Book Subscription Box
Two Different Intents, Counted as One Number.
01 · At a Glance
Traffic was healthy. Rankings were healthy. New subscription orders were flat. Everyone was looking at the numbers that were working.
| Dimension | Detail |
|---|---|
| Company | Book subscription box, direct to consumer |
| Role | Growth strategist. Search and content architecture, acquisition path, proposition. |
| Market | United Kingdom |
02 · The situation
The business was measured on traffic and rankings, both of which looked good, while the number that pays the bills sat still. That combination is usually treated as a conversion problem. It was not.
The organic traffic arriving was largely informational. People researching books. Not people choosing a subscription. Those are two different intents with two different next actions, and they were being counted as one number, so the number said everything was fine.
03 · The constraint
A subscription is not a product decision. It is a commitment decision, and the two are reached by different people arriving through different doors.
Underneath the traffic problem was a proposition problem. The offer described what was in the box rather than what the box was for. That reads perfectly well to someone who has already decided they want a book subscription and is now comparing them. It does nothing at all for someone who does not yet know they want one, which is most of the traffic.
04 · What I did
Rebuilt search and content around purchase intent rather than volume
Twenty-plus keywords brought to page one on terms where the searcher was choosing rather than browsing. Fewer terms, higher intent, and a deliberate willingness to lose informational traffic that was never going to convert.
Reworked the acquisition path so the proposition led with the reason to subscribe
Not the contents. The reason. What the subscription is for in someone’s life, stated before the specification of what arrives in the box.
05 · What moved, and what it means
New subscription orders up 35%. Cost per new order down 40%.
Those two together are the whole result. Orders moved and the cost of getting them fell at the same time, which is the only combination that means something actually changed rather than that more money went in. If orders had risen while cost per order held or climbed, it would have been spend. Both moving in the right direction says the traffic got more qualified and the offer got clearer, which are the two things you can control.
Organic traffic also grew 20% month on month. That number is in the results table for completeness and it is the least interesting one on the page. Traffic was never the problem.
06 · What I would tell you before you hire me for this
This was agency-side work. I owned the search and content strategy, the acquisition path and the proposition work.
The honest caution: cutting informational traffic in favour of intent traffic makes your traffic chart look worse before it looks better, and if the person reading that chart is not the person who agreed to the strategy, you will have an uncomfortable month. Agree the measure before you change the approach.
07 · Where this is relevant
Subscription and membership businesses, and anything where the top of the funnel is full of people researching the category rather than choosing within it. Subscription acquisition economics behave differently from one-off ecommerce, and most people optimising these accounts do not price that difference in.