News International, the newspapers’ parent company, announced that readers will be offered a day’s use for £1, or £2 for a week’s subscription. Readers who have a seven-day subscription to the print editions will not be charged extra for access to the websites. International pricing has been set at $2/€1.5 a day or $4/€3 for a week.

In total that means UK users will pay £104/per year to view the site. Interestingly International users will pay an increased $208 (£140) per year for the same service, a fact that hasn’t gone down well with the US audience.

So far the reaction on this website has been fairly negative, as you can see from the screenshot below. It is unusual for the top comments to have this many votes in such a short period (1533 3574 to the leading comment).

The Financial Times seems to have been reasonably successful introducing a paywall to their content. Subscription is set at $4.69 per week or $244 per year with free access to 10 articles per month for registered users. However as some contributors have pointed out, FT content is targeting a community that needs specialist, accurate and reliable business news.

The audience at Times Online are consuming more general news that can be sourced elsewhere. It will be very interesting to see how well this gamble plays out.

Articles at The TimesOnline are well syndicated and linked to across the Internet. Take the article today “Binyamin Netanyahu humiliated after Barack Obama ‘dumped him for dinner‘”. We can already see over 1400 quotes from this article in Google.. Will these links and references start to dry up once the paywall is erected?

Aside from the distribution, The Times has built up a successful and vocal community. These days, much of the new is sourced from the same few facts and quotes. An informed community adds insight and value to the articles.

Google News has enhanced this need for added value on news articles. When you’re presented with 5000 similar articles, you’re going to look for the factors that make articles unique and add to your knowledge. Opinion and commentary play a key role here.

Looking through the responses of regular contributors to the site, you’re left wondering if Murdoch has just killed off the very thing that made The Times Online special.

After all, if the comments offer unique value to the website then shouldn’t Murdoch be paying these people for their content, or at least letting them have free access. You can bet the successful paid model for online news will be one that rewards all the content producers involved.

Update 26/03/2010: 11pm The user backlash towards this move seems to have taken The Times by surprise. An impromptu live Q&A with James Harding was “inundated with questions” and seemed to struggle under the demand. Only 5 questions were answered before the editor sped away.

They have now launched a Q&A article on the changes. Considering this was released late on a Friday, it doesn’t seem planned.

As other commentators have noted, this maybe the first time we’ll see the effects of a paywall in action on such a scale. We can end the hypothetical discussions and see if this model can work in the mainstream.

Update 29/03/2010: A great critique of the Times / STimes paywall plans by eConsultancy’s Ashley Friedlein

Technorati Tags: journalism, Paywall, Sunday Times, The Times, Times Online

Why do I need to know this?

SPF records are increasingly being used as a filter for email. That means that failing to put one on your domains (or that of your clients) can result in email being sent directly to the spam bin, bounced back or even deleted.

How does this connect to online marketing?

Well the obvious connection is email marketing. If our client mailouts never make it past the spam bin we have already impacted our conversion rate but this has wider implications. Not using a SPF record can hamper any email communication including support/sales follow-ups and forum/blog thread updates or other user notifications. This is a technical issue for server or domain administrators but many are yet to implement this standard. As the marketer you can suggest and push this good practice.

SPF records and Google/Gmail

Gmail is quickly emerging as one of the main email providers, especially as they push us all towards the utopia of “cloud computing”. They are definitely taking note of SPF as a method to fight spam and have already implimented an SPF test for all incoming email. If you open any email there and click “Show original” from the right hand menu, you will probably see something like this among the blurb:

Received-SPF: neutral (domain.com: 238.38.32.00 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of user@domain.com) client-ip=238.38.32.00;
Authentication-Results: mx.domain.com; spf=neutral (domain.com: 238.38.32.00 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of user@domain.com) smtp.mail=user@domain.com


That means Google can’t get any positive authentication for this email, i.e. no SPF record exists. The best it can do is be neutral about the test, “neither permitted nor denied”. Now if we have an SPF record set up we get something a lot more positive:

Received-SPF: pass (domain.com: domain of mail@domain.com designates 238.38.32.00 as permitted sender) client-ip=238.38.32.00;
Authentication-Results: mx.domain.com; spf=pass (domain.com: domain of mail@domain.com designates 238.38.32.00 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=mail@domain.com


Much better, we’ve passed the SPF test at Gmail and our emails have improved chances of avoiding the spam folder.

How do I add SPF records?

Very easily as long as you have access to the DNS settings for the domain. SPF records can also be entered as text (TXT) records which are standard entries for DNS providers. Here is a handy wizard which will generate the SPF record for you. This will probably look something like this:

v=spf1 a mx ~all

So the record you would end up in with in your DNS zone will be similar to:

yourdomain.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ~all"

If you are using scripts to send out emails automatically (i.e. forum or blog) you may need to add settings for your server IP and the account it sends from. Again check the headers on these emails to see the sender details you need to authenticate (“Show original”).

To check if a domain currently has a record use this SPF validation tool. If you want to test a positive result, use this domain (nickwilsdon.com). Any questions, feel free to ask below.

Technorati Tags: DNS, email, Email Marketing, Gmail, SPF

My first reaction was to advise them to keep the PayPal option. While at first glance this restriction looked a bit severe, around 50% of their stock was affected, on closer inspection 7 of the 10 bestselling lines could still be processed using them. This accounted to well over 70% of their total monthly sales. With their permission, this was part of the email the company CEO sent me:

I have checked Paypal for the amount of sales but I think people will pay with whatever payment options are available, not so sure it would affect us in terms of sale completions?

Also checked and only found 1 other Widget Store in the UK who uses Paypal, spoken to a few friendly stores who just use an online banking system like Protx or just accept card payments by phone.

Now in my book the more payment options you have the better. I’ve seen this first hand on stores we run but there have been various studies done, one in 2004 by CyberSource suggested that having four payment methods increased conversion by 20%

According to the data, merchants can convert as many as 20% more customers by offering them more payment types to choose from. Those merchants offering one payment type, such as general purpose credit cards, for example, convert 60% of their shoppers. Those offering four types, e.g., credit cards, gift certificates, eChecks, PayPal, etc., convert 72% of their shoppers–a 20% increase

PayPal themselves suggest a 14% rise from their own studies. So why do more payment choices equal more sales? In my opinion this comes down to three key factors, trust, security and convenience.

Trust

Users have concerns about giving details to merchants or unfamiliar payment providers. Payment gateways have varying levels of brand recognition with consumers, some are completely unknown to international buyers. Trust is a large aspect of the buying process, and if the brand has value for the user they are far happier to hand over their sensitive credit card details. This is especially true of PayPal or Google Checkout as the payment process is completed on the website of the provider, not the merchant.

Security

The user may also know that their chosen gateway provider can help them with refunds should the payment go wrong. With an unknown payment provider they may feel less confident that they can get their money returned, or that the process will be more difficult.

Convenience

People get used to using one common method of payment online. They may just want to have one central place to check their outgoing payments and print off their invoices or just prefer that method when buying online. These people actively seek out merchants who provide this payment type or award your shop points if they see it there. Meeting this requirement can be the reason they choose to shop with you in the first place.

So for me looking around and seeing that only 1 other Widget Store uses PayPal is an opportunity, not a reason to drop them. A unique selling point for your shop that differentiates you from the competition.

OK so what are the three things we walk away with from this article?

1. Adding more payment methods increases the chances of your client making a sale and can be a unique selling point for them.

2. If users trusts and looks for certain brands of payment, make the fact you provide them obvious on the entry and landing pages of your shop, don’t just hide them on the payment section. These companies have already done the leg work on getting the brand recognised, use that to your advantage.

3. Deleting these payment options may make these users leave, don’t assume they will just use another method. You may just have sent your hard earned customer to the other Widget Store that does let them shop they way they want.