Selling group subscriptions

What if you could sell 10 annual paid subscriptions to your content at once?

Matt Brown from Extra Points has done it.

Jacob Donnelly from A Media Operator has done it.

The trick is getting companies to buy group subscriptions for their employees.

Extra Points

Matt Brown is the founder of Extra Points, a newsletter covering the business of college sports.

When Matt sells group subscriptions, he sells to athletics departments and sports management departments at universities.

He gets them onto annual subscriptions that give multiple employees access to his premium content.

Usually, Matt sells about 10 seats at a time. One seat is $84/year. 10 seats times $84/year is $840/year. He often offers discounts when buying multiple seats.

Matt likes group subscriptions for several reasons:

1. Extra Points gets more readers and more revenue.
2. Annual subscriptions reduce churn.
3. It’s easier to sell to companies than to individuals.
4. It saves time on accounting. A group subscription is 1 payment per year. 10 monthly subscriptions are 120 payments per year.

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A Media Operator

Jacob Donnelly is the founder of A Media Operator (AMO), a great publication covering the media industry.

A single subscription to AMO Pro is $395/year.

(I’m a subscriber to AMO Pro. I highly recommend subscribing!)

For group subscriptions, Jacob offers discounts. He told me: “10 folks would be $300 a year per person probably.” That’s $3,000/year in total and a 25% discount.

Overall, AMO is on track to make $1M in revenue this year. In that context, when Jacob sells a group subscription, it is “meaningful money” to him.

In 2024, subscriptions as a whole made up 14% of AMO’s revenue.

Arizent

Arizent is a great example of a company selling group subscriptions at scale.

Arizent produces content for the financial services industry.

They make money by selling group subscriptions to large enterprises.

As reported in AMO, the CEO of Arizent sees an avenue to charge banks $25,000–$100,000 each for enterprise subscriptions. In addition, they see much higher retention rates for enterprise subscriptions than for individuals.

How do I sell group subscriptions?

The following assumes that you have job data on your audience. In particular:

• Name
• Job title
• Company name

Ad: If you don’t, check out Megahit. I’ve built it to get you this data.

1. Preparation

Lay out your data in a big table. Group people from the same companies together:

2. Identify companies to reach out to

Good fits are companies from which you have both

1. many employees subscribed, and
2. an executive or team lead subscribed.

(Even better if that executive already has a paid subscription for themselves.)

Matt Brown, for example, searches his subscriber list for universities with many subscribers. Jacob Donnelly is looking for companies with many subscribers and an executive on a paid subscription.

3. Identify the right person to reach out to

In general, reach out to the most senior subscribers from each company.

Jacob Donnelly reported: “In the case of the bulk of my group subs, it was the CEO. In some cases, one level down.”

Matt Brown looks for individuals with purchasing power. In his case, this is often the Director of Athletics or other senior officials in a university’s athletics department.

What doesn’t work: I spoke to a founder who asked junior employees to make intros to decision makers. That didn’t lead to sales. Sell to decision makers.

4. Reach out

Email the subscribers you identified. Show how a group subscription will help them.

You can either push to get the existing subscribers from a company upgraded. Or you can even push to get their other colleagues on a subscription, too.

Jacob’s pitch

Jacob usually pitches to CEOs and executives. He highlights that “more of their leadership team would benefit from the original reporting and content” of AMO.

In short: Your employees will learn and get better. Then they’ll make you more money.

Matt’s pitch

Matt also mentions the cost savings and simpler accounting:

Looking at our metrics, x people from your university are subscribed. X people have paid subscriptions. While one user account is $84/year, I’d love to upgrade everyone at an x% discount. We can put it all on one credit card. Let me know how many people you want.

He might also say:

Here are examples of peers who are important in your department who also read Extra Points: …

He might also mention that those peers have a 70% open rate.

How effective is this outreach?

Matt closes deals with 20% of the universities he reaches out to.

He has recently hired a salesperson who will help with his outreach.

Bonus tip: upgrade covert group subscriptions

Sometimes, companies will try to get away with paying less.

They’ll buy individual subscriptions using emails such as team@example.com. Every email to that address will then be delivered to every member of the team.

When you notice that, reach out and sell them a group subscription instead.

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Then it helps with group subscription sales, ad sales, segmentation, and more.

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