In the past couple of years, several newspaper publications with paywalls have given subscribers a new benefit: They allowed them to share articles with friends and family for free. At Hearst Newspapers, we added a second wrinkle: requiring anonymous gift recipients to register an e-mail address to redeem the article view.

Our hope was that this would result in a “two-fer,” creating an uplift to both our retention and acquisition efforts. While we’re still studying this for the long term, the preliminary results were so positive that we moved from just a test on HoustonChronicle.com to rolling this out to all subscribers on our biggest sites: SFChronicle.com in San Francisco; ExpressNews.com in San Antonio, Texas; and TimesUnion.com in Albany, New York, with more publications to come.

First, there was a 9% stop reduction during the period of our test among the group of subscribers that saw the article gifting benefit versus those who didn’t. While it’s not totally clear whether the mechanics of using the benefit helped or simply knowing of its existence did, that alone was an eye-popping number. Ask any retention executive at your companies if they would like to reduce churn by 9% and I think you will get an enthusiastic response.

There are other indications subscribers were quite stoked to receive this benefit. In a survey of our subscribers last March, the ability to share articles with friends or family was the most requested feature benefit. And when we sent an e-mail to subscribers touting its availability, more than 50% read the e-mail, an astonishingly high read rate for any e-mail campaign.

The second element of our feature was just as exciting. When gift recipients went to view the article sent by their friend or significant other, about 20% provided an e-mail address when asked.

That is more than triple the e-mail provision rate when we tested imposing a registration step on visitors who have exceeded their monthly allotment of free article views.

Think about it: When someone you care about sends you an article they think you should read, don’t you want to find out what they’re talking about (even if you have to provide an e-mail address to do so)?

Conversely, as marketers, it’s great to be able to target people in the close circle around existing subscribers who’ve already declared their devotion to local news by paying for their own subscription.

The other thing that happens when gift recipients provide an e-mail address is they get added to e-mail lists where we send out promotional subscription offers. From this mechanism, not only do we have 17,000 new e-mail addresses from these four markets, but in the market where this went out the earliest, the downstream conversion rate to paid among certain cohorts has already reached 1%.

While that may not seem like a ton of e-mails to have acquired for a company of Hearst Newspapers’ size, the great thing about a product like this is it has a set-it-and-forget it aspect, where the mechanism is at work even while we sleep.

For Hearst Newspapers, it’s one great example of product-led growth, where a new feature can act as its own marketing channel, reducing the cost of acquisition of new leads and tapping into adjacent target audiences as we all try to figure out where the next growth opportunity is.

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