Your job description is probably phony!

Being revenue-orientated is top of the marketing remit, but is usually, for some strange reason, way down on the list on the job description – if it’s there at all. Here’s a recent job description I came across (most of these ads look the same):

Marketing Executive: Media / publishing / events
If you are an ambitious, dynamic marketer with experience of or an interest in conference marketing, then we would like to hear from you! We have a vacancy within the conferences division of one of the world’s most successful B2B media and publishing companies, and we are looking for candidates who really stand out from the crowd. This is an exciting time to join the business, with a whole new conferences division being developed – this has attracted some of the best people in the business, so this is a fantastic opportunity to learn from the experts! With ambitious growth plans over the next few years, there will be plenty of training and progression opportunities for the right candidate.

What we need from you:

  • Strong direct marketing experience, preferably in an events or conferences environment
  • Exposure to, and an interest in, online marketing techniques
  • Experience using integrated marketing channels
  • Excellent numerical and analytical skills
  • Experience in a B2B environment advantageous
  • a genuine interest in a career within the conferences / events sector

What about money?
There is nothing there about bringing in money or orders for the company. But guess what? Revenue-earning is top of the list for company bosses and shareholders, even more so during a recession! That job description diverts the applicant away from the real reason the media company is advertising. Don’t be lulled by the phony description!

Remember – when things get tough, loyalty always seems to go up, but never down the company hierarchy.

There are three areas where you and your boss’s interests will always coincide: money, money and money. No matter what your job description says, when it comes down to it, revenue and cash-flow are the two main measurements of your and your company’s success. They will shape and decide your career prospects.

In the business of direct marketing, making more money for your company is the first step to genuine entrepreneurship and business leadership.

Click here for revenue-building marketing advice

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Not another paywall survey from PaidContent!?

I suppose with a name like paidContent:uk, you have to say something about The Times newspaper’s attempts to make their paywall profitable.

But to take a survey?! This one is no use whatsoever. And they’ve even got their maths wrong!

According to the paidContent:uk survey, 4% of direct visitors say they are ‘extremely likely to pay’ £2 a week to access The Times website.

They extrapolate that figure to make 253,186 people, bringing in a ‘monthly revenue of ‘£2,025,488’.

I have two points about this paidContent baloney:

1. Where did the guys at paidContent:uk learn their maths? As any competent business person will tell you, you don’t multiply weekly revenue by four to get the monthly income. The weekly income comes to £2,194,278 (not £2,025,488) a month because there are not 48 weeks in a year but 52. You divide annual revenue by 12 to get your monthly figure.

I hope the guys at paidContent:uk aren’t pissed off with me for pointing out their poor homework. I’m only trying to be helpful: I have just found an extra £168,790 they didn’t know The Times had. Someone should be pleased..

2. You cannot survey people to see what they will pay because what people say bears no relation whatsoever to what they do. And anyway, to estimate a 2% response to The Times paywall offer is the kind of forecasting that would annoy the hell out of anyone in direct marketing. It’s a pointless exercise, no matter how many charts paidContent:uk produce.

Paywall success is all in the proposition
Lots of things go into a promotion and the most important of these is the proposition – what you are offering the prospect to part with his cash.

The only way to forecast what response The Times is likely to achieve from a proposition or offer is to run a test and see what dosh comes in. Those are the only results that count, and the only thing that Murdoch will be looking at. If I were him, I would have the daily figure ticking on the corner of my screen (in the old days, I would be in the mailroom every morning counting the cheques coming in).

The fact is, tiny things can affect response to a proposition. Do you run a picture of the editor with your promotional message? Or do you run pictures of the top Times columnists? Do you offer a monthly, weekly, daily or annual payment? Is payment by credit card or direct debit? Do you give a free trial? If so, how long should it be: 30 days? 90 days? A week? What incentives should you include in the offer? How long should the message be? What typeface, what size headline, which font? Should you send out a long email message, or a designer template? Should your call to action be a text link to your order page or a button graphic? Should the proposition be:

In this business, seemingly tiny things affect response. (This makes fascinating dinner party conversation, by the way.) As those who have received our recent SubscriptionsStrategy.co.uk email marketing report will know, just changing the length of your message can lift response by 430%..

There was a joke up there somewhere. But that uplift in response is the difference between earning £2.19 million a month and £9.42 million a month. Not funny at all.

Someone should send the guys at paidcontent.co.uk this quote from Claude Hopkins, from his book Scientific Advertising. It was published in 1923 and it is still relevant today:

“ ... advertising is traced down to the fraction of a penny. The cost per reply and cost per dollar of sale show up with utter exactness. One ad is compared with another, one method with another. Headlines, settings, sizes, arguments and pictures are compared. To reduce the cost of results even one per cent means much in some mail order advertising.”

So no more silly surveys please!

Paid Content survey for The Times paywall

Text link vs button

Do buttons get clicked more than text links?

Here’s a case study carried out by Aweber, providers of email marketing software such as autoresponder services.

Aweber created the button shown above and ran it against a simple text version: read more >>

The test shows just the sort of information you can learn about your email marketing campaigns by conducting split tests.

The split test replaced the text links used to drive people to the Aweber blog with the button.

Previous testing on the website had shown that in many cases, buttons make better calls to action than text links do. So the same might hold true for email.

So, Aweber created a button-shaped image with the words “Read More” stamped on it:

They then created A/B split tests for blog broadcasts, inserted this image into one version as the call to action (to read the full post on the blog) and continued to use text links in the other version as they had before.

The emails were otherwise identical — with subject lines, sending dates/times and templates the same for each version.

Here are the surprising results of the test:

Text link vs designer button

Click here to access hundreds of other revenue-boosting case studies at our Marketing Best Practice website:

Marketing Best Practice case studies

Subscription marketing tips

We all know how difficult it is to get a publisher to tell us what’s working – that’s why it’s worth paying conference fees and taking a notepad.

I have stopped attending many conferences because they are too formal: there is usually some chap on the stage with slides and a fixed presentation and not much inside information is delivered. Audience questions are limited in scope and time. Answers are usually cagey.

But some conferences are different, and here are a couple of tips I can pass on from a conference I recently attended. The whole list of tips is published in the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter and they are worth the subscription price alone!

Example tips
These examples were delivered at the end of the conference as ‘bullet points’. Some delegates may have missed their significance, or may forget the advice, so it’s worth getting the lot and putting them on your office wall. Business can only benefit.

1. What’s the best day / hour to send out an email campaign? An Ebay survey found it’s 2.00 pm Tuesday.

Comment: timing is important because if you are running a test promotion, remember you need to use your best copy, best offer, best list, and despatch your email on the best day and at the best time. Otherwise, if your promotion fails, you just won’t know why. If you do your best, and need to make your promotion more profitable before rolling out the test to your complete list, it’s a simple process to make adjustments once those initial test results are in. This advice applies to your direct mail efforts too.

2. How many times can you re-use an email? If your email promotion works, re-mail it right away. It will work up to three times.

Comment: with traditional direct mail, the reason we don’t immediately re-mail a successful pack is because of the cost. Although it may work well on it’s first outing, response will drop by around 50% if you mail it out to the same people within 30 days. Because of print and production costs, this usually means your ROI (Return on Investment) will be too low to make it worthwhile. With email promotions, those print and production costs don’t apply. Time and trouble represent most of your outgoings. Once you know all this, you will notice how other publishers disguise those re-mailed emails!

Usually, once an email has been sent out a few times, it’s best to give it a rest for a month or two.

Most of the publishing colleagues I talk to are at the hard edge of marketing – their performance is measured on profits and how much new business comes in. They range from millionaire business owners through to new junior marketers – all wanting to pick up important information on what’s working in today’s tough market.

Subscriptions Strategy free trial

Discount marketing goes nowhere!

Yes, discount marketing goes nowhere! The major magazine brands have, alas, been giving discounts and free trials for years, through the biggest and longest boom period in the UK’s history.

Now their wheels are stuck in this recessionary quagmire because the magazines can’t discount any further. Scarily for them, they have nowhere to go now, except to sell benefits and re-build their brands.

Which, up to now, they seem incapable of doing. But all it takes is a little bit of copy.

And that’s the problem: bad copy! If you want to see the kind of bad copy publishers and others in the industry come up with, see the examples by clicking on the link below.

(These examples of bad copy are the most popular pages on the Subscriptions Strategy website. Why is that?):

Bad copy

Is any publisher making social media work?

Is any publisher making money from social media? Here is a list of the most popular platforms:

*Facebook

*YouTube

*LinkedIn

*Twitter

*MySpace

*Blogs

Social media is great for consumer contact
There is no doubt social media is an enormous advertising platform. But who is making it work? Companies like Dell and Starbucks have raised awareness of their products and have changed their strategies and products according to the feedback they receive. It works well for them.

Social media is great for targeting
Companies can target individuals based upon specific interests shared on social media. For example, if an individual watches a YouTube video about jogging, a running shoe company can place an ad near it. Those that are gadget-minded will get ads for new mobile phones and netbooks etc. Social media has allowed advertisers to refine ad nets extremely narrowly because it’s such a massive platform.

But is social media great for publishers?
Those that have read so far may have already picked up a clue to the answer. In the paragraph above we said: “Dell and Starbucks have raised awareness of their products”.

So social media is great for awareness advertising. But to our knowledge, no publisher has yet made money from advertising subscriptions, or website memberships. These, of course, are sold through direct marketing, not by awareness ads. Awareness advertising response is difficult to measure.

Conversely, you know almost immediately if your direct marketing promotion is working: you start receiving money.

This is not to say social media will never work for publishers. It’s just that no publisher has yet demonstrated the ability to target prospects through social media and convert significant numbers into paid subscribers. I don’t think any have tried!

Social media looks good because it’s free. But:

“If it’s free it’s not worth anything”.

(That’s my quote by the way).

Here’s another quote from Drayton Bird, author of Commonsense Direct Marketing:

“Put no faith in easy answers …. which reminds me of all the ballyhoo I have heard over the years about CRM, Social Networks, rebranding and other miracle solutions”.

Facebook members are asked for their ‘likes and interests’ so it should be possible to successfully advertise specialist titles alongside golfers, athletes and fishing enthusiasts. I have see twitter used to advertise events such as publishing conferences. But so far, no publisher has claimed financial success with social media.

Peter Hobday
hobday@subscriptionsStrategy.co.uk

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Reader response

“Peter – I think social media puts a lot of businesses in a Catch 22 situation. It’s not worth doing unless you do it really well, and you can’t do it really well unless you put the time and resources into it, but you can’t do that unless you know it’s going to work. As a result, they end up doing it half heartedly, don’t get any good results and wonder why.
Another thing to consider is that our success (not revenue, I grant you) is measured in different ways now; web hits, newsletter sign up etc. While these don’t necessarily instantly drive sales, this is where our advertising now takes place. Driving numbers in these areas is what is expected of us.
Also by guiding more people to your website (provided it’s any good) people should, in time, convert to subscribing (also provided you don’t give away too much for free!).
I think the real problem is trackability, we need to find ways of measuring the customer’s journey from social media engagement to subscribing.
Everything’s too disparate at the moment. We need someone to come up with a product that will link everything together and match online users to their real life selves, enabling us to track conversion rates. If only I was a programmer…” Kristin Crilly,
Crafts Council

Membership marketing, paywalls and the Times


This post looks at what is happening to the traditional publishing model, and how subscriptions and membership marketing are now the focus of so many companies using the Internet.

Below, we list 16 great ways to monetise your online members, subscribers and prospects. For those who don’t believe Rupert Murdoch can make his Times / Sunday Times paywall work, read on.

If others have done it (and they have), so can he. The fact that his platform is news is irrelevant. News is just a feature of what the Times offers. The BENEFITSof membership are what sells a subscription and the more the better.

How membership marketing works

Some good reasons why membership and subscription marketing are now seen as the Holy Grail:

1. The traditional publishing model is broken
2. Direct marketing through the Internet is a low-cost activity
3. Almost every business now has, or needs, a website
4. The Internet is a highly effective way of building a prospect, membership or subscriber list
5. Membership marketing is a proven way to profitability

The advantages of membership marketing

Many industries are using the advantages of membership marketing.

While publishers were early adopters of the membership or subscription business model, many new industries, including investment, property, software, online gaming, and online music/video are discovering the important advantages that the membership model, both free and paid for, offers.

The items listed above can all be wrapped up into a great benefit package – and with the right approach successfully offered to readers of newspapers such as the Times and Sunday Times.

Membership website advantages include:

• More stable revenue stream – Good membership programs see
renewal rates of 75 percent or better. This means that 75 percent of next year’s revenue is already identified

• Improved sales with targeted offers – memberships can be easily bundled together to create different product offers for different target markets

• Improve product adoption – memberships and subscriptions spread the cost. The lower perceived product cost increases product trials

• Better upsell/cross sell opportunities – each membership or subscription transaction is an opportunity to build the customer’s profile, increase confidence in the supplier and upsell/cross-sell other products

• Increased customer retention – members or subscribers make a purchase decision only once. After that, he or she is just confirming a decision already made

• Lower customer retention costs – Marketing, sales, and collection efforts are greatly reduced when a membership is renewed

Online membership and subscription products and services are very popular indeed. In fact recent estimates indicate that nearly 45,000 membership products or services are being marketed online, and there are more than 120 million members or subscribers to online products and services in the United States alone.

Membership-based revenue model businesses offering content have very good prospects and their revenues estimates are they account for greater than 20% of all web revenues (it was that figure in 2005).

Membership website strategy: 16 extra benefits

Membership products and services allow members and subscribers to have access to up to 16 extra benefits in the form of online content. Most of these aren’t applicable to traditional print publications, but work very well online.

Any publisher who is wondering how to successfully monetise their membership, subscriber or prospect list should pick some of these:

• Membership communities,
• Newsletters
• Ezines
• Email updates
• Discounts for events, products and entrance fees
• Dynamic content
• Digital content
• Downloads and files
• Pictures and graphics
• Audio and music
• Electronic reports
• Film and video
• Live news feed
• Software and Updates
• Application servers
• Expert advice

(More to come on membership marketing….)

hobday@subscriptionsStrategy.co.uk

Subscription marketing response figures

Response comparisons for email – ads – inserts – mailings

Email marketing promotions: response rates
What kind of response can you can expect to a series of emails to your prospects. What will the creative work cost?

These are the figures for an email marketing promotion for a consumer website which has 200,000 registered, unpaid members.

Response to email marketing promotion offering a risk-free trial is 0.23%. After the risk-free trial, the subscriber pays £60 by automatically renewing credit card.

Response is 70% pay-through conversion following the trial period.

Email marketing revenue figures

Email marketing expenditure figures

Profit: £16,920

(Broadcast costs and staff time are included in general company overheads, and not within the expenditure figures above)

Converting free publications to paid-for
There are lots of publishers currently thinking of converting B2B and other free specialist titles to paid-for subscription.

I have given two examples of results achieved for specialist free titles previously totally reliant on advertising revenue.

The first title is distributed mostly to individuals working in Govt departments in the UK and overseas. The second is sent to both public and private sector readers, central and local government departments, NGOs, charities and other agencies.

Similar results have been obtained in various B2B markets. Our experience is that if the magazine content also appears on the website free of charge, it has no effect on the response to our promotions.

These figures are based on creative copy and strategy produced by a professional copywriter / subscriptions consultant (i.e. not in-house work):

Government sector free title
In the first example the publisher commissioned a series of emails to build a paid-for subscriber list to run alongside his free list.

Response figures for email conversions

Here are the figures for this specialist magazine:

Profit: £26,180

In the example above initial price tests found that new subscribers would pay £77 for a quarterly publication, where subs were previously sold for £50 a year.

Converting free magazine readers to subscription
In this example, we sent out a series of conversion letters to all free magazine readers and prospects announcing the subscription rates. Here are the figures:

The emails can be re-vamped and the series extended to continue to collect more paid-for subscriptions, and the cost amortised over, say, five years.

General response rates

The results of direct marketing tests I have seen over the years have been pretty consistent, and are laid out below. These figures for email, advertisement, insert and direct mail promotions assume the creative work and strategy – the offer, concept and design – are created by a professional subscriptions copywriter.

I have used a magazine advertisement as a basis for this comparison, with the advertisement pulling one reply every thousand readers. So for every 10,000 readers, the response to a good ad would be 10, which is 0.1%.

That means an effective ad in a magazine like Cosmopolitan, which has a circulation of 321,475 in the UK and Ireland, would receive around 321 orders to a subscriptions advertisement.

Taking that response level as a base, you can see what happens to response when the creative work is re-vamped to appear in the various different formats.

Promotion response comparisons

So you can see that if you run a loose insert using the same kind of creative as your advertisement, the insert will pull in three times the response. A mail shot will pull in ten times more response than an advertisement.

Variables
Things that will affect response significantly are:

1. Age and quality of list

2. Offer

3. Concept (message, headline, USP)

4. Email open-rate

5. Email subject line

6. New launch

7. Repetition of promotion (a good email resent after three of four days will give half the response)

8. Day and date of despatch

9. Disposition (mood) of target audience

Contact and queries for quotes:

hobday@subscriptionsstrategy.co.uk

What's bugging the subscriptions marketers?

The marketers I speak to always complain of the same two things:

1. No money for researching readers / markets

2. Marketing revenue is not channeled back into marketing

As these two factors are central to running an effective publishing company, the marketing directors involved probably find it impossible to help their company grow.

Historically, the publishing focus has mainly been on editorial and advertising income:

Everyone agrees that has changed – advertising no longer makes the money it did.

Now, revenue is measured by marketing success. So editors and marketing directors now have similar responsibilities: to reach and monetize prospects on whatever platform works best.

Editors must also be marketers and a marketers job is to maximize revenue. But marketers of all kinds are being held back!

What’s this to do with the price of fish?
Marketers in publishing are usually restricted by fixed budgets, low-level staffing and seniority, and their work and motivation are stifled by the kind of old-school financial models that existed pre-Internet.

For many, ‘marketing’ means sending out a promotion, when it should mean ‘building and monetizing an audience in the most cost-effective way possible.’

Now to the fish question:

If you are selling fish you would catch the fish yourself to cut out the middle man. You would rent a low-cost retail outlet and run a seafood restaurant next door. Your customers could choose their fish, see it cooked, then enjoy their meal. In a couple of moves you have doubled your audience to include both retail shoppers and people who enjoy a meal out. Your investment in the boat has reduced costs, and the restaurant outlet has increased your audience and brought in high-end revenue.

Marketers cannot maximize company revenue unless they are autonomous and their budgets are open-ended: if you are catching fish, then you should be able to keep fishing. If your tests uncover a new, profitable audience, then you should be free to go after it.

Subscription marketing: renewals

The information on this website is free. We have three levels of information we give out, and this website information is included in the first category below:

I will give you an idea of the information we provide. I have just come across a renewal form from AARP – that’s the American Association of Retired People. At first look the AARP appears to break a forbidden rule when marketing renewals:

‘Never offer a discount within your subscriptions renewal series’

Here is the AARP’s headline from their renewal letter:

‘Special Offer – Reduced rates when you renew today’

But what the AARP marketers are doing is very clever – signing up 5 and 3 year memberships as well as the standard one year membership. How do they do this without breaking the golden rule?

Well, I don’t post this kind of creative marketing information on the website because it falls into the ‘subscriptions reports and newsletter’ paid-for information category.

Or if you would like me to do some copywriting to adapt the tactic to bring in multiple-year subscriptions for your website, portal or publication, that would come under the ‘subscription renewals consultancy’ category, paid by the day (or half day). That kind of creative work costs more because your publishing company makes lots more publishing profits. And you can’t get that for free.

But on this occasion, I will break my own ‘golden rule’ and send you a scan of this excellent piece of creative subscriptions renewal work. Contact me to get your pdf at:

hobday@subscriptionsStrategy.co.uk

There is no obligation. I will leave any follow-up to you.

Note
The AARP is one of the largest membership organizations in the United States with more than 40 million members. The AARP’s marketing budget is also one of the largest in the USA and their subscriptions renewal methods are exhaustively tested before rolling out to their general membership.

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