Helping a leading European broadsheet halve their churn rate and and hit their North Star subscriber goal

FT Strategies partnered with a leading European news brand, to achieve a ~66% increase in digital subscribers by helping to halve their churn rate and double the size of their B2B business.

A leading european media group approached FT Strategies in early 2021 with a challenge - to build upon the solid foundations its main news title had developed in paying readers and substantially grow and retain their customer base. In collaboration with FT Strategies, the client over-delivered on its goal - driven by a 66% growth in their subscriber base.

Initial discussions with the client revealed that the brand, like many news publishers, had experienced significant growth in digital subscriptions during the Coronavirus pandemic. As such, we agreed that the strategic imperative now was to build an engagement-first organisation that thrives at understanding, engaging and retaining its subscribers.

FT Strategies delivered a programme of support that created:

• A playbook with best practices around engagement and retention, including identifying immediate quick-wins addressing involuntary churn
• A revamped customer engagement programme and experimentation roadmap
• North Star Strategy and keys to expand to overall subs strategy
• A strategy to accelerate B2B growth - performing a health check of B2B performance and providing the fundamentals required to scale the operation at pace
• Developing and deploying a propensity to churn model - leveraging our in-house data scientists and developers to setup, test and activate a propensity to churn model

The impact of the support from FT Strategies has fundamentally changed the organisation’s commercial outlook. The growth (over 30% YOY) was driven by the publisher halving their churn rate and doubling the size of their B2B business.

A key success factor from the engagement was the efficacy of the Propensity to Churn data science model built in partnership with the FT Strategies data science team during the second phase of the project. The customer model - developed and deployed within a two month period has been proven to outperform comparable churn prevention models from market leading software vendors - and led to a significant improvement in the client’s churn rate. Alongside growth in their subscriptions, the client also saw a record audience of unique users per month on the site and a significant increase in their social following (Instagram alone recording a +34% rise).