In 2018, a major news publisher in the UK formed a cross-functional team of Directors to achieve the goal of acquiring 3 million registered users in one year, then asked me to lead it. I learned so much from this experience that it still influences how I create plans to hit lofty goals today. If you’re trying to achieve a huge objective that requires help from across the organisation, these principles can be applied to just about anything - not just acquiring more registrations.
One goal to rule them all
The single most impactful thing that made this initiative successful was that it was the number one priority for everyone across the organisation. That included Technology, the Newsroom floor, Marketing, Commercial, Finance, everyone. The CEO gave us the mandate that whoever’s help we needed at any time, they were to drop everything and help.
Truly cross-functional and empowered
The Strategic Programme Director established a small but truly cross-functional working group made up of Directors and Heads ofs. The team was designed so that decisions could be made on the spot in the room, eliminating any lengthy committee based decision processes that can add months to hitting a target. Here’s who was on the team and why it was truly cross-functional:
The Deputy Editor, because creating the Editorial strategy and deciding what content would sit behind registration walls was key
The Director of Marketing because we’d want to align marketing campaigns to drive traffic to registration walls
A dedicated Senior Analytics Manager who could provide insights on the success or failures of our efforts on a daily and sometimes hourly basis
Leadership from Tech teams who could prioritise and direct teams on whatever was needed from the publisher’s digital products
The Finance Director to make on the spot approvals of registration walls that could impact advertising revenue
The Head of Strategic Projects to bring all areas of the organisation together with the authority to make it the top priority
Experiment to go fast
We didn’t start building productionised Tech for nearly two months and this is one of the greatest learnings I experienced from this programme. Instead we focused on hypothesis testing by building very quick low-fi experiments, throwing them in front of our audience and seeing what succeeded vs. what flopped. We weren’t scared to fail because failure was learning. And failing on a test that took 2 days is a lot better than failing on something that took 8 months to build.
What did these experiments look like?
Throw up a registration wall on the 3rd article a reader clicks on in a single session
Customise the copy on the registration wall so that a reader knows exactly what they’re going to get if they sign-up
Put registration walls on photo galleries since they have high engagement levels
In doing these tests, we looked at the data and learned which circumstances had the highest propensity for readers to register, which ones didn’t, and also which ones led to the customer returning and continuing to read while logged in. The ones that were successful, we sent to the development teams to build properly so they were scalable. Some examples of these were:
the ability to put a section or an article behind a registration wall from within the CMS
the ability to change the copy on a registration wall from within the CMS
the ability to replace advertising slots with registration calls to action
With this knowledge and a roadmap for when our winning experiments would be scalable, we started to create a playbook of how we’d hit the 3 million target.
Develop a playbook
We looked at the newsroom calendar to identify an upcoming event where we knew we’d see traffic numbers spike. A prominent political party conference was coming up and the news publication prided itself on its excellent political analysis coverage. We hypothesised that we could put general coverage in front of the registration wall to garner SEO, then put the more valuable political analysis behind registration walls. The registration wall would contain marketing copy that explained the value in registering and exactly what the reader would get. Day by day we executed the content plan and each day we saw our registration numbers jump.
We had a winning strategy. Tying our registration efforts to a specific event where we knew we’d get traffic and could tailor the content for registration was a winning play.
The Deputy Editor then mapped out the significant editorial events for the remainder of the year and we placed our bets on which could have the greatest registration success, averaging one event per month. These included things like an annual Travel Awards event, Harry & Megan’s royal wedding, and the World Cup.
Tailor your working group and snowball your learnings
With each event, we examined who we’d need across the organisation to be successful. For the World Cup, the Sports Desk, Events, and Sports Commercial teams joined our working group. Our plans were tailored for each event and mapped out exactly who would be doing what on each day, then we ran regular planning sessions, stand-ups and insights feedback so we could see which articles and efforts were getting the best results, then pivot to drop what wasn’t working and focus on what was successful. These learnings would also be fed into the next event’s planning to ensure we were continuously snowballing our learnings to bigger and bigger numbers.
For example, our single highest registration day was Harry & Megan’s royal wedding. The Style desk decided to include ‘content packages’ containing all of the latest wedding trends for the upcoming wedding season and put them behind registration walls. We placed calls to action throughout the royal wedding coverage to entice readers to see the best wedding venues, wedding dresses, cake trends, etc. Readers couldn’t resist and happily registered to munch up all of the beautiful photos in the flurry of royal wedding excitement. We took this learning and created more ‘content packages’ on different topics like ‘best summer recipes’ that could feature on any food or summer event articles, or ‘best electric cars’ packages that could feature on any articles that focused on environmental topics.
The end result
Before long we had a play by play strategy to smash registration numbers for each event and we could predict when we’d hit the goal… 31 August. This gave us plenty of time to plan how we’d celebrate hitting our goal 4 months early.
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