The Times paywall: a massive ecomms fail

All our newspapers are screwed unless they can figure out some way to make money from the Internet. So while many regard The Times paywall as a ‘Canute-like‘ step, I’m happy to see it as a courageous experiment and hope it’s a step towards sustainable online journalism.

I will, however, lay into them for the laughable ineptitude of their emails.

Email marketing for a membership organisation (which is essentially what The Times is becoming) is as close to a pure science as anything in the history of selling. Given a big enough list and enough time, there is nothing that can’t be split tested, measured and optimised. If you try hard enough you can sell veal to a vegan – or a £100-a-year online  newspaper subscription to people who used to get it for free.

The first email you send is the one with the highest opening rates, the email that those excited new members leap to open, to click the links, to discover how their expensive membership will add an alluring glamour to their lives that will be the envy of their friends.

For Times Online, as tens of thousands sign up for their 1 month free trial membership, this is surely their chance to show that when it disappears behind its paywall, £100 a year will be a genuine bargain: great content.

Fail to pay, those emails should be saying, and you’ll never again be able to read some of the finest writing on the web. No more lines like “A dish so cruel I weep not only for the animal that died to make it, but also for the mushrooms”; no more glorious worship at the feet of the mighty Moran, or eye-gouging rage at that unputdownable idiot Liddle.

So what did the Times send to the hundreds of thousands who signed up for their free trial?

This crime against copywriting, proofreading and design:

(Click the image to read the whole thing, but I absolutely guarantee you won’t get past the second paragraph without having to prop your eyelids open).

This is an email which speaks volumes about The Times’ lack of commitment to an  integrated online offering, whether they’re using the word ‘exclusive’ in both sentences of the second paragraph, missing a capital letter off  ‘Gordon Ramsay’s maze’ so it looks like they’re referring to some kind of sweary culinary labyrinth, randomly swapping the word ‘and’ for the ‘+’ symbol, or thrilling their new subscribers with phrases like:

“As a temporary member you don’t have a membership card so you won’t be able to participate in any offers that require you to present it but please enjoy all the many other offers and extras available to members on the site.”

I appreciate that email was not the first thing on their minds during one of the most ambitious online launches in the history of News International. But someone, somewhere should have been thinking about it, and the fact that it was clearly left to an inexperienced middle-manager speaks volumes about Murdoch’s organisation, and its ongoing failure to ‘get’ the internet.