Increasing subscribers to the Financial Times product bundles

At The Hunting Dynasty – as part of a suit of work – we proposed that sign ups can be improved with simple text changes founded on behavioural principles.

The naming of the different levels of access as ‘standard / premium’, we hypothesised, were affecting the desirability by creating a linear one-is-better-than-the-other relationship. However, younger potential customers (20’s / 30’s new to business world) and older potential customers (40’s, 50’s+) can be targeted in different ways. It was a ‘packaging challenge’, in effect.

In the example shown we re-wrote the Financial Times subscription names and descriptions based on various behavioural effects. This included a loss aversion and reputation effect variant – ‘essential’ and ‘unlimited’ – and a proximal, and norms version (not shown).

We changed nothing else on the page.

We ran the variants through a live controlled trial comparing the new with the original description and naming, pushing approx. 1 million page visits per variant.