The Toledo Blade aimed to start building relationships with potential users who might have been excluded from its ongoing hard paywall strategy.

They wanted a low friction way to entice readers rather than "subscribe or nothing" as well as obtain users' first-party data and payment information. By offering day pass purchases, they converted leads to registrations at a significantly higher rate than its typical user experience. They also found out that day pass purchasers are 12x more likely to buy a subscription than non-day-pass readers - due to reduced friction of checkout experience.

Piano also enabled them to build and target their six daily newsletters to enhance content engagement with AI-recommended content and invite readers to events and contests with dynamic content blocks.

Hear from The Blade’s Tom Zeller about the approach they took, and lessons learned along the way.