Update: Tweaking Stack

There have been lots of changes at Stack over the last 12 months – we launched Sampler, hired our first employee and held the first Stack Awards (watch out for news of this year’s awards coming soon). After so many big changes in 2015, I decided that this year would be dedicated to smaller tweaks, and making sure the service we provide is as good as it can be.

We ran a survey in May and June to check in with Stack subscribers, and based on the feedback they gave us we’ve made a series of fairly small but important changes to the way we do things. If you have a whole 14 minutes to spare, you can read about it all in detail and see lots of charts and graphs in my latest Medium post. Or if you just want to see the basics, scroll on for the short version.

1. Stack subscribers are happy
While the survey was live I kept obsessively refreshing the results to see our net promoter score (a metric that shows how likely customers would be to recommend your service to a friend). In the end we finished with a score of 67.6, which is good, but slightly meaningless in isolation. More important is the fact that 54% said they would definitely renew their subscriptions, and 32% said they probably would. Phew.

2. But they want more magazines
Time and again throughout the survey, respondents told us that they want more magazines, and more control over those magazines. That’s the job Sampler should be doing, but a massive 40% of subscribers said they’d never heard of our weekly magazine offers. Oops. We’ll be figuring out ways to bring Stack and Sampler closer together from now on, for example including information about Sampler in our Stack packs, and giving subscribers a free Sampler magazine if they decide they really don’t like the one we sent via Stack.

3. And other stuff
Subscribers told us they would love to receive extra pieces of print from Stack, so we’re working on a series of brand collaborations that will allow us to do that. And events are also popular, so we kicked off our new Stack Live evenings at the end of June in conversation with Dan Stafford, editor and art director of Amuseum magazine, the title we delivered that month. Watch out for more events coming soon, all of them recorded and released as a podcast on our Soundcloud page. (If you haven’t heard it yet, the event with Dan is well worth a listen – he’s a brilliant speaker.)

4. And we’re also creating new (slightly more expensive) ways to receive Stack.
We’re adding a monthly pay-as-you-go option for subscribers who want a more flexible type of subscription, and we’re introducing Stack Extra, a new service aimed at offices, agencies and other places that want to have a bundle of magazines delivered every month. We’re also increasing our prices slightly for new customers – all existing subscribers will remain on the same rate they’ve always paid, but people signing up after 1 August will pay a bit more (for example a quarterly subscription in the UK will go up from £18 to £20, and an annual subscription from £66 to £70). That’s still fantastic value (the average cover price of the magazines we sent over the last year was £10.50) but of course if you want to get the best possible deal, sign up before 1 August!

I hope that with these tweaks we’ll be able to sharpen up our service even more, and ensure that by the time we come to survey subscribers next year, we’ll be able to push that net promoter score just a little bit higher. Of course the best way to do that is by sending out more fantastic independent magazines over the next 12 months, and I can’t wait people to see what we’ve got lined up…

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