This handout accompanies slides -- Driving subscriptions -- presented by Danny Gawlowski at Fresno NewsTrain. Gawlowski is assistant managing editor of The Seattle Times. For more information on the News Leaders Association's NewsTrain, please see https://www.newsleaders.org/newstrain.

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Driving digital subscriptions: Improving the
platforms that build audience habit
Danny Gawlowski | @gawlowski | dgawlowski@seattletimes.com
Grow your subscriber audience and retain your existing subscribers by continuously improving the
five digital platforms that they engage with most. Here are tips to improve key efforts that build
audience habit.
1. Homepage curation and design
The act of coming to a homepage shows that an audience member is engaged: they are coming to you
to learn what is important.
● Keep the homepage fresh with new stories to give audiences reasons to return frequently.
● If possible, use real-time analytics to listen to what your homepage audiences are interested in
at any moment and make adjustments
● If possible, use A/B testing or other user testing to adjust the design of your homepage to adapt
to audience needs.
Read: “The homepage is not dead in Seattle and yours shouldn’t be either,” by Kati Erwert and
Danny Gawlowski, BetterNews.org, August 2021
Headlines
One of the fastest and most effective ways to improve a story’s performance is to improve the
headline. If possible, use A/B testing to test various options and see what resonates with your
audience. Test multiple stories and headlines simultaneously and frequently. Test well-
performing headlines as well as poor-performing headlines to boost both.
Great headlines:
● Explain why the story is important
● Aren’t too short; give enough information
● Aren’t too long; don’t give away everything
● Surface key superlatives (“best,” worst, “etc.”) and numerical data, when possible
● Avoid questions
● Do not overpromise and are not clickbait
Headlines that work often have:
• A call to action
• A direct effect on readers
• A curiosity gap
Headlines that don’t work often:
• Are too long
o Original: Redmond officer who killed woman in 2020 had been dismissed from
Whatcom County Sheriff's Office for poor performance 14 months earlier

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o Better: Redmond officer who killed woman had been fired from
another agency
• Reveal everything
o Original: Merriam-Webster chooses vaccine as the 2021 word of the year
o Better: Merriam-Webster's 2021 word of the year is a key sticking
point in this era
• Contain puns.
o Original: Seattle company flush with success
o Better: Seattle company finds big profits in toilet-paper industry
2. News alerts
News alerts deliver the most important news directly to audiences through push notifications, desktop
notifications and email instead of waiting for them to visit us.
● Measure success with open rate.
● Monitor concerns with unsubscribe rate.
● Be accurate and fast. The best predictor for performance is how quickly breaking news is
alerted
● Plan each day for a series of alerts, then interrupt that plan with breaking news. Don’t hesitate
to send more alerts than expected when news happens.
● Label non-breaking news differently
3. E-newsletters
Newsletters are a powerful way to build audience habit by delivering a collection of the news they are
most interested in to their email inbox.
● Frequency is important. Sending on a daily or at least weekly schedule often helps build habit.
● Creating a voice is important but also can be time-consuming. Balance this with automation to
reduce production time.
● Monitor which headlines audiences are most interested in and which do not generate interest.
● Offer a variety of focused newsletters. Closely monitor the performance of each. Don’t be afraid
to shut down the underperforming newsletters so you can focus your time on others.
4. SEO
Search is the way that most people likely visit your site for the first time. It’s also likely how existing
subscribers and engaged audiences find some of your stories. There are many, many guides out there
to improve your SEO. Here are a few tips on improving your headlines for search engine optimization:
● SEO headlines are fundamentally different than homepage headlines. Have separate headlines
if possible.
● Think about the questions that people have. Then think of the keywords they will use to find
those answers.
● Use Google Trends to compare search terms, as needed.

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5. Social media
Social media can help reach new audiences and keep connections with existing audiences. It’s also
possible to spend a lot of resources here with diminishing returns.
● Know which social media platforms are most valuable to building habit within your audiences.
● Balance time and resources spent on social media with other platforms, particularly with
platforms that drive more audience habit.
Continuous improvement
For each platform, monitor what is working and what is not on a regular basis. Adjust your strategies
based on how audiences respond. Keep experimenting and keep improving the ways you build
audience habit.
Read: “Consumer revenue,” curated articles include subscriptions and memberships at
BetterNews.org