Designing a registration wall that drives subscriptions

At Industry Dive, there was an appetite to experiment with using registration walls to leverage our high-value journalism to grow newsletter subscriptions. But without the ability to add these walls articles, we had no way to see if this would actually drive meaningful growth.

Any registration wall strategy would need to be based on understanding which, if any, types of content readers would be willing to fill out a gate for.

On the business side, we wanted to use article gates to increase newsletter subscribers. But on the reader side, this was an anti-pattern — users weren't coming to our articles to sign up for the newsletter, they were coming to read the article. My main challenge would be balancing these opposing needs.

In the spirit of one of Industry Dive's core values — experiment, learn, repeat — we would run a pilot program to collect data about how users interacted with registration walls on a small batch of articles to shape a larger registration wall strategy.

I analyzed 28 walls from other publications to understand common patterns. Most were paywalls, which suggested we should emphasize that we're asking readers to sign up for a free newsletter, not a paid subscription, to maximize conversions.

Nobody likes opening an article only to find it behind a wall. Our wall would need to feel light and unobtrusive to minimize bounce rates. We opted for an inline gate placement since it was visually less "heavy" than a modal or banner, and we could use the beginning of the article to hook the reader before showing the wall.

In my initial designs, the wall copy needed a lot of improvement. I had framed the language around what we were asking readers to do (subscribe to the free newsletter), but it wasn't what readers wanted to do. They wanted to read the story. We needed to use language that aligned with the reader’s intentions and make it abundantly clear how they could continue reading, in as few words as possible.

Another challenge was designing for current newsletter subscribers. In most cases, we could detect existing subscribers and suppress the wall, but we couldn't guarantee they would never encounter it. To avoid frustrating and confusing these readers, I added a note below the input field to make it appear as though existing subscribers could sign in through the form.

To prevent the wall from feeling overwhelming, we limited the form to one field and hid our privacy policy checkbox until the user clicked into the field.

We saw high conversion rates in the 5-month pilot, which gave us the evidence we needed to make registration walls a core strategy and continue investing resources. But that meant our editorial teams needed to be able to turn on walls themselves, without relying on product or design.

I designed CMS workflows that empowered teams to independently apply and remove walls, and preview what a wall would look like before publishing. I also designed for various permission levels (only certain users could turn walls on and off, but all CMS users needed to see when an article had a wall). I added filtering and history views so teams could easily track and manage walled content.

Registration walls have become a successful and powerful tool in our belt to grow audiences. View a live registration wall at any of the following articles: 11 retailers at risk of bankruptcy in 2023 (Retail Dive), How many college closures are on the horizon? (Higher Ed Dive), Top healthcare conferences in 2024 (Healthcare Dive).

• #1 source of newsletter sign-ups across all publications, outperforming all other subscription channels.
  

• 20,000+ newsletter subscriptions in 60 days after rolling out the full registration wall strategy.
  

• Scaled from pilot to core strategy in 5 months, where strong conversion rates in our 5-month pilot led to increased investment and organization-wide adoption.
  

• Created a self-service CMS workflow that enabled editorial news teams to gate articles independently without engineering or product support.
  

Now that we've determined registration walls are a successful audience growth strategy, we plan to explore applying walls to additional types of editorial content and to explore enhancements that can make them even more successful in the future.

This project was a true example of the importance of starting small and testing assumptions before building at scale. We could have spent months building a full registration wall system, only to find that readers weren't willing to convert. Instead, we validated the concept first with a pilot program and used real data to inform how we built the full solution.

It was also a crash course in balancing opposing business and user needs. Registration walls are frustrating and annoying for users, and focusing on eliminating every piece of friction we could, we created something that worked for the business without completely alienating our readers.

And designing the CMS workflows reinforced the value of empowering teams to act independently. By giving our editorial and audience teams the tools to experiment with registration walls on their own, we unlocked more learning and growth than we could have achieved if every gate required product and engineering support.