French daily newspaper Le Monde has built a strong digital subscriber base, both domestically and internationally, with 550 journalists reporting from 50 countries. Customer loyalty is central to their online business model. More than 594,000 digital subscriptions represent 90 percent of total subscriptions and 35 percent of monthly revenue.

“Our best strategy is to keep investing in our newsroom,” says Head of Marketing Retention Flavia Barbosa Ferreira. “People are willing to pay more to subscribe to quality content.”

Le Monde’s business model depends on knowing what their customers want and delivering diversified, engaging content, whether in-depth analysis of national elections on their webpages, or international news videos on their YouTube channel, which has more than 2 million subscribers.

But recently, Le Monde faced a challenge that threatened to impact customer retention.

In August 2022, the French government passed a “3-click” termination law requiring businesses with consumer contracts – including newspaper and online media publishers – to offer online contract cancellation in three steps or less (with one click preferable).

This new law posed a significant challenge for Le Monde, which required digital customers to unsubscribe through a multi-step process via email or phone calls – handled through an external client services call center. “The challenge was maintaining revenue while complying with the new regulations and improving our customer experience,” Barbosa Ferreira says.

Le Monde’s data infrastructure runs on Google Cloud, enabling dynamic content delivery while boosting subscription numbers. They use Big Query to analyze their website traffic and other data to better understand their audience and tailor content accordingly. And they use Subscribe with Google, which accounts for 35% of new digital subscribers.

When the new law required service providers to simplify their online contract cancellation process, Le Monde decided to overhaul their entire unsubscribe system. This was a complex, multi-faceted initiative requiring changes to their website UI and UX, as well as to how their customer services call center handled online subscription cancellation requests.

Le Monde phased in changes to achieve compliance with the new law. Instead of sending multiple emails or calling customer service, users could now click to cancel their subscription from their account page, which also offers an option to temporarily pause their subscription.

Just as importantly, Le Monde changed their relationship with their customer service call center, shifting their focus from print subscriptions to retaining digital subscribers. Le Monde worked with their vendor on introducing new customer incentive offers, turning a reader’s call to unsubscribe into an opportunity for customer engagement and retention.

“We made a paradigm shift in our view of our call center as a cost center used to manage print issues – to a sparring partner that can gather data and offer solutions to our readers,” says Le Monde’s Chief B2C Subscriptions Officer Anne Tostain.

With a new online unsubscribe function in place, Le Monde used Big Query to gather and analyze data on why customers chose to unsubscribe.

Le Monde introduced an online questionnaire to better understand the reasons behind, gaining additional insights into customers’ needs and preferences. With increased quantity and quality of data in hand, Le Monde added customer incentives to the unsubscribe process, such as suggestions for new reading interests to explore, editorial products or features designed to address lack of time - such as an option to pause the subscription -, and special subscription pricing offers.

“Changing the unsubscription process was a big opportunity,” Barbosa Ferreira says. “We assign a score to [each customer] who visits the unsubscription funnel based on their level of engagement. We then follow up with email messages for specific retention offers, [which we customize] for them. And that's all because of data. With our customer services team handling this [level of engagement] with phone calls, it’s amazing.”

Thanks to Le Monde’s new unsubscription process, and defying all expectations, they’ve decreased reader churn with two out of three unsubscribe customers accepting a retention offer, and a 60-percent retention rate for subscribers contacted six months after their initial call. The call center retention client score increased by 9 points. And active subscriptions on flagship products increased by 12 percent, with the average life of a subscription up to 3.3 years in 2024 – a two-month increase over 2023.

Le Monde recently celebrated 80 years of independent journalism, and they continue to evolve and innovate to deliver thought-provoking news and analysis to readers all over the world. They no longer view “unsubscribe” as a negative word, but as an opportunity to better understand and engage their readers.

“The metrics show how the improvement with our readership is going,” says Barbosa Ferreira, as they carry out A/B testing for new incentive programs. “I think we can still improve our retention rates. And I think it will be great.”