When I started my career back in 2001, subscription revenue was not widely regarded as critical to a company’s success. However, times have changed, and subscribers are the backbone of most modern media companies.

As a collaborative consumer engagement team, we recognised the need to do more for our subscribers by delivering additional value, staying relevant, and expressing gratitude for continuing their relationship with us. When we looked around, this theme was not widely embraced by many companies.

To that end, our team launched Subscriber Appreciation Month on November 1, 2022.

In the United States, Thanksgiving Day is celebrated in November, so what better time to recognise our customers than a month-long celebration centered around giving thanks. It is not a novel concept, but some of the pieces we added were designed to reward and engage more of our subscribers for just being that: subscribers.

Another reason for this concept was to test principles of gamification as a way to build habituation with our subscribers.

We worked with our cross-functional news, product, and marketing operations teams to engage subscribers in three key ways:

• Offering rewards for engaging with content.
• Delivering additional value just to say thank you.
• Extending the relationship with partnerships and/or random acts of kindness.

Subscriber Appreciation month was full of contests, giveaways, and premium content available exclusively for subscribers. Our team developed a blog that was updated throughout the month to keep subscribers informed about what we were offering. The key to this blog was that it was subscriber-only content that required subscribers to be digitally activated in order to access it.

Offering rewards for engaging with content

We knew that constantly reminding subscribers of these giveaways and “stoking of the fire” was key to this month’s success. We used some “national holidays” as the pillars of our different reward programmes throughout the month.

We celebrated National Book Award Week by hosting a digital scavenger hunt, which gave users the opportunity to win a book retailer gift card. Every day that week, we posted a new scavenger hunt code on the subscriber appreciation blog. It also appeared in the Nation/World Extra or Sports Extra sections of the subscribers’ e-newspaper.

On Friday of that week, we supplied a link on the blog to a survey that asked for the codes from all five days that week and allowed the user to enter the contest. The first 50 users entering the correct codes each won a book retailer gift card. This contest was so popular the blog had the top traffic across our entire network when the survey link was posted, and we hit the 50-user limit in the first 60 seconds.

Additionally, we celebrated National Game and Puzzle Week by rewarding the subscribers who successfully completed that day’s crossword puzzle the fastest. Each of the fastest five completion times won an online retailer gift card.

We also ran a Guess the Number contest. We asked subscribers to fill out a form with their name, e-mail address, and a numerical “guess” between one and 1,000. At the end of the contest, we randomly selected a number. The first 20 subscribers that submitted their form with the same number won a VISA gift card ahead of Cyber Monday.

Delivering additional value just to say thank you

During the month, we shared links to premium how-to guides from Reviewed.com, our consumer review platform. These included “How to Clean Your Electronics,” “Reviewed’s Guide to Coffee,” and “Aging in Place.” These were all downloadable PDFs that subscribers could keep for future use.

We also ran a Thanksgiving recipe round-up content series featuring some of our writers’ favourite recipes from across the USA Today Network.

Extending the relationship with partnerships and/or random acts of kindness

Throughout the month, we offered three giveaways for subscribers:

• We partnered with Blake Shelton’s upcoming tour and offered an opportunity to win a trip to Tampa, Florida, to see Shelton on his Back to the Honky Tonk tour in March 2023.
• We partnered with Sirius XM to offer four free months of its premium streaming service to every subscriber.
• We also randomly selected one subscriber each weekday during the month to receive a retailer gift card. There were no enter-to-win forms, no contests, and no submissions. This was just because.

Promotional strategies and results

So how did we get the word out to subscribers? We used a series of e-mails, our live blog, social media posts, and newsroom promotions. We also leveraged a new promotional space on our Web sites that could only be seen when subscribers logged into their accounts. A call-out appeared in the top right corner of every site that read “Celebrating YOU! Thanks Subscribers!” When subscribers clicked on this message, they were led to our live blog. This was a great opportunity and use case to try out a new asset on our site.

While the intent of Subscriber Appreciation Month was to thank subscribers, we also wanted to test gamification within our subscriber base. Some of the metrics we tracked were open and click-through rates on e-mails, which all came in at or above the other engagement e-mails we routinely send. We also measured how many pageviews per user we had driven from this specific campaign.

We were pleased with the results that showed the Subscriber Appreciation Month participants had close to three times the number of pageviews per user from the normal campaigns we have previously run. We also tracked every link so we could use this as a learning opportunity to see how users found their way to the blog and the month’s individual contest/sweepstakes opportunities.

Our subscribers really loved this concept, and it is something we hope can become part of every November to ensure our subscribers feel valued and appreciated.

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