or submit a ticket.
Bridget Sibthorp-Moecker is the director of audience at TownNews.
