The Growth Playbook You Haven’t Heard

Rethinking Blog Subscribers:

CAUTION: minions at work inside

Hi, I’m @anum.

I love telling stories, pretending I’m Beyoncé, and sipping chai tea.

Let me quickly walk you through a typical scenario.

1

APPLY USER ONBOARDING TO CONTENT

Meet Dan Wolchonok, Senior PM for Sidekick.

Leading growth efforts for our product, Dan became obsessed with user retention.

So his team launched 60 onboarding experiments to figure out a new user welcome flow that contributed to greater retention.

They tested, reiterated, and tested again until something clicked.

This got me thinking about current content subscription models:

reader subscribes

receives “subscription complete” email

receives next published post

… wait a minute. If an optimized user onboarding flow leads to longer user retention, wouldn’t an optimized subscriber flow result in a similar impact?

We began experimenting and eventually end up with new content onboarding. (and are still actively learning how to improve …)

READER SUBSCRIBES

READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN

READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS

READER SUBSCRIBES

READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN

READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS

Standard step. A visitor on your

website fills out a form to subscribe to your content.

READER SUBSCRIBES

READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN

READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS

Hypothesis: The higher the engagement with subscribers early on, the longer they’ll retain as monthly active

subscribers.

Approach: New subscribers enter 4-week workflow that sends them top performing posts.

READER SUBSCRIBES

READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN

READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS

These workflow emails generate 2x the clickthrough rate as our normal sends – an indication that first

impressions really count – and were a vital contributor of our most valuable metric, which we’ll show soon.

READER SUBSCRIBES

READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN

READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS

Once the workflow is complete,

subscribers join our email list to receive new content as its

released.

READER SUBSCRIBES

READER ENTERS DRIP CAMPAIGN

READER RECEIVES NEW POSTS

Of course, this onboarding flow uses technology in it’s simplest form: setting up

smart drip campaigns.

2

MEASURE SUBSCRIBERS LIKE USER RETENTION.

Most growth teams seek authentic growth through active usage.

DAU: DAILY ACTIVE USER

unique amount of users who are

"active" within a day.

WAU: WEEKLY ACTIVE USER

unique amount of users who are

"active" within a week.

MAU: MONTHLY ACTIVE USER

unique amount of users who are

"active" within a month.

We measure HubSpot Sales Products in WAUs. We use a set of criteria that shows if users are getting value from our product every week. That core metric helps us monitor the success of our product growth.

To support this authentic growth, we set on a mission to turn content into a meaningful revenue channel.

We applied the same authentic metric behind product growth …

MAU: MONTHLY ACTIVE USER

We applied the same authentic metric behind product growth … to content.

MAU: MONTHLY ACTIVE USER

MAS: MONTHLY ACTIVE SUBSCRIBER

MONTHLY ACTIVE SUBSCRIBER:

noun 1  an individual subscribed to content and clicking

through on that content through emails

2  definition used by Sidekick content team to monitor authentic audience growth

11,870 12,698 12,489 12,990 12,495

14,217 13,675 13,176 13,616

16,794

19,159 20,697 20,636

24,108 23,906 24,967

While we aim to rapidly grow our email list, we focus more on how many subscribers are actively engaged.

Looking purely at “views” can fog our vision. Measuring active engagement allows us to assess our content’s true effectiveness.

3

ALLOW SUBSCRIBERS TO CHURN JUST AS USERS.

When users stop using freemium products, we consider them churned.

When users stop using freemium products, we consider them churned.

… but when subscribers stop reading our blog, we keep emailing them.

In the early days of our new sales blog, we invested heavily in growing our

subscribers and grew quickly.

At one point we reached 60K subscribers, But only 22K of them were actively reading our content. So we removed the others from

our subscriber list.

We sacrificed subscribers for success.

Our goal isn’t to shove content into inboxes, it’s

to provide something worth reading.

Thank You. More Presentations: ANUMHUSSAIN.COM