Engaging disengaged readers at the Financial Times

EngagementHabit formationB2C

Role & Company

I lead the product design as part of the FT’s Engagement team alongside a PM, a Business Analyst, a User Researcher and 4 engineers

Summary

We experimented with 3 new features to help disengaged readers get more value from their subscription. Those who use 1 or more of the features are 20% more likely to become ‘engaged’. Those who arrive on the improved article page are 5% more likely to follow a topic.
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Problem

Those who don’t read cancel their subscription

The cost of acquiring a new customer can be anywhere between five and 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. We know that those who pay for the FT but don’t use it are much more likely to cancel their subscription.

How might we ensure that those who pay for the FT use it, value it and stay subscribed?

Opportunity

Disengaged readers have unique behaviours

We used data analysis and qualitative feedback from a survey to better understand disengaged subscribers. We learned that disengaged subscribers:

Arrive at an article page more often than engaged users
Over index in desktop use and under index in app use
Often ignore emails and newsletters and can find them annoying
Expect relevant news to find them
Are less familiar with personalization features like myFT

Solution

Meeting disengaged readers where they are

Using this research, I facilitated 2 rounds of ideation workshops with the team and stakeholders. We came up with more than 40 ideas and chose to test 3 that we agreed were low-effort/high-impact:

In article myFT onboarding
In article myFT recommendations (AB testing copy)
Hyper-localized homepage slice

Result

More engagement and a deeper understanding

Those who use 1 or more of the features are 20% more likely to become ‘engaged’.
Those who arrive on the improved article page are 5% more likely to follow a topic.
In/out bias was most effective in encouraging the under-engaged to follow a topic

Methods

Data Anaysis Surveys Personas Ideation Workshops User Flows Wireframes Advanced Prototyping UX/UI AB testing

User journey for in-article myFT onboarding

Basic wireframe for in-article myFT onboarding

Next Steps

Following this work, we revisited and audited the language used for myFT, with the ambition of making it more understandable and action oriented.

We shared our findings with marketing teams so they could experiment with their messaging targeted at disengaged users.Read Next