Website Subscriptions

Offering website subscriptions allows visitors to sign up to receive notifications when new content is published on topics they are interested in — this chapter covers how to set them up.

Subscription options

The first step is to decide which subscription options to offer. Fortunately, the category list for website content can also form the set of options.

Each of the firm’s products and strategies can be added as additional subscription options, but this might become unwieldy — especially for a large product range or one that includes UCITS funds (subscriptions can only be offered to visitors in countries where a fund is registered).

If the subscription options have been based on asset classes that align with the firm's product range (as recommended), website visitors can be given a simpler choice for product and strategy subscriptions:

In this case:

• Asset classes are used for blog subscriptions (non-product content)
• Product and strategy content is distributed to subscribers who have opted in to general product/strategy updates and a relevant asset class
• Product content is also restricted to subscribers in countries where the product is registered

Adding a subscription form

Next, a form needs to be added to the website (only made available to professional investors) so that visitors can subscribe.

Suggested fields to include on the form are shown below.

Field	Type	Example
First name and surname	Free text	John Smith
Email address	Free text	john.smith@domain.com
Country	Dropdown	United Kingdom
Client group	Dropdown	Institutional investor
Job function	Dropdown	Manager research/fund selection
Subscription options	Checkbox	Equities Fixed Income

Two fields — job function and client group — are used to manage new subscribers, and only need to be included if the volume of new subscribers is high enough that the process requires automation (otherwise, each new subscriber can simply be vetted manually).

If included, job function should contain an exhaustive list of options:

• Provide investment advice*
• Manager research/fund selection*
• Construct/manage investment portfolios*
• Operations or investment support
• Risk management
• Sales or marketing
• Other

Subscribers who select a job function of interest to the sales team (typically those with an asterisk) can then be identified. And requiring subscribers to select their client group from a list of options that matches the structure of the firm's sales team enables those identified as key individuals to be automatically routed to the appropriate team for vetting.