What Now? What Next?
OPEN LETTER
Looking for?—
**new offers to test
**new formats that work
**new strategies for today’s ABC rules
**new ideas in mail, online, and
**new paths to creative breakthroughs
Here are some hands-on ideas and best practices learned creating subscription promotions for many of publishing’s most successful titles. Magazines like BusinessWeek, newspapers like The Chronicle of Higher Education, and newsletters like Journal Watch. While I get paid well for my work, what I charge never quite equals the returns I collect in knowledge gained and lessons learned. So I think of these dividends as received wisdom … and these Open Letters as a way to pay it forward.
Voucher for success
The direct mail of the moment is the voucher. It’s ubiquitous. Two-part vouchers. Double-panel professional courtesy vouchers. Single-slip, reply-via-web-only vouchers. Full-page, credit-card style statement vouchers. We’ve seen double window vouchers, blown-in vouchers, even full-color vouchers. If you have not tried a voucher, now is the time. Especially if your title is well known among your target audience.
The coin of the realm is two-sided
While vouchers are the current coin of the realm, if you’ve tested a voucher and were not overwhelmed by the results, try extending your promotion onto the back of your form. The secret is to do it in the style of a disclosure statement (smaller text, gray type, etc.) Of course what you disclose will be features and benefits that increase response, not terms and conditions that limit it.
Less is more (more or less)
We discovered it is usually a mistake – especially for well-known publications – to add a separate editorial insert or even a free gift buckslip to a voucher. They tend to depress response. But don’t let that depress you. We created a neat little trick that seems to work well. Use a bangtail reply envelope instead of an insert. That gives you the best of both worlds. An official-looking, statement-style voucher plus an intrusive reply envelope that captures extra attention and gains extra response. Works just like your monthly credit card bill.
It’s hard to go wrong
The great advantage of a voucher is how much it improves payment with order and even payment later. Which means you can safely soften your offer significantly and not suffer a commensurate high order/cancel rate. And because the difference between gross and net response is typically narrow on voucher-generated orders, consider testing an unusually generous free issue offer to quickly increase your response rate.
Get ready for the format to fade
Like double postcards and oversized billboards and magalogs before them, vouchers are destined to fade as consumers recognize them for what they are…attention-getting derivatives of financial formats that co-opt their attention.
So while you are busy using vouchers to build circulation for now, also use them to replenish your arsenal of ideas for later. Take the time today to test-market new concepts that can stand on their own tomorrow when consumers learn that its officially safe to ignore these ersatz statements and documents.
Place a hidden premium among your voucher’s statement of benefits. Test a new brand identity or image. See if you can make continuous service pay. Conduct a whole series of discreet and controlled offer and creative tests to at least 15% of your file as you roll out your vouchers. That way you’ll be ready when it’s time for the next big thing.
Build an online franchise
Are you selling and renewing subscriptions effectively online? While it’s too early for most to generate enough volume to rely on the net alone to make numbers, it is almost too late if you aren’t building business on this new frontier. Here’s a checklist of things you need in your toolbox now:
**a campaign of banners that generate high click-throughs like intriguing envelopes that always gets opened
**a series e-mail messages that hold interest like the best control letters
**a web page that collects orders like top-performing order cards and
**a system that builds a database of qualified prospects that respond like timely hot lists
Information is free
It’s the ethic of the web. And why it’s so hard to sell on the net. When everything is free, how can you get customers to pay for your publication? Remember McLuhan. The medium is the message. Create banners that offer free information in exchange for an e-mail address. If your offer is useful or an entertainment (like a salary survey or a brain game), you can quickly build a database of active, responsive, and qualified prospects. A new list of addresses to which you can immediately e-mail online subscription offers created just for the occasion.
Offer incentives to gain a subscriber’s email address
Give an online freebie to any subscriber who provides a personal e-mail address. It could be a holiday recipe or an industry report, a money-saving coupon or a music download. What’s important is that you make the offer whenever and wherever you communicate with subscribers in exchange for their online identity. Do it in new business direct mail, renewals and billing series, on your insert cards and in small space ads. The more you can conduct subscription business online, the better your circulation bottom line.
The new A-B-Cs of circulation
Expect the new audit rules to fundamentally change circulation’s best practices. Now that the venerable 50% rule is history, new opportunities abound:
**subscriptions sold at any price qualify as paid, and
**premiums may have a value equal to the entire cost of the subscription less one cent
But don’t become a subscription spendthrift – there are also bridling responsibilities:
**the net average subscription price must be revealed on your statement
**and all issues sold at less than 35% of the average will be specially highlighted
So it’s like the old television game show, Let’s Make a Deal. It’s hard to know what is behind each door. Or where opportunity will knock. However there are some good strategies to unlocking success. Here are three…
1. Feels so soft. Works so hard.
Strategy: Charge just postage and handling for a half-year trial of your publication.
Benefits: The new ABC rules allow you to count these trials as new paid subscriptions. So you net quick volume with an essentially free (soft) offer. And you enjoy good conversion to full price because your trial customers are better qualified having made (hard) payment. Plus you gain six months to use editorial and marketing to persuade these new subscribers to renew at your basic rate.
2. The soul of a new machine
Strategy: Combine an extremely low price/short term with a continuous service offer. A weekly magazine, for example, might offer 12 issues for $1, with a $1 per issue rate thereafter.
Benefits: Suddenly a new, dramatic, attention-getting, breakthrough price with which to attract new business. Plus an efficient new subscription marketing system – a circulation machine – that moves new readers quickly and automatically to full price … raising the average per-issue subscription rate along the way (a feature the advertising sales department is sure to trumpet).
3. A pair beats one of a kind
Strategy: Partner with an affinity interest title to forge free subscription offers, develop new subscriber experiences, and create original marketing ideas. Imagine a father-son package of Sports Illustrated and SI for Kids. A mind-body package of The Atlantic Monthly and Men’s Health. Or a shop-and-save package of Lucky and Money. Buy one, get the other free.
Benefits: You create a new story to tell, gain a new way to sell, and create a deal that’s doubly attractive. Plus if you share just one cent of each sale with your partner, you both can count the subscription as paid, while each title gets a chance to renew the subscriber at full price separately.
Tap your secret source of winning premiums
If you are searching for a new, high-pulling premium look no further than your best list and your best advertisers. Use their products and services, or a low-cost version of them, as your free subscription gift.For instance, Seventeen might offer a free panty from Victoria’s Secret (delivered when new subscribers visit stores in person). You may well discover your source for premiums considers your promotion so valuable to their marketing efforts they will share the cost with you.
Plan for creative breakthroughs
Can you imagine Coca-Cola or Gap or Ford or Nike or Apple suddenly deciding that this year it would spend nothing on new advertising to attract customers? Think what would happen to the market share, or brand image – to say nothing of the career of the consumer marketing director – of the benighted company where budgets were managed like that.
Yet remarkably, that’s often the norm among magazine marketers. Publishers and circulation directors who routinely spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars annually on lists, printing, lettershops, postage, and service bureaus think nothing of spending little if anything on new creative because “this year we are rolling out, not testing ideas…”
There’s a reason why Coke and Pepsi, Ford and Chevy reserve 10-25% of their marketing budgets for new creative every year. They know every campaign – every effort – is a test. Not just of how efficient you are as compared to last year, but of how effective you are as compared to your competition this year and next.
Magazines that expect to grow and succeed like a Gap or Nike or Apple are well advised to reserve at least 5%-10% of total marketing dollars for creative breakthroughs. So even if you cannot equal the big marketers’ percentages, or match their spending, you can follow their example. After all, in our world $50,000 to $100,000 budgets for new creative can buy you the finest talent available and lots of it. See for yourself. (Self-promotion alert)
Plus you’ll enjoy a huge advantage over general consumer marketers who complain that half of their $15-$20 million ad budgets are wasted, they just don’t know which half. You, as a disciplined circulation direct marketer, can measure precisely the return on every cent you spend.And in the process you can become more than a budget-constrained accountant in charge of subscriptions. You can be a powerful, successful, confident director of circulation and consumer marketing who knows the true value of breakthrough creative and what good ideas are actually worth.
