http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2023/05/188-wapotimes-schemes.html
#188 Blog Post - Wednesday, 17 May 2023
Posted by Denny Hatch
The Circulation Jackasses of The
Washington Post and The New York Times
One day last month — in the fifth year of reading The Washington Post (a.k.a. WaPo) on my iPad very early every morning — this huge ad you see above covered the daily landing page and cut me off from the news and commentary I paid for. The message: “Resubscribe and get unlimited access blah… blah… blah…”
Resubscribe? I am a paid subscriber. I never received a notice saying it was time to renew for another year. I clicked all over the place trying to get my news. No dice. The Washington Post would not allow me to access the day’s news and commentary.
Resubscribe? I didn’t dare. If I signed up, I would have two subscriptions. Look at the strange last three lines:
Already a subscriber?
Sign into a different account or
Restore subscription
“Already a subscriber?" I am.
“Sign into a different account or Restore subscription.”
Huh? What different account? I only have one account with these people.
Okay, I said to myself. I guess my subscription had lapsed and I plumb missed the renewal series.
The
following two days I tried to read The Washington Post and discovered it was “Groundhog
Day.” No access.
As founder and editor of WHO’S MAILING WHAT! Peggy and I were deep into the renewal business. This was our life’s blood. Without renewals we wouldn’t have a business.
Did I let my subscription lapse?
Last week I searched online for the WaPo circulation department. I found a “Contact” link and roused an instant chat person. My question: “When is my subscription up for renewal?” The return answer on 11 May 2023:
Let me assist you, Denny.
Our records indicate that you are currently signed up for an All-Access subscription associated with your email address dennyhatch@yahoo.com
Your account is set to renew on 09/08/2023 at the standard rate of $120.00 for 52 weeks.
(Bold red type in the message above is my doing for emphasis.)
After a week of no access to news, I gave up and deleted the WaPo App icon. I get major Washington Post stories on Apple News plus I get the daily e-edition of The New York Times.
Why didn’t I Immediately Call
Or e-mail WaPo Circ People?
I’m 88 years old. Time on this planet gets more and more precious the longer I live. Frankly I did not want to get into a pissing match with a twenty-something smarty-pants (or mini-skirted) untutored circ clerk. I subscribe to Apple News, and I have been a subscriber to The New York Times for over 60 years. I’m also a regular viewer of CNN and MSNBC. Plus, I get Axios, Bo Sacks, Mr. Magazine and other news and newsletters. In short, I don’t need WaPo to be in touch with the world.
Here's The Washington Post’s Offer Sheet
I have never seen anything like this in my life.
1. Look at upper left above. WaPo was trying to get me to resubscribe and sell me “All-Access Digital” for $11.99/month.
2. “Let me assist you, Denny.
Our records indicate that you are currently signed up for an All-Access subscription associated with your email address”
—WaPo Chat person to Denny Hatch
WaPo’s Bizarre “Premium Digital” offer:
Try 1 month free
(then $16.99 a month)
and pay through the nose forever after. No description of the products. Another $60 a year. No benefits. No reviews of the e-books or testimonials from happy users. Not one iota of warmth or fun. Here are the products. Here are the prices. Buy ‘em, Bub.
Holy Moly! The New York Times Pulled a Copycat Stunt Using the Very Same Words as WaPo!
Did the Times and WaPo Use the Same Copywriter?
WaPo: All-Access Digital
Come Back and Get the Full Experience
vs.
NYT: The New York Times | All Access
Upgrade and Enjoy the
Complete Times Experience.
Note: Unlike WaPo — who completely cut me off — I am still allowed to read the Times. Oh Thank you, thank you, A.G. Sulzberger. How long will this last?
The two identical messages infuriated me. These up-selling offers were classic stupidity on the part of the two newspapers' circ departments that had no clue how to talk to customers.
Look at it this way. Both papers originally persuaded me to buy their digital contents. I paid their bills and assumed I was getting "All-Access" to the news and features.
Uh-uh.
The Times held back goodies — e.g., recipes and puzzles. They gypped me — conned me into thinking I had bought the contents, when, it turns out, they kept me from seeing everything. If I order these extras and pay for them… only then will I have the “Complete Times Experience.”
Recipes? Peggy is a marvelous cook. Pay extra for games and puzzles? Nah.
BTW, digital subscribers are the most profitable customers.
Think of it: no cost of paper, no ink, no printing, no folding, no delivery, no dead trees. I paid $100 a year for the e-WaPo. The raw cost-of-goods was oh, maybe, a nickel a year for teensy spritzes of electricity.
Takeaways to Consider
• “The most important order you get from a customer is the second order.” —Maxwell Sackheim (founder of Book-of-the-Month).
• The second order means the buyer liked your product or service and came back for more. Multi-buyers are what all businesses strive for. In the case of a publication, the second order is the renewal.
• BTW, if you rent your lists be sure to add a premium/M for multi-buyers.
• “Direct marketing should be scrupulously honest.”
—Dick Benson, legendary consultant and marketer
• “Dealing with a customer is like making love to a widow. You can’t overdo it.”
—Franklin Watts (My second employer in 1962)
• “God protect me from amateurs!”
—Henry Castor (another early boss)
###
Word count: 1001
The Sales Prevention Department is alive and well!
ReplyDeleteIt's sad to see this, Denny. Having worked recently for a large media company, my experience has been that nobody is left in these companies that understands the logic, science, and art of circulation.
ReplyDeleteFor some of these companies, they've long outsourced the "dreary" task of circulation to third parties like PubWorX and removed those expensive circ pros from the payroll. The result is that nobody can draw the workflow that resulted in their mix-up on your account, nor even figure out how to hack the systems to get you right.
Not that anybody from an outsourcer would even care. After all, they can fill the circ number with a $1 agent sold sub.
Couple that with likely two or three different circulation platforms--one for print and one for digital, at the least--that can't talk to each other, and the poor customer gets stuck in a do loop with a bunch of uncaring clock-punchers.
Yet those digital subs are, as you mention, some of the most incredibly profitable subs at the margin. Absolute insanity.
Mark,
DeleteThank you, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts in a long and thoughtful comment.
Like many copywriters, I started out working for publications and was assigned to write renewal and billing series. I learned to get inside subscribers’ heads to thank them for being members of the family and talk to them personally about the benefits of subscribing and promises of great things to come. I believed every word I wrote. Most copywriters want to do the acquisition effort and hate doing renewals.
(I loved doing renewals!) Writing this one blog post was a bitch. I knew there was a story here, but how to frame it. I didn’t want the post to run long. But I had to see if I could summarize what WaPo was about. I put on my copywriting hat and wrote a short feelgood lift note from the WaPo CEO. Here is what I wrote (in old-fashioned Courier typewriter type which is what we always used in the old days:
Fred Ryan, Publisher & CEO
Dear Denny Hatch,
Charles Love alerted me that your subscription is coming up for renewal.
I want you to know how much you are valued as a reader and as a member of The Washington Post family over the past 5 years.
And we really are a family. For example, if you want to reach out to the us, it’s easy.
Simply Google “Washington Post Newsroom Leadership” and you’ll discover the directory of 71 executives, editors and reporters by name, beat, title and email address.
We’re here to bring you the news and to listen to what you have to say.
In short, thank you for being a member of the Washington Post family.
Warmly,
/s/ Fred Ryan
Denny, I'm also an online subscriber to WaPo and NYT and agree that it's a user unfriendly process with frequent "false positives" of being called out as a non-subscriber.
ReplyDeleteIn case of WaPo, I suspect the problem is that you're automatically being logged in under a user ID/password that's a non-subscriber account. (Perhaps another user account that you set up at one point to view a certain number of free articles without subscribing.)
In this case, the solution is to clear your browser -- including all cookies -- and then log-in using the user ID and password of the paid subscriber account.
In the case of the NYT, what you're seeing is what I get periodically, too. The Times is trying to get you to upgrade to an "all access" premium tier including all their bells and whistles like cooking, puzzles, WireCutter (a for profit and less-than-arms-length knockoff of Consumer Reports.) But they're doing it in a confused way that looks like you're being stopped as a non-subscriber.
At both publishers, the problem is failure to clearly explain what's going on, quirky technology that all of a sudden changes the way it's been working for you in the past...plus a little touch of greed.
I'm sure Mark is correct about the replacement of circ pros by children who know little, or care little, about the subscriber experience.
ReplyDeleteBut today's poor "CX" (as the nerds call it) really dates back to the tragic error of giving away the product for free for the first 15 years of the World Wide Web. In this case, the mistake was made, not by children, but by extremely well-paid media execs who all drank the Kool Aid of a subscription-free future.
As their once-great companies were running into the ground, the media execs put up "paywalls," circa 2010/2011. But they were "porous" paywalls, allowing non-subscribers to see a certain number of free articles (along with the annoying, but low-revenue-generating ads) before closing the iron door and demanding some money to reopen it.
To this day, this 3-tier system results in a confusing, diminished customer experience compared with a much simpler binary subscriber/non-subscriber model which the Wall Street Journal embraced from the beginning, while NYT and WaPo did not.
Peter,
ReplyDeleteAlways a treat to hear from you. Thank you for taking the time to comment.
You are bang-on.
“Of all the formats used in direct mail, none has more power to generate action than the letter.” —Dick Hodgson
Trouble is nobody knows how to write a powerful letter these days. And all the great letter writers are not around to mentor the young up-and-comers. The art of getting inside the heads of subscribers/customers, thinking how they think, feeling what they feel getting them excited about the benefits, benefits, benefits is a communications form that’s deader than Kelsey’s nuts.
Regarding the WaPo message… it stunned me. Every time I re-read the pitch… I still can’t believe it.
Do keep in touch.
Cheers.