A cheap introductory offer is the easiest way there is to make the acquisition numbers look good. Three issues for £1, and the sign-ups roll in.
The bill arrives later. Usually at the point the offer ends and the reader is asked to pay full price, and then again a year after that at their first proper renewal. If the offer brought in the wrong people, or trained them to expect a discount, you find out then.
None of that means you shouldn't run trials. It means the offer needs designing from the end backwards: start with what you want to happen when it finishes.
The three common shapes
Most publisher offers fall into one of three types, and they behave differently.
The free trial. A few issues, or a month of digital access, for nothing. It's the lowest barrier, and for digital products the cost of each extra trial reader is small. For print it's a different story: every free copy is printing and postage you won't get back if they don't convert.
The token-price introduction. £1 for three issues, or a few pounds for the first quarter. The small payment matters more than the amount. Someone who has handed over card details has made a decision, and you have a payment method on file for when the full price starts.
The discounted first term. Half price for the first year, or the first six months. This brings in people who are already fairly sure they want the title. The drop at the end should be smaller, but you've given away a lot of revenue to get there, so it has to be worth it.
There's no universally right answer. A specialist B2B title with a small, well-defined market and a high annual price might want a short, qualified trial. A consumer hobby title with a big potential audience might do better with a token price. The point is to choose deliberately rather than copy last year's offer.
What "yield" means here
Yield is simply the revenue you actually get per subscriber, after discounts. Every offer pulls it down for a while. The question is whether it pulls it down for a good reason, and for how long.
A worked example, with made-up numbers. Say your annual rate is £120 and you run two offers:
| Offer A: 3 issues for £1 | Offer B: first year half price | |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-ups | 1,000 | 400 |
| Taken during the offer itself | £1,000 | £24,000 |
| Full-price subscribers at the end | 250 | 240 |
| Copies sent to people who didn't stay | 2,250, nearly free | 160 readers' worth, paid at half price |
On sign-ups, A wins easily. On full-price readers at the end, they're nearly level. A's 250 start paying full price within a few months, while B's only start in year two, but A has posted 2,250 copies to people who left. Your real figures will be different. The point is that the offer that "worked" depends on which line of the table you look at.
Measure the right thing
Sign-ups are the least useful number an offer produces. The ones that matter come later:
- Conversion: how many took the first full-price payment, and kept it (didn't cancel or get refunded straight after).
- First-time renewal: how many of those renewed again at the end of their first full term.
- Value: what each original sign-up was worth over, say, two years, against what the offer cost to run.
That needs every order tagged with the offer or campaign code it came in on, and the code needs to stay with the subscriber through conversion and renewal. Without it, you can't tell whether this spring's offer did better than last autumn's. Our renewal rate calculator splits first-time from ongoing renewals, which is where the effect of an offer shows up.
Designing an offer that converts
A few things help, whichever shape you choose.
Say the full price up front. The reader should know from the offer page what they'll pay afterwards and when. That's about to become a legal requirement for consumers (more below), but it's good practice anyway. People who feel caught out cancel, and they tell others.
Keep it short and specific. "Your first three issues" or "until 31 March" is clearer than an open-ended offer, and it gives you a fixed date to plan the conversion around.
Qualify B2B trials. For a professional title, ask the same questions you'd ask any subscriber: job title, organisation, sector. It costs you a few sign-ups, but the ones you keep are the readers advertisers want, and it tells you which trials are worth a sales call. A team trial that turns into a corporate licence is worth far more than a dozen individual conversions.
Plan the step up. Going straight from £1 to the full annual rate is a big jump. One way to soften it is a monthly or quarterly price, so the first full payment looks less like a cliff. Whatever you choose, the reader's first experience of the full price shouldn't be a surprise on a bank statement.
Don't reward leaving. If existing subscribers can lapse and come back on the introductory price, some will. Decide whether returning readers are eligible, and make sure the system can check.
Switch offers off. Every offer should have an end date. The ones that never get switched off are how you end up, five years later, with readers on a price nobody can explain.
How the offer ends
There are two ways a trial can finish. Either it rolls onto the full price automatically, or the reader gets an invoice or a renewal notice and has to act.
Auto-conversion is popular because nobody has to remember to do anything. But for consumers, from 1 January 2027, it brings the trial under the new subscription rules in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. The Act covers any free or reduced rate for a specified period that's followed by a higher charge. We couldn't find a minimum price or a short-trial exemption in the Act or the draft regulations. So for consumer offers that roll onto full price:
- the key information before sign-up must say that they'll be charged, or charged more, unless they cancel, and the date that starts;
- a reminder notice must go out before the first higher payment, within the period you said you'd use;
- once the trial converts, there's a 14-day renewal cooling-off period, with its own separate notice.
The rules apply to contracts entered into on or after 1 January 2027, the regulations are still in draft and company-paid subscriptions are out of scope. Our guide to the subscription rules 2027 covers the detail, and the subscription rules checklist turns it into tasks. This is our reading, not legal advice.
In practice, an offer that's already clear about the full price and reminds people before charging them shouldn't need much changing. If yours relies on readers not noticing, it will.
What the system needs to do
To run offers well you need the offer code on every order, a trial that becomes a normal subscription when it converts (not a new record), the conversion date and price held against it, and reporting that follows each offer through to first renewal.
In Avio, our subscription platform for larger publishers, trials use the same order flow as paid subscriptions, so a trial reader is already a full record when they convert, and each order carries its campaign code and sales channel for reporting. In Adeptis, our all-in-one platform for smaller publishers, prices come from rate cards set up per title and renewal chains link each term to the next.
If you're planning an offer for the new year and want to talk it through, get in touch.
Rob Sherwood is Managing Director of Adept Data Services. He has spent his career in subscriptions and circulation, at WDIS, Optima and CDS Global before founding Adept.