A subscriber is most engaged in the first two weeks. I read that once, and it stuck. So the question became: How engaged can we get a new subscriber from the moment they click “submit?”

And the onboarding journey was born.

For several years, growing digital subscriptions has been a major focus for Newsday. Now that we’ve got them, how will we retain them? That’s the “why.” The time to begin building engagement is while the subscriber is still in the transactional mode. Engagement is at the core of retention, beginning at sign-up. 

By asking the reader to customise their subscription, we’re creating habits.

It’s all in the cards

How, you might ask, are we doing this?

The initial onboarding series launched with three cards: interests, newsletters, and e-edition. For the test launched in December 2023, the journey was expanded to six cards.

In addition to the control, the subscriber was offered the opportunity to download the app using a QR code/desktop or links to the App Store or Google Play/mobile, sign up for breaking news alerts via SMS, and was introduced to NewsdayTV+. Early results show control, with a 78% completion rate, is stronger than the test, at a 40% completion rate.

To close this margin a few modifications were made to the test, reordering the cards and copying the CTA buttons from control.

What’s interesting about control is that there are two CTA buttons, “next” and “skip and continue.” Both move the reader to the next card, but this method gives the reader control of how they move through the journey and therefore, we’re seeing more readers complete the series. The test version only had a “next” button, and we saw a large percentage drop off at the first card.

Our hypothesis is that if we include new products and improve the UX for onboarding, we can expose more users to subscriber benefits — thereby increasing engagement. Success is measured by the percentage that completes onboarding and the clicks on the calls to action.

Results have been positive while creating benchmarks with the new cards: 50% of subscribers have signed up for one or more newsletters, 5% have signed up for text alerts, and 3% have downloaded the app.

Next steps for testing

The next steps will include a long-term analysis showing the impact on engagement and retention. The test will continue running until it reaches statistical significance.

By gathering the metrics from each card, we can optimise the user experience and determine if the interactive cards positively affect retention and improve customer lifetime value. We will also see if adding three cards impacted the journey due to the longer completion time.

We will leverage these findings to create new tests. Adding new topics, combining Interests and Newsletters into one card, or updating the series to include timely or seasonal newsletters are just a few examples. How we observe readers interacting with the onboarding series will impact how we test the welcome and engagement series, but that’s a whole other programme.

We still have quite a bit to learn and uncover with the onboarding series. Stay tuned to see what comes next.

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