Analysts were at pains to explain the sudden slowdown in Western Europe, particularly as the United States market has held up in spite of the tough economic environment. De Groote said that a contributing factor could be the timing of Easter this year, which came earlier than usual. [EMPH. ADDED]

That damn, unreliable Easter. Never shows up when you need it.

For those looking ahead, more trenchant analysis:

“The figures for Western Europe are clearly disappointing,” said Alex De Groote, an analyst at Panmure Gordon in London. “If this trend continues it will be a clear negative going forward.”

Plan accordingly.

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** I used to compare direct response to general advertising in purely parochial ways.

Targeted vs. untargeted…
Tested vs. untested…
Accountable vs. unaccountable…

Now with so little need to persuade clients of the efficacy of the one marketing method over the other, I tend to think about it more academically.

Behavioral vs. theoretical.

Prediction: Done well, it will sell.

Do you treat all subscribers the same?

That question is the common denominator for two projects I am currently creating. And since CM caught me at work, take a look over my shoulder at the ideas driving these promotions. See if you, too, can increase revenue without new spending on subscribers or content.

Project A is for a professional weekly.** It’s the launch of a monthly newsletter — with a twist. The newsletter is offered only to the presidents among the publication’s current subscriber titles. And like a gift subscription, the presidents are not buying the newsletter for themselves. They subscribe on behalf of their board of directors — giving the newsletter free to their trustees 10 times yearly.

What’s in the newsletter? Articles drawn from the previous four weeks of the publication’s regular coverage that is of particular interest to directors. The format is PDF-only (which gives the newsletter the freedom to publish in odd 5- and 9-page editions). And each issue is emailed to the subscribing president who in turn can easily forward it to trustees, or print and mail it.

The marketing pitch hits several sweet spots. A president’s desire to quickly and efficiently inform the board without having to do so personally. A trustee’s natural desire to stay informed and avoid litigation (an increasing reality) without having to wade through hundreds of pages of otherwise boring information. And an organization’s desire to provide directors with useful tools that demonstrate appreciation of each trustee’s service.

Of course for my client this idea works on every level. There’s no new content. No printing, production or postage. And because it’s sold as a gift, subscriptions auger to renew easily and cancel rarely. It’s the ultimate in low-cost, low-maintenance, added-value, subsidiary publishing.

Even better, it’s in the tradition of “the more narrow the newsletter, the higher the subscription price.” So high, one barely needs to model it. The initial test featured 1-year rates that ranged from $500 to $3,000 (which is 6-to-36 times the cost of the very publication the newsletter is drawn from!) With a publishing architecture this rich, it requires scant few sales to make a winner. And our pilot test landed more than a few — and so easily we’re now skeptical! So step tests are underway. If the initial results are repeated, this will be one singular sensation.

Project B is for a consumer newsweekly.** This magazine is experimenting with a premium subscription — and it, too, has a twist. Typically a premium subscription provides a “basic” subscriber with a valuable, higher-cost extra. For example, Harvard Business Review grants premium subscribers unlimited online access to its deep archive of brilliant business advice (“Summon the Gods!” I wrote). While The Economist grants higher-paying subscribers gated content online (and successfully — unlike The New York Times who fenced the opinions of their op-ed commentators only to discover readers had an opposing opinion that was even more powerfully persuasive!)

Now the premium subscription program I’m helping develop is a decidedly different concept. Instead of promoting premium content, they are offering premium status. And instead of a premium subscription price, they’re after a higher subscriber commitment.

Here’s how: Subscribers who sign up for a 5-year renewal commitment — tied to a direct-pay arrangement — earn better than your average subscription gifts every year. (Think cash gift cards and exclusive signature swag). These high-value subscribers also get invitations to mix and mingle with opinion leaders at private social events in selected cities. (Think wine tastings, gallery openings, charity auctions, black tie galas, and such). This is a kind of American Express Green - Blue - Gold - Platinum - Black - rentention strategy that personalizes the magazine in the lives of its most dedicated readers, and turns faceless subscribers into first-name friends.

Next time:

• 8 circulation marketing mistakes I made so you don’t have to

Future articles:

• If you’re paying more than “FREE” for your circulation creative, you’re spending too much

• Why you need to sell subscriptions like it’s 1984

• Are you a secretly subversive circulator?—A self quiz

P.S. Two more rule-breaking, bonus ideas if you, too, find it wise not to treat all subscribers the same

1. Do like The Chronicle of Higher Education and build a grid of prices and terms and formats so subscribers can find an offer they like. This breaks the “one-path, one-price” subscription rule that says options only invite confusion, indecision, and analysis paralysis. Not true for The Chronicle. Its target market — like you and yours I’m sure — is smarter than that. An intelligentsia that actually responds to choice…and a little piece of “audience development” genius invented by Alex Levin.

2. Take it even further. If you publish a weekly, why not let putative subscribers choose their own term? Many who might find your title an expensive burden to read each week, may very well be more interested in reading you every other week. Or even once a month. Just because you publish weekly, why make that the only frequency you sell?
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**Names revealed only after circulation success is assured—and client permission is given!

He being Dan Ariely, author of the new book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. It’s about the buying and marketing choices we make and why we make them. And why the seemingly rational path to a purchase is often the road less traveled.

Chapter One opens with an example drawn directly from the subscription promotions of my sometimes client The Economist. (And note to Ms. Scardino: It has been some time!)

Mr. Ariely’s second example involves real estate. Showing why most buyers choose the more expensive, and yet demonstrably less valuable property among the three houses he presents. Which is why you’ll also find this article posted here.

As a “behavioral economist,” Mr. Ariely organizes the book using the scientific method. In successive chapters he postulates a theory. Devises a controlled experiment. Tests his hypotheses. And reports the results…which are fascinating as well as illuminating. (Conduct a few tests on yourself: Door game. Easy-hard game. Circle illusion. Table illusion. Jastrow illusion. Stroop illusion. Line illusion. Checker board illusion. And Koffka illusion.

Predictably Irrational reveals that many best practices in marketing may, in fact, be predicated on myths. And it gives the lie to some long-held, fiercely-defended beliefs about customer behavior. But its greatest contribution is how it can help you achieve what I think is most missing in sales—whether real estate or publishing: The ability of sellers to think like buyers in accurate and advantageous ways.

These “hidden forces” will help you understand the true meaning of free. The concept of price anchors. The power of social motivation. If you’re in real estate, I think you’ll find it easy to take what you learn and apply it to the pricing of properties, the showing of homes, the marketing of listings. If you’re selling magazines, it may cause you to re-frame your offers, re-cast your benefits, and re-position your brand.

Now fair warning: Mr. Arieley has a grander vision than I. So he doesn’t draw the same conclusions from his data as I do. As a result, he tends to airily end chapters with sweeping pronunciations on the implications of his findings for everything from health care to tax hikes.

Me, I’m more interested in the practical than the political. So I skimmed and skipped those parts—reading Predictably Irrational much like I did The Robber Barons when just starting out in business. The more the author cast the capitalists as villains and the customers as victims, the more I admired—and understood—the motives, methods, and character of both buyers and sellers.

If you are you are interested in the ideas in Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely has a blog, an MIT website, and the inevitable Wikipedia entry.

Three word review? Useful if true.

Now, after reading Tom Asacker’s excellent post at A Clear Eye, I’m adopting his definition. Tom is more right than I.

“Only first class business, and that in a first class way…”

In the world of magazine publishing, nothing describes Condé Nast Publications better. And this second quote describes some of the secrets to Condé Nast Portfolio’s circulation marketing success:

“It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement, and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and read. Therefore, study the graphics used by editors and imitate them. Study the graphics used in advertisements, and avoid them.”

As you can see from the screen capture below, Condé Nast Portfolio is following that advice, promoting itself in the style of the Drudge Report on the Drudge Report. The magazine is drawing on its own content to create putative “news items.”

A click on the teased item takes you to the full article and not—as is so typical of (ever-grasping) circulation marketing—to a subscription offer landing page. Condé Nast Portfolio’s idea is bigger: Get readers interested in the magazine itself. Quelle chose! This is a clever and sophisticated way to qualify casual readers and build their commitment to the magazine. Of course the chance to sell is not forsaken. Banners next to the article promote subscriptions. There’s an offer on the top right, and another in the right sidebar.

A click on one of these subscription banners then takes the reader to the subscription landing page in the usual way. And the offer includes a popular premium—a free flash drive. The kind of put-in-your-pocket subscription swag that proves popular with professionals (or at least doctors, as I learned working for the New England Journal of Medicine).

To be sure, this campaign on Drudge is not the whole of Condé Nast Portfolio’s launch. Classic direct mail and newsstand promotions undoubtedly are at the heart of their efforts. And I would bet they are working Google Adwords and the like as well. But Condé Nast Portfolio is playing things close to the vest, perhaps taking a lesson from former CN-er, Tina Brown, and her splashy Talk debut.

And while I certainly don’t know the attendant metrics, or what Condé Nast Portfolio is seeking to achieve in their numbers, I do know placements on Drudge are not cheap. Nevertheless, I bet the publisher is judging the efforts effective. Not just in the subscription sales they make. But in the awareness they get (=more ad sales and pages). The buzz they generate (=more earned media and blogged commentary). And in the brand image they establish (=credibility across industries, across borders, and across print, digital and web 2.0 platforms).

Of course this kind of old school rule breaking, and new economy rule making is “drudge” work in that it requires item-by-item, issue-after-issue attention. And unlike traditional mail escargot, it also requires quick thinking and even quicker evaluations of results—day-by-day, if not hour-by-hour circulation management. Which fells the old goal of evergreen controls that could run largely untouched for months and, with luck, trouble-free for years of predictable response. (”Two men graduate college”—indeed!)

But because this innovative launch strategy is so fundamentally sound, it is still possible to cast it in traditional subscription marketing terms. Just think of it as Condé Nast Portfolio launching from a newsstand called Drudge.
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God-is-in-the-Details Dept.

Notice, at the foot of the landing page, the continuous service offer (which is, after all, the very definition of a subscriber). And look at the immediate cross-sell and up-sells here at the point of purchase. Gift subscriptions and sister (brother?) magazines sold on the come. Hard-working fundamentals that show Condé Nast Portfolio intends to be more than just a pretty face.
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** I had the stupendous luck of starting my career at David’s Ogilvy’s advertising agency in New York—hired on by Creative Director, Stan Winston, for their direct response division (which was a pet interest of D.O.) Considering what I wrote and created for the likes of American Express and Sears, Ballet News and Audubon versus what I learned and took away—especially from my immediate boss to whom I owe so much, Creative Group Supervisor, Robert Chambers [2] [3]—I’m surprised Ogilvy isn’t still billing me later from his grave.

Later, when out on my own, I was given a taste of working Condé Nast style—a small double postcard project for GQ. And no, thank you for asking, I did not beat their control.

Just as The Wall Street Journal serves as a subscription marketing model to the world of business publishing, The Jewish Week plays that role for many regional Jewish publishers across the nation who look to New York to see how the leading newspaper for America’s largest Jewish community manages it’s circulation.

I have been blessed, so to speak, to create many of The Jewish Week’s promotions over the past several years under the direction of the Associate Publisher and Marketing Director, Rich Waloff and his colleagues, Paul Bukzin the paper’s Circulation Manager, and Gary Rosenblatt who is Editor and Publisher.

Here’s something we’re creating now that may benefit those looking in from Cleveland or Baltimore or Phoenix or Los Angeles or Milwaukee or St. Louis or Philadelphia — all members of the American Jewish Press Association to whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking.

It’s a bangtail blow-in, a (shall we say colorful?) name that describes those combination subscription card/envelopes that fall out of magazines and newspapers usually to the general annoyance, when not occasional response, of readers.

Blow-ins, and their cousins the bind-ins, tend to be profitable for several reasons:

1. They reach newsstand and pass-along readers “in the moment” — at their highest point of interest.

2. They’re intrusive — literally falling into laps if not on the floor of highly qualified prospects.

3. They ride along with the issue — by-passing the always high cost of lists and postage associated with direct mail.

Bangtails with their built-in payment envelopes (like you see in your credit card bills) are also smart:

4. They encourage and embrace cash with the order — well, actually, checks or credit card info.

5. Which, in turn, eliminates the need for a series of expensive direct mail billing efforts — again dispensing with postage and printing costs.

As you can see, the blow-in bangtails we’re proposing for The Jewish Week follow the fundamentals of Circ-101.

6. They feature a discount — typically the #1 driver of response.

7. They connect the subscription to personal emotion — usually a strong motivator.

8. The changing images and headlines create variety — refreshing attention week after week.

9. The price savings is presented in a voucher format — proven to be the fastest, most-effective presentation of value.

The rest is DM-101

10. Show the product.

11. Offer a premium for a longer commitment.

12. Downplay the website…Downplay the website? I often get asked, “Why not do away with bangtails — perhaps too blow-ins and bind-ins — and simply run in-issue ads with the offer and a website address?” This would allow prospective subscribers to log on, order up, and pay directly.

If only that worked. Unfortunately, testing has shown it’s doubly difficult — rare and often impossible — to profitably move prospects from print to a website while making their desire to order so compelling they actually go on to complete the transaction.**

If you, too, decide to create blow-in bangtails for your in-issue subscription offers, you’ll find there are lots of envelope manufacturers who feature the format. And many printers who can produce them. You might also consider over-printing your needs by a thousand or two so your editors and writers can have some to hand out as self-contained subscription promotions at talks they give or conferences they attend.

B&W Press in particular has made the bangtail something of a specialty for the magazine and newspaper industry. Their prices are indeed low. But so too is the print quality (the inexpensive paper does not lend itself to good quality four-color reproduction). However you may not need high fidelity — and the extra it costs probably will not produce a commensurate increase in response. It usually doesn’t to my chagrin.

In the few times I’ve used B&W on behalf of clients, I have found them more than somewhat difficult. So fair warning. I think they may have an aversion to working with outside creative agencies as opposed to directly with cost-is-the-object publishers. Of course, it could just be me B&W wished to avoid. So try them yourself and see if you agree!

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**For some reason — as Les Wunderman brilliantly showed with his famous “gold box” for Columbia House***— the idea works well in reverse: Successfully clueing-in TV viewers to mark a special box on an order form they would see in print ads and inserts*** produced a ton of extra sales. I wonder if this same technique would also work getting buyers from a print ad to a website … and suspect the reason it hasn’t happened yet is because we need creative ideas equal to Wunderman’s.

***Originally, I mistakenly wrote Publisher’s Clearing House instead of Columbia House, and referenced direct mail instead of print ads and free standing inserts.

The BBDO Advertising Discipline

Creativity without discipline is a gamble with bad odds. And discipline without creativity is a clear waste of money. Good discipline provides good direction. Good direction doesn’t stifle creativity, it stimulates it. And by discipline, we don’t mean a research system. We mean a thought process…a way to sort out data…a means for judging what information is valuable and what is not…a flexibility for interpreting information imaginatively.

Simply stated, BBDO’s Advertising Discipline consists of four steps:

1. Understand the market
2. Know the prime prospect
3. Know the prime prospect’s problems
4. Position the brand

1. Understand the Market

Consumers are the final arbiters when it comes to making a brand decision. Their perspective counts most. How they perceive a market and the choice of brands within it will certainly affect their decision making at the time of purchase.

BBDO has developed a research tool called Market Structure Audit (MSA) to accurately measure consumers’ perceptions in virtually any product or service category. It asks consumers to tell us who they think your brand’s competitors are and which brand would be the most likely substitute if yours were not available. Understanding which brands are perceived as similar can help us determine if a brand should be repositioned and where gaps might exist in your product line. MSA is just one of several proprietary tools we use to better understand your market and competition.

2. Know the Prime Prospect

For every product, service or company there is a small group of people that’s more valuable to a marketer than all other groups. It might be traditional heavy users, occasional users or even, in some cases, non-users.

Often there is more than one prospect for the same message. Mothers as well as children. Customers and sales men. Employees, opinion leaders and the financial community. But the thought process we go through is the same for all. We learn everything worth knowing about these prospects. Not just their demographic statistics, but their psychographic profiles, too.

We learn prospects’ age, sex, income, marital status, size of household and so on. But equally important, we learn about their attitudes, how they think, what gets them emotionally involved, what their lifestyles are or what they would like them to be. What we learn is of critical importance. Whatever advertising message we create, we must create with these people in mind.

3. Know the Prime Prospect’s Problems

Our next step is to find out our prospect’s problems. Its BBDO’s experience that the most effective way to gain people’s attention, to be remembered, to have people prefer our brand—to sell—is to solve people’s problems. It’s also our experience that advertising based on traditional benefit / attribute research is usually inadequate. With that research, most consumers end up simply playing back the same basic benefits they’ve already been told about in ad after ad. Which means there’s nothing in the way of preemptive positioning that you can dig out of what they say.

On the other hand, BBDO has found consumers to be quite original in describing problems they have with products or services. Using our proprietary technique called Problem Detection, we’ve found, almost without exception, that all consumer problems are related to one or more of three elements—performance, image or price. Undoubtedly, with any product we’ll uncover problems in each of these areas. But the evaluative skills we’ve gained from hundreds of case histories involving problem research enables us to identify which problems will form the basis of the most persuasive brand positioning.

4. Position the Brand as a Solution to a Problem

Only after we know our prime prospects and their problems, do we look at the product, service or company to learn what solutions it provided. That way, we can look from the right perspective—the consumer’s point of view.

The fact is, most agencies start with the product or service and try to find a way for consumers to respond to it. This approach is based on the premise that it’s the agency’s job to represent the client to consumers. BBDO believes that it’s just as important to represent consumers to the client. Because we represent both, we can find how the product or service can best respond to prospects and their problems. And we’ve developed a marketing technique called Brand Equity, which helps narrow our judgment and determine the most persuasive selling message. A message that convinces the prime prospects that our brand can best solve important performance, image or price problems. It’s the most effective marketing strategy you can have.

As more and more consumers impressions are gathered, we become increasingly sensitive to the subtleties that influence the choice of a brand. Our information gathering techniques, many of them originated by BBDO and unmatched anywhere, gives us the best available data. But they don’t dictate strategy to us. Expert judgment does. Long experience in working with these techniques has given us the judgment needed to turn raw marketing intelligence into a convincing selling message.

Even so, our judgment must be made over and over again. People change. Markets change. Companies change. Strategy must be reviewed regularly to ensure that assumptions that were once correct are still correct.

Idly looking in, I saw John Caples, the famous ad man, staring back at me. His photo, probably used in a presentation extolling BBDO’s impressive heritage as a laboratory of copy testing, had apparently served it purpose and was discarded, no longer needed. But it felt wrong to see Mr. Caples atop the trash. So I retrieved it. Took it home. Put it in a ready-made frame. Hung it in my office.

Several years later—having started my own agency in the interim—my office was in my home. Caples on the wall.

One day a colleague or client saw the photo and asked, “Is that your father?” “No!” I said reflexively. But as quickly, I caught myself and reversed the answer. “Yes, actually he is….” And I gave a bit of history of the great man. BBDO. Tested Advertising Methods. They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano. Famous Artists School and Famous Writers School. Direct marketing as we know it today. Even self-serving details about an advertising award I won in his name. More information, I’m sure, than my polite friend wanted to know.

I never met John Caples. But I felt his hand in my life.

My father’s name was Carmen Joseph Riccelli. “Carmen” to his Italian brothers and sisters and friends in Boston where he was born and raised. “Joe” to my mom and her family, and everyone in the post WWII suburb 20 miles north of Boston where he lived when I grew up.

My father was in the direct mail business too. He worked for the Post Office in downtown Boston. First sorting mail in the back. Then selling stamps in the lobby. Sometime in the 1960s, when the Post Office went from a department of the federal government to a quasi-private, profit-pursuing business, the newly christened “United States Postal Service” decided to make more of its commemorative stamp business.

Encouraging the public to collect—and thus not use—stamps is a profitable business indeed. Enough to elevate my father to Chief Clerk for philatelic sales in the lobby of the Boston Post Office. There he manned a small window, which grew into a boutique, that catered to stamp collectors, professionals and amateur alike.

Dad took his work seriously. I recall him spending time researching famous figures who were being featured on upcoming stamps in our installment-payment-plan encyclopedia. That way, should a customer inquire, he would be familiar with the back story and significance of Dag Hammarskjold’s UN or John Audubon’s birds or John Donne’s poetry.

Like the subjects of the stamps he researched, my father was talented in several creative ways. He built fine furniture featuring carved inlays of exotic woods. He cultivated an extravagant garden of trellis roses and plum tomatoes. He hand-lettered signs and proclamations in old English letterforms. And he designed a stamp—a Christmas stamp in particular.

My father took up stamp designing when the newly minted USPS publicized its intention to welcome the work of outsiders for the honor of having created the annual Christmas Stamp—long the province of a small circle of inside artists, none of whom had ever sorted mail or sold stamps to the general public.

Dad wanted to be first to receive that recognition. And he had a wonderful idea. A peace stamp. Featuring a dove above a radiant earth against deep blue space. I can still see it in my memory. It was imaginatively designed and carefully drawn, hand-lettered and beautifully painted at a size many times larger than the stamp would be engraved, in order to reveal every detail.

The original was submitted veiled in vellum and mounted on art board. Accompanied by a letter Dad carefully drafted and Mom typed error-free explaining the inspiration that underpinned his proposed stamp. Only to receive a too-quick, too-terse, “sorry-received-too-late” letter of rejection.

Dad was persistent. In his workshop hung a hand-lettered sign quoting William Penn: Patience and Diligence, like faith, remove mountains. So he re-submitted his stamp answering each objection to its acceptance. But Dad wasn’t stupid. And after many months of finding his art and letters returned to sender, with ever-more oblique reasons against its issue, he stopped corresponding with his employer.

My father never mentioned the disappointment he must have felt. Concentrating instead on the stamp collection he had started for me with every new commemorative issued from the day I was born to the day he retired from the Postal Service in 1980. Twenty-six years of American stamps carefully organized in binders.

Upon his death, Dad’s stamp collection became mine and I have it still. It includes wonderful issues and plate blocks and first-day covers. Some famous. Some valuable. Some that were even flown to the moon and back.

And in those binders I also found a carbon copy of a Christmas stamp submission letter full of hope.

But no matter where I looked among my father’s effects, I never found his original drawings of the Christmas stamp that would never be. It remains unreturned, a dead letter of sorts.

If I had it in hand, I would issue it today. The inaugural day of my dad’s stamp collection. Just in time for Christmas, 18 days ahead.

I would use my father’s stamp to send greeting cards of the season, each with a message I feel father-to-son, business and personal:

Letters mingle souls.

You see them on television’s Sunday news shows like Meet the Press. Corporate image commercials for a murderers’ row of companies and industries that have less than stellar reputations with the general public. Businesses like Altria Group (née Philip Morris) or DuPont or Pfizer. They want you to see their good works, hoping you’ll think better of them as you hear their side of the story.

As I am sure you realize, we in circulation marketing (or as one of my clients calls it “audience development”) work in a generally notorious, if not nefarious industry too. After all, “junk mail” and “spam” are not terms of endearment.

But I, for one, view what we do in the circulation department as noble. Equal to what our vaunted cousins do in the editorial department (however distant they wish us to be).

Despite working in publishing, we get lousy press. So some years ago I created a series of four ads that made that point. I sent them to our trade magazines, Folio: and Circulation Management, and to our trade organizations, the MPA and the DMA. I invited each to put their own logos at the bottom, and adopt them as their house ads on a space-available basis. I was trying to barn raise an image campaign for professionals in circulation management. Hoping to improve our profile at least to the level of, say, “Big Tobacco.”

Well like a lot of things in direct mail, my idea garnered no response. So I offer these resurrected and updated orphans to you, dear reader. With the same invitation. Put your logo at the bottom and circulate them to those who may not think as highly of you as I do.

As I noted, I created four of these. This is the first (text below). I’ll post the other three in the weeks ahead.

**What’s a “back issue?” Ideas and opinions I had before I had a blog.

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[Text of ad above]

A free press? Without America’s circulation professionals, it’s a hollow promise indeed.

The constitution guarantees the right. But it’s circulation professionals who make it real. Circulation directors and list brokers, subscription agents and fulfillment managers, copywriters and graphic designers, printers and lettershops, telemarketers and postal workers—millions of dedicated Americans—who make it possible for news and views, issues and ideas to find and reach eager subscribers.

Readers who might not otherwise improve their homes with Family Handyman. Start a new business with Inc. Understand the world with The Economist. Fashion a personal style with GQ. Test their brainpower with Games. Or delight in any one of 19,419 other magazines, newsletters, and newspapers now in circulation.

Our tools are direct mail. Subscription cards. Coupon ads. Television. Radio. Email and the Internet. Employing everything from sweepstakes to free gifts, we’ve created a vibrant and ubiquitous, efficient and effective marketplace that’s as hard to ignore as it is vital to our economy.

Call it junk. Curse it as spam. Toss it away. Turn the page. Click delete. Send no money now—or ever if you so choose. But you ought to defend it. And the people who create it.

Circulation professionals. We promote a free press.

Here’s Psychotactics on the power of suspense in copy. And how it’s different than mystery.

Good envelope teasers are tried and true examples of this technique in subscription direct mail. But why stop there? Below is a letter I wrote recently for EBSCO — the reception room magazine service. It uses suspense to drive readers even deeper … onto the order form.

The technique is simple. Find a fun fact related to your offer. Tease it with a question. Promise to reveal the answer momentarily. Ask readers to guess. Frame possible answers around your benefits. And just when they can’t stand the suspense a second longer — hold back yet another moment more — wait for it — and then …

The secret to suspense that succeeds is to take readers to a razor’s edge of knowing. And once there, strike a harrowing and compelling balance between frustration and fulfillment.

It’s not as hard as you may think. The idea is to do in copy what we all do in relationships when we tease: Attract attention. Build interest. And develop so much desire, you can perform the ultimate marketing jujitsu: Prospects so eager to end the suspense** they literally beg you to close the deal — by becoming buyers.

** Did you guess the most popular? Here they are 9 to 1:
9. Consumer Reports
8. National Geographic
7. Southern Living
6. Newsweek
5. US Weekly
4. Better Homes & Gardens
3. Time
2. Sports Illustrated
1. Use the form below to send me your guess, and I’ll respond with the answer you’re looking for…

Wooden Horse worries it might be the long-feared über magazine that devours all others.

“With such a competitor on the horizon, how will regular publishers cope?”

Blogging Stocks conjures something bigger.

“While some bloggers have speculated that Google is interested in starting a magazine, I highly doubt that. The money isn’t in the paper, it’s in the data. Following this model, Google could end up with both Time and Money—as clients.”

Now the Royal Mail, the British postal service, which has been hit hard by the effects of the Internet, is trying to stimulate business by appealing to the senses. A new initiative, aimed at marketers who use the mail to reach potential consumers, encourages them to incorporate a scent, taste or sound in their snail mailings.

Got me to thinking. For some magazines, this idea sounds like it might make scents (right—sorry) in subscription direct mail. Certainly for Bon Appétit. Horticulture. And Rolling Stone.

Of course it’s easy to get carried away. I wouldn’t want a whiff of Sports Illustrated (well, maybe the swimsuit issue). Parenting might want to concentrate on the cooing and baby powder as opposed to the crying and the diapers. But I am eager for a taste of Money. Which O would say is the Scent of Woman.

There is a sound lesson in all of this. If you want your promotions to resonate on a deeper level, appeal to all five of a subscriber’s senses.

A satellite provides perspective–walking the surface provides insights, but low-level flight reveals both details AND how they fit together to form the whole. PagePlane attempts to see design and marketing from just above the treetops.

I’m late to this shout out, but PagePlane recently passed 300 posts in its first year. Two things makes this blog so effective. First, Chuck is a great designer. His stuff is clean, bold, assured, never esoteric or self-indulgent, always solution-focused and practical. Second, Chuck has a great eye and a generous spirit. Sharing what he sees with copious links, instructive tools, and templates worth buying and adopting.

As I have. Much of what I do here and in my client work is modeled on Chuck’s ideas. So congratulations to PagePlane. And personal thanks too. If you haven’t visited, conduct a quick flyover and become a frequent flier.

This list is a mash-up of questions I’ve gathered over the years — mostly from Denny Hatch’s Who’s Charging What, Dick Benson’s book, Ed Nash’s Direct Marketing Handbook as well as from my early training at Ogilvy and BBDO which, for me, proved to be great institutions of higher education in advertising and marketing.

List

A recent list history, or results by list for your last few mail campaigns, will quickly answer most of the list questions below.

• Which lists do you plan to test? Are the data cards available? If not, how would you describe your sources? Explain why you, or your brokers, chose them.

• Which are your best lists and why do they do well?—both anecdotally and empirically.

• Which lists have performed poorly in the past. Why did they fail to pull?—again both anecdotally and empirically.

• Have you established any specific list buying criteria? Things like recency and frequency, list size and universe, special selects, hot lists, compiled vs. mail order, etc.?

• Is your list broker available for consultation on the creative?

• Regardless of lists, describe in a few words the individual who is your main prospect (e.g., a working woman, 35 years old, with two pre-school children, rising executive, making $63,000, living in the suburbs, etc.)

• For online marketing, describe as fully as you can the nature of your e-mail lists and the individuals on them. Please provide of list of planned media/banner placements, if you can.

Offer

• What offer do you plan? Provide price and term. Is one of your objectives a new offer?

• Is this your winning (best-performing or control) offer? Do you plan to test this offer?

• Please provide results of recent offer tests.

• What is the objective of this offer? Sampling? Cash with orders? To maximize the quantity or the quality of the initial orders?

• Any premiums, gifts, one-time savings, introductory bonuses, deadlines, etc.?

• What are the payment options? Bill me? Check enclosed? Credit cards accepted?

• Do you offer a guarantee? A free trial? A sample period? Do you accept / wish to encourage orders by telephone, fax, internet?

Mailing History

• Do you have samples of your control mail package to examine?

• What—through testing, intuition or judgment—makes your control succeed?

• Can you provide a recent creative history (package formats / offers / prices / tests), as well as the corresponding profit / loss results history, along with samples of what was tested.

• What has been the focus of testing over the past few years? What has experience taught you makes success or failure?

Online Promotion History

• Can you provide your recent test history in online promotions? Particularly helpful are step-by-step results / analytics (clicks, convert-to-order and convert-to-paid rates), cost data, and corresponding profit / loss results, along with examples of the creative used.

Newsstand History

• What is your recent history of newsstand sales? Draw and sell through statistics per month. Characteristics of top-performing and under-performing agents / locations. Contractual obligations as they influence or limit other direct marketing efforts.

Agents | Other Media | Ancillary History

• Can you provide the results and examples of other promotions that contribute significantly to circulation sales? These might include inserts in syndicated mailings, agent sales, partner programs, etc.

Editorial Product

• Can you provide — either electronically or hard copies — several recent back issues?

• Have you bought a subscription in order to experience your title as a subscriber?

• Any special editorial or event coverage planned in up-coming editions?

• How does the editor describe your publication? How does your publisher or sales director describe your publication to advertisers? Is there a written editorial mission? Is there an SRDS editorial summary?

• In few words can you describe your publication as outsiders see it?

• What is the practical purpose of your publication?

• What are the main features of your publication?

• What are the main benefits of your publication?

• What makes it different, better, unique? Why is it indispensable, exclusive, special?

• Which publications compete for your subscribers? Why do they succeed when they do?

• How would a non-responder complete this sentence?—“The problem with (your publication) is…” If you answered, “the cost,” what’s the next most-likely objection? If you answered “time to read it,” what’s the next most-likely objection after that?

• What are your taboos? What must never be stated or promise?

• Can you provide your publication’s history … how it came to be? Any interesting company folklore, legends, personalities?

• Do you have any third-party testimonials that can be used? Any reader “love letters”? Any famous fans?

• Who or what should one read to learn more about your publication? What’s the best way to know and understand you?

Advertising, Research, and Competitive Information

• Can you provide a current media kit along with any other media mailings that help explain why advertisers choose your publication?

• Can you provide readership studies, market research, or other related materials that help reveal the hidden nature of your readers or market.

• Can you provide, at random, ten recent “expires” or “order cancels” — readers who let their subscription lapse or immediately canceled after initially ordering (typically via soft / free offers).

• Is it possible to talk or email these people informally?

• What or who is your main competition?—seen by your main prospect as well as you?

• What makes your competition effective?

• Is your main competition something other than another publication?

Guidelines, Standards and Practices

• Are there any terms, phrases or descriptions that are off-limits in your promotions?

• What is the quantity and production budget for your mail tests? For your online tests?

• What class of postage do you mail at?

• Are there any peculiarities in your offline or online ordering process?

• What is your project schedule? Who will be involved in the approval process? Who is the final decision maker?

• Anything else?

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.

Depending on their industry, I’m sure others here at the narrowest tip of the long tail — who like me are also chatting it up — are saying, “substitute ‘architecture’ for ‘Hollywood’ … or ‘brokerages’ for ’studios’ … or ‘gallery owners’ for ‘distributors’ …”

For those of us in the business of creating, launching, and advancing new magazines, I’d simply say, imagine your role in this major motion picture. Indeed write yourself a star turn. After all, it’s your screenplay, your production, your magazine — you are up in one — and it’s coming soon to a publisher near you.

This award-winning cover — which broke the “green is death on the newsstand” rule — was the subject of a fascinating Slate article, “It Ain’t Easy Being Green,” by Julia Turner.

It’s no secret to those of us in circulation that the covers that win design awards hardly ever win the most buyers at newsstands. Which raises a couple of questions. What works on newsstands? And who should create and control the covers — editors or circulation directors?

The answers vary by degree and by publisher. And you can be sure the people at Rodale have a very different view than the people at Condé Nast

.

Several years ago, Folio: asked for my views about these questions for “The 3-Second Seduction” — a cover story on covers. Turned out my take was even more controversial than Harper’s Bazaar’s now legendary green cover.

See what you think. You may never look at a newsstand the same way again.

**What’s a “back issue?” Ideas and opinions I had before I had a blog.

Chris Anderson of “Long Tail” fame offers a couple of thoughts on the value of “FREE!” He learns from Scott Adams, it’s a more complicated equation than you might think. And he discusses with Shai Agassi how changing prices can dramatically shift and even obscure the perception of what’s free, what’s expensive, what you’re buying, and what you’re paying for. Get ready for your “FREE!” car…