Managing Digital Churn Through Understanding Reader Emotions (Round 6)
Summary
The media industry depends on subscriber revenue. It is our lifeblood. While attracting customers is hard enough, keeping them is even harder. Engagement is key.
Our goal is to consistently and permanently lower the churn rate across all of our publications. We believe we can achieve this by focusing on a healthy balance of emotions measured with the Emotional Value Index (EVI), an indicator of emotions and high engagement.
EVI is based on behavioural science research and gives us a deeper understanding on which emotions drive engagement. By measuring reader EVI we can achieve a healthy balance of emotions for optimal engagement.
The solution
Churn is an issue. We're heavily focused on growing our digital subscriptions. While we can actually sell them fairly well, reaching our goals is challenging due to a high churn rate. Growing digital revenue in any meaningful way is extremely slow without fixing the churn. EVI is a new type of metric that provides a fundamentally deeper understanding of emotions and their role as engagement drivers. Measuring emotional experiences helps us understand how our readers feel. This gives us far better engagement insight, which is exactly what we need to manage the churn. We will develop online tools for developing content to cultivate engaged, positive, and prosocial behaviour, and to serve both the media business and responsible journalism.