Onboarding should be a familiar concept to everyone trying to get paying subscribers to stay longer. It is a term that encompasses all information, trigger points, notifications, and updates a new subscriber receives in order to get the most out of their new product.

For Schibsted and its brands (Aftenposten, Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad, and many more), the main product is the news. So our onboarding communication should always be updated with the latest stories and the best articles.

Successful onboarding = retention

Relevant content at the right time helps readers stay engaged with our products. But with several media brands, each with different onboarding per subscription plan, it takes a lot of time and work to manually update the communication. It seems impossible to be relevant without spending a disproportionate amount of time adding content to our mails.

However, static evergreen content is not a viable option either, since that can make the products feel out of date, out of touch, and not relevant for the customer at the point of onboarding. 

We needed a way to always be relevant in our onboarding and while not have to manually update each communication with new content.

To be both relevant and evergreen seemed impossible. But through API-powered content feeds, we found a way to do just that.

Going live

In 2020, Schibsted partnered with the tech company Movable Ink. Movable Ink allows its users to serve live content from its Web sites directly into newsletters, onboarding e-mails, and sales campaigns.

In short: Instead of adding a static story, we could build an automatic feed that pulled the latest news or articles into the e-mail for our subscribers.

We use our own API endpoints that contain all information needed to build a news article and style it into our emails.

If done correctly, we would only have to update our e-mails once. After that, they would always be relevant with the latest news.

Reinventing communication

In 2021 we started to rebuild a lot of our customer communication, using dynamic content where we previously used static recommendations.

Firstly, in the communication where we wanted traffic to our sites, we added the most-read or the latest news articles as a feed. Whenever a subscriber opened the e-mail, they would get the latest news.

We could also target feeds based on what subscribers wanted. We had the latest news and most-read, but we also made our own feeds for economy news, the latest podcasts, popular pundits, and offers from our loyalty program.

Combining custom feeds with user data allowed us to seamlessly create the best possible experience, and be relevant and personalised with no additional work. The same personalisation allowed us to power our holdback offers to outgoing subscribers with a personalised countdown timer, which created a sense of urgency.

By the start of 2022, nearly all of our onboarding journeys had automatic, live content, served to subscribers at the most crucial point of engagement. We have also integrated the latest news feeds in our weekly newsletters. This ensures that we are relevant throughout the weekend, if, for instance, a major news event were to happen after the communication has been sent to the customer.

Not only did this lead to an uptick in engagement, but we also saved time — an estimated 280 hours a year. Additionally, the personalised holdback decreased churn, making subscribers stay a little longer, resulting in increased revenue.

So, by deploying live content, we have become more effective, more engaging and more efficient. And, all in all, created a better journey for our subscribers.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .