500,000 Subscribers In 5 Years

Happy Saturday,

You’ve heard of price anchoring…

But do you know how to apply it properly?

Today, we shall see it in action from Bloomberg.

It’s a masterclass by itself, as they boast an incredible figure of 500k paid subscribers in just 5 years.

For a subscription business to prosper, it’s simply not enough to acquire new customers.

The real secret to long-lasting, sustainable growth isn’t buying ads, finding the right product-message fit, or even reducing their CPAs…

In Bloomberg’s case, it’s when their customers refuse to unsubscribe.

For reference, a standard subscription for Bloomberg’s All Access Pass is $34.99.

It’s priced similarly to competitors such as The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.

The Wall Street Journal has about 3.4 million digital paid subscribers since 1996.

That’s an average of 125k subscribers per year, compared to Bloomberg’s 100k subscribers.

The key thing to note here is that The Wall Street Journal had the first-mover advantage for 22 years before Bloomberg.

On the other hand, The Financial Times has around 1.25 million digital paid subscribers since launching their paywall in 2002.

That’s around 59.5k paid digital subscribers per year.

So Bloomberg is growing around 40% faster than The Financial Times in digital paid subscriptions, which is pretty impressive.

At the same time, it’s common practice for publications like these to offer a month’s trial for $1.

Bloomberg does this, so no surprises there.

Usually, when the trial is ending, many trial users will proceed to cancel the subscription to prevent themselves from being charged the regular price for the next month.

In Bloomberg’s case, when you try to unsubscribe, a chatbot will pop up to ask why you’re unsubscribing.

Now, here’s where it starts to get interesting…

If you select the option that says the subscription is too costly, the chatbot will fire off an unexpectedly pleasant deal back.

It will offer you a monthly subscription for $10 instead of $34.99 if you lock it in immediately.

That’s almost a 72% discount from the original subscription price, which is simply irresistible if your main concern is the subscription price.

This is one of the main reasons the paid subscriber count didn’t dwindle for Bloomberg, because they managed to retain their customers.

And that’s exactly one of the things we look at to help optimize your sales funnels at Single Grain, our full-service marketing agency.

We fully understand the pain of watching your list shrink, which in turn reduces the number of customers you have.

And when that happens, it really hurts your bottom line.

But you don’t have to go at this alone…

When you work with us, we’ll go deep into optimizing your unsubscribe flow.

We’ll do the plumbing to reduce, if not eliminate any leakages from your list.

The end result would be your list having an engaged audience who are less likely to unsubscribe and are more likely to buy your products or services.

Go here to optimize your unsubscribe flow with the help of our marketing experts.

Have a great weekend,

The Leveling Up Team