The Globe and Mail transformed its subscription platform by implementing Zuora Billing and Zephr to enhance digital product sales, streamline processes, and improve subscriber management, ultimately allowing for greater agility and the introduction of diverse offerings.
The Globe and Mail is Canada’s premier news media company, leading conversations through its award-winning news, political, business, investing, and lifestyle coverage.
The Globe and Mail team needed to replace their legacy subscription platform with a dynamic SaaS solution to better support digital product sales and subscribers.
Zuora Billing and Zephr replaced two thirds of The Globe and Mail’s subscription technology and enabled improved speed to market for new B2C digital products while also streamlining the order to cash process. It’s also provided a foundation for customer nurturing journeys, B2B sales and allowed us to diversify product sales to include new products.
With Zuora’s help, The Globe and Mail could focus technology resources on creating Intellectual Property instead of maintaining bespoke and legacy custom code. The Globe and Mail team was able to more easily manage communication with customers, quickly onboard new payment providers, and receive high-quality support for ongoing success.
“Zuora has performed consistently, we feel we are only using a fraction of the product’s capabilities and look forward to expanding our use of the platform. We find that Zuora delivers on commitments and has consistently introduced new features that will help us improve efficiency and services to our valued customers.”
Founded in 1844, The Globe and Mail is Canada’s premier news media company and an integral part of its citizens’ daily lives.
Covering everything from day-to-day happenings to massive national and global events, The Globe and Mail shares its stories in print and digital media formats that reach more than 6 million readers each week. The Globe and Mail has won more national newspaper awards than any other news organization in Canada and has received multiple Michener Awards for public service journalism.
Like many traditional news outlets, The Globe and Mail has had to evolve to succeed in the new media environment. The Globe and Mail business team wanted to modernize its legacy system and adopt a SaaS solution to prioritize subscribers and digital journeys while also diversifying its product offerings.
Searching for the right solution
To unleash the full potential of the digital subscription business while still sustaining its print model of operations, The Globe and Mail team needed to remove bottlenecks imposed by previous systems. They sought a solution that would help the company continue its journey of subscription management modernization and digitization — both to improve the subscriber experience and to monetize subscription-related activities. The Globe and Mail team was also looking to retire in-house code wherever possible, by absorbing it into a vendor-supported platform.
The team realized their ecosystem — a complex mix of in-house and third-party platforms that was becoming increasingly difficult to support — had functionality restrictions hindering their ability to be agile and responsive in a world of fast-changing online content and news. The system had run its course, and it was time to find a solution that would allow the news media company to continue to deliver relevant stories in a timely manner.
What The Globe and Mail needed
The Globe and Mail team sought a solution that could help them:
- Maximize content delivery and habituate content consumption by subscribers
- Deepen subscriber relationships and gain more robust data on each subscriber’s preferences and usage patterns
- Identify opportunities to increase revenue per subscriber
- Create new offers without system-level restrictions
- Decrease the administrative load of supporting current and future subscriptions and monetization activities
- Improve order-to-cash life cycle support for subscribers
The Globe and Mail found a trusted solutions partner in Zuora.
Zuora enabled The Globe and Mail to deliver:
- Diverse acquisition offers with increased speed to market
- Free trials: The Globe and Mail previously did not offer free trials, which put it at a competitive disadvantage.
- Gift offerings: The Globe and Mail already had a rudimentary gift offering, basically a normal subscription with a custom code wrapped around it. This meant that revenue recognition was not captured properly or accurately. With Zuora’s help, The Globe and Mail could correctly complete revenue recognition, as the gift purchase was treated as a debit memo that was applied to the subscription when the gift was redeemed.
- Non-subscription product sales like the Globe Leadership Institute executive training
The results
Zuora helped the Globe address its challenges in a number of ways. Zuora delivered out-of-the box capabilities to manage communication with customers through each step of the subscription life cycle. The Globe and Mail could now quickly onboard additional payment providers, creating a more seamless payment experience for customers. The business team appreciated Zuora’s agility and ease of use, which lacked the complexity of the previous solution, particularly in regard to reporting capabilities.
“Zuora has performed consistently, we feel we are only using a fraction of the product’s capabilities,” said Susan Kelly, Vice President, Information Technology at The Globe and Mail. “We find that Zuora delivers on commitments and has consistently introduced new features that will help us improve efficiency and services to our valued customers.
Interacting with Zuora has been excellent, “Their team’s involvement ensured we had everything we needed to achieve great results. They worked with us as a partner during our implementation and existing knowledge about the media business was one of the main reasons behind our successful implementation.”
“We find that Zuora delivers on commitments and has consistently introduced new features that will help us improve efficiency and services to our valued customers. Zuora has performed consistently, we feel we are only using a fraction of the product’s capabilities”
