Composer is a highly flexible experience management product that makes it easy for non-technical users to create, test, and customize unique experiences for online audiences. While the use cases for Composer are nearly limitless, here are a few of the most common applications:
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Discourage Ad Blocking: Composer has built-in ad blocking detection that allows for the presentation of custom appeals to the ad blocking portion of your audience.
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Drive Newsletter Registration: Composer lets you A/B test and direct various newsletter offers at select audiences so you can identify the ideal message and timing for each offer.
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Drive Subscriptions: Composer provides the ultimate flexibility for the presentation of subscription offers, working with Piano VX, third-party subscription billing systems like Zuora, or fulfillment partners like CDS and DTI.
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Encourage Social Sharing: Composer makes it easy to promote social sharing at the article level to increase new user engagement and to form direct relationships with your distributed audience.
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Power Marketing Initiatives: Composer enables promotion of events or special offers to audience segments based on interest, frequency of visits, geography, device, and profiles from third-party DMPs.
Research
Ad Blocking
Since most users aren’t passionate about blocking ads, merely asking that users turn their ad blockers off has produced incredible results for some Piano clients:
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34% monthly cumulative reduction in ad blocking
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30% recoupment of ad revenue in one month
Better yet, clients using Piano to intercept ad blocking users have barely perceived any negative pageview impact. That's because most users who bounce when asked to turn off ad blockers likely wouldn’t have generated another pageview regardless (and of course, that pageview wouldn’t have produced revenue anyway).
Our research has shown that heavier consumers of content are more likely to be using an ad blocker:
But those loyal, frequent visitors are also more willing to turn ad blockers off when asked:
Newsletter Signups
Composer helps publishers increase their newsletter base by intercepting users at moments when they’ve shown to be engaged and are therefore more likely to convert. According to our research, these sign-ups are valuable because:
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Newsletter ads typically generate CPMs between $25 and $60
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Newsletter recipients are 20x more likely to visit your site than non-subscribers
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Newsletter readers consume between 2x and 3x the pageviews of social readers
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Newsletter readers are twice as likely to subscribe
Piano clients typically see a 2-5% conversion rate on registration offers. On average these subscribers generate 6.5 more pageviews over the course of the year than your average visitor.
Subscriptions
Composer serves as the front-end of many of the world's largest and most innovative paywall programs, providing the power and flexibility that drives revenue growth.
Direct and dedicated audience usually comprises 10%-15% of average monthly unique visitors, but it almost always accounts for a majority of subscription revenue. The New York Times, for example, has reported that 90% of its digital revenue comes from 12% of its audience.
In addition to audience loyalty, we've found that heightened demand for content at a given moment in time can increase subscription revenues substantially. For example, though the revenue of all subscription sites varies widely day to day, paywalled live video events drive truly dramatic spikes in subscriptions:
Social Sharing
Composer can segment site traffic by referrer, allowing media companies to treat visitors differently based on the source from which their content is initially discovered. Though social users tend to be casual visitors, they are often an important source of new visitors:
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Approximately 22% of attributable external traffic comes from social sources.
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42% of social visitors are new visitors to a site versus 12% of a site’s direct traffic.
With Composer, you can directly message these visitors asking them to share your content socially or engage these users in a manner that encourages them to return to your site and move down the sales funnel.
Marketing Initiatives
Media companies are increasingly utilizing their online properties to connect paying audiences with offsite benefits, such as events, conferences, exclusive deals, coupons, and other entitlements. Composer enables media companies to present and test marketing messages for these programs to targeted audience segments.
These campaigns can also be used to up-sell, cross-sell, or to run retention campaigns. For example, Piano's research shows that monthly subscription cancellations nearly double at the start of the year (perhaps due to New Year's resolutions to cut back on extra costs). It takes a month for cancellations to take effect, causing outsized churn rates in February:
Because of this seasonal spike, many Piano clients choose to intervene during this time period with special offers or other marketing initiatives designed to increase retention.
Tips and Tricks
Piano's products are designed to support any number of digital business strategies, and while don't presume to tell you how to run your business, there are a few strategies our most successful clients tend to employ:
Optimize for revenue, not reach: Consider the dynamics of your ad revenue and your subscriber revenue in concert. Be willing to trade off some low-value reach for sustainable subscription revenue.
Segment wisely: Articles and readers are not all created equal, and should be targeted and engaged uniquely in order to optimize conversions — no matter the business model.
Test everything: Test your models, meters, creative, and pricing. Know what your KPIs are, and build multi-variant tests accordingly. The smarter you become about your audience and what resonates with them, the more effectively and efficiently you can build your business.
Budget two years to get to your subscriber goal: It takes time to launch, itemize, and optimize your paid content strategy, and for your audience to acclimate to your site rules.
Identify "at-risk" subscribers early to reduce churn: Look at analytics like visit frequency, expiration dates, non-renewing subscriptions, pages consumed, customer service inquiries, and deploy renewal campaigns in response.
Think like a retailer: Target your audience and use marketing tools like introductory pricing, free trials, promotional discounts, and tailored messaging to drive conversion. Retarget segments that redeem promotions or view marketing campaigns.