3 simple search features that encourage subscribers to buy more content

Away from the fluctuations and stress of having to bring in revenue each month, teams can be freed to think creatively around how they can enrich their customers’ experiences and add value with new products and additional content bundles. If, however, your subscribers already have access to a wealth of content, how do you encourage them to buy more?

Let’s assume that the subscribers in question only have partial access to your portfolio. In this article, we’re going to look at three simple ways research businesses can encourage greater cross and upsell from a subscriber base by adding basic features to their search returns.

‘Others also viewed’

What’s the best way to let subscribers know about useful content that lies beyond their licence? How about showing them what other people are interested in the same reports or search terms have accessed? This could include those reports to which they don’t have access yet.

If, time and again, a key bit of content seems to be beyond their access rights, they might suddenly find an interest in extending their subscription.

Offer content outside their subscription

Similarly, if a subscriber to ‘Supermarket Food’ content, for example, enters the search term ‘blueberries’ in your database, what about showing – in the returns alongside content to which they have access – relevant content that lies outside their subscription?

If you can provide a button that lets your subscriber instantly buy a report on sales of blueberries and blueberry-containing products – or even add a whole new category to their existing package – then you have just cross-sold to them without breaking a sweat.

Offer granular search results

It’s good to offer fresh content outside of what a user already has access to, but beyond showing them a report title, how do you convince them that these additional reports will be of significant relevance to their work?

In the search results, what about clearly displaying how often their search term appears in a chapter or section within a report that they currently do not have access to? This would let the prospective buyer know how relevant a piece of content is to their research and understand what they are missing.