Stephen Hale

How do you want to receive our content?

The Foreign Office has more than 200,000 subscribers to our web content. But do we give them what they want? And what more could we do to make our content available to subscribe to?

Magazine editors spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract - and then manage - their subscribers. They have to because the ongoing success of their magazine depends on how well they do it. Subscribers are a guaranteed audience. They pay for 12 editions in 1 go, and renew their subscription by direct debit. You don't have to win their custom every month. They keep your readership figures consistent despite the tactics of your competitors, and high enough to attract advertisers.

We don't have a magazine to sell at the Foreign Office, but we do have subscribers. Our subscription service allows people to subscribe to the parts of our web content that interests them. Some subscribe to receive our news releases by email, some want our travel advice updates for specific countries, others might have a particular interest in our human rights content.

I've thought for a while that we should treat our subscribers it bit better. After all they are an already engaged audience - they have made it through our unwieldy subscription process, and they've actively requested to receive updates when our web content changes.

Rob Pearson has been doing some great work for us to find out what we can do to improve what we offer through subscription. I've been quite surprised by the results. A survey sent to a random selection of 10,000 of our subscribers not only got a far higher response rate than we expected (10%) but also revealed that our users seemed pretty pleased with with the current service.

We’ve found that we have a really engaged audience who like a lot of things about email alerts. There’s room for improvement: the irrelevance of some updates ("...the next ambassador in yangon is frankly irrelevant"), the division of information between the alert and the site, and problems in changing subscriptions or unsubscribing were quoted as problems. But our users said that they liked the convenience, timeliness, accuracy, and impartiality of current email alerts.

Now that doesn't mean we'll leave things as they are. An endorsement from existing subscribers doesn't tell us anything about the people who tried to subscribe but couldn't, or about those those for whom only SMS alerts would be useful. We know there's plenty we can do to improve our offer to potential subscribers.

I'm not a representative user, but personally I'd rather take an RSS feed than subscribe to an email alert. And I know that brilliant digital campaigns provide multiple ways for users to subscribe to their content. But our survey clearly shows that, while there's some appetite for alternatives (see graph below), our existing subscribers want to stick with email alerts.

We’re considering some new ways to distribute alerts. Tell us how likely you’d be to make use of the following:

In Digital Diplomacy Group, we think that the future for Foreign Office web content will be less about our corporate websites and more about brilliant content delivered in whatever format our users find most convenient. But I think we'll do well to listen to our existing subscribers, and provide them with what they are telling us they want now.

I'll report back on how we get on with this work, but I'd be interested to hear what others are doing to keep their subscribers happy, and to reach out to new subscribers.

(By the way, a by-product of the survey I mentioned is that we now also have 478 subscribers who have said that they would be happy to take part in further research. Thank you - we'll be in touch.)

Posted at 18:30 30 April 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[7]