Managing “sleeper” subscribers

An inconvenient truth for most subscription publishers is that their businesses are driven — to some degree — by revenue from people who don’t actually use the products or services they’re paying for. They might be paying subscribers, but they’re inactive — or “asleep.”

Deciding what to do about sleepers can be tricky. They often represent a meaningful chunk of publishers’ subscriber bases, and attempting to “wake” them risks triggering cancellations and denting revenue.