Dealing with brokers: how to rent lists

Renting lists: here are some hot tips for maximising revenue and avoiding problems with your subscriptions marketing lists. Advice is provided by Mike Chantry of Hilite Direct Marketing, the leading list broker in the field.

Part one of this subscriptions marketing article is also on this website.

9. Multi buyer selections
Many mailers claim that a multi buyer is three times more likely to buy from you again than a single buyer. This also holds true for mailers mailing other company’s multi buyers. It’s usually worth paying a premium for this selection.

10. Response rates
If you get a 5% response when mailing your first test list that is NOT your response rate – it’s the very best you can hope to achieve. Your true response rate is the level at which you would still continue to mail.

11. Response comparison: ads – inserts – mailings
The results of over 20 test results I have seen over the years have been pretty consistent. If you get one reply to every one thousand subscribers to a particular magazine advertisement you would get three replies to a loose insert and 10 replies if you mailed them.

12. Discounts
If you ask for a price deal after a successful test, most list owners will know the list worked for you and you won’t get much of a discount. Ask your broker to negotiate the rollout discount before the test.

13. Test sample size
For a statistically valid test you can use a target of 50 responses per cell. If you are testing two cells on a certain list and you expect a 1% response, you would need to mail 5,000 of each cell to get the 50 replies. If you got 70 replies from one cell and only 50 from the other the test would be valid. However, if both test cells only gave you 15 replies the test would be invalid and you could safely say that both tests failed.

14. Roll out increase
Restrict your roll out to a maximum of five times the test. A successful test of 5,000 from a 155,000 list would indicate a limited rollout to 25,000 next time, followed by a mailing of 125,000.

15. Net names – when to use
When you merge two or more lists together you will find people who appear on one or more lists and you may pay for thousands of duplicate names. Most list owners will offer you an 85% net names deal on lists where you order 20,000 names or more and only charge you for the names you use.

16. Net names – when not to use
When your list orders are small you will have to pay for the names you don’t mail. However, as these names bought from at least two firms they are the multi buyers– the very best prospects. These people are often worth a remail in three or four week’s time. If you can vary the look of your mailing you could find that the remail segment is the most profitable.

17. Endorsed mailings
A letter from the list owner endorsing your product or services nearly always lifts response considerably – although it does depend on the relationship the list owner has with its customer list. The price charged for this service is around £50 per thousand, a share in the profits or a reciprocal deal. Care needs to be taken on the amount of times the list has been exposed to an endorsement.

18. Finding responsive names
The descriptions that list owners and managers use to promote their lists are essentially advertisements. It’s the background on the list that is often more revealing.

Discover how the people got on the list. Did they complete a free prize draw entry or have they parted with real money to buy a product or service similar or complementary to your own? In consumer mailings you will find it almost impossible to beat buyer lists, especially those generated by direct mail.

19. Reasons for being on a list
The more effort a person has made to get on the list the better the list will be:

A business book buyer is better than an exhibition attendee, who is better than a controlled circulation responder, who is better than a company director from a Companies House record, who is better than someone listed in a phone directory etc.

20. Publishers’ lists
Publishers mail their lists regularly so they should be very clean. Paid subscribers are better than non-paid and those recruited by direct mail are at the top of the pile.

21. Lifestyle lists
Mail order buyers nearly always beat compiled lifestyle lists. The data is expensive to accumulate so the temptation is for the data owner to rent it beyond its shelf life.

22. List sources
Apart from your favourite list broker, there are two major resources where you can look for lists: Lists and Data Sources (LADS) is a twice-yearly directory listing over 4,000 UK mailing lists and costs £90 an issue. List Link is a web based searchable list of lists costing £125 for three months. Go to www.list-link.co.uk for details.

23. List brokers
No qualifications are needed to become a broker and there are some dubious operators on the fringes of the industry. Membership of the Direct Marketing Association should be a minimum requirement when choosing a broker.

24. List owners
A good list of addresses could generate between £1 and £4 for each name in clear profit in the first 12 months. With these names a by-product of the main business, and with the very high margins, list rental can be a highly successful profit centre in any mail order company.

25. How to order lists
Work through these questions:
• List name
• Quantity
• Selections – geographical-sex-status (buyer etc)
• Exclusions – all past orders or just the last one?
• Flagging – always specify that you want the records flagged for possible future suppression
• Format – disk, tape or e-mail
• Layout – do you need title, initials/forename and surname on separate fields (always worth specifying along with postcode and country names on separate identifiable fields).
• Delivery date – most list owners need five days
• Delivery address
• Agreed price
• Net names deal if any (see note on net names)
• Payment terms if more than 30 days are required

26. Day of the week to mail
I have seen many tests conducted and have been unable to draw any conclusions as to the best day of the week to mail. There may be specific offers – such as gardening or DIY product mailings aimed at increasing store traffic – that may favour Saturday delivery, but most offers aren’t sensitive to the day of mailing.

27. Months of the year to mail
Here are my best guesses at how each month might perform for a non-seasonal product. 100% is the best response you hope to get:

January 100%
February 90%
March 90%
April 90%
May 85%
June 80%
July 80%
August 75%
September 95%
October 90%
November 75%
December 60% (unless in the Christmas gift market)

In the past most mailers avoided the summer holiday period. However, with people getting longer holidays from work, they can spread their holidays more. With fewer mailings in the summer, response goes up from the people who are at home.

Hilite Direct Marketing Services, Ash House, Ash Road, New Ash Green, Longfield, Kent DA3 8SA (tel: 01474 874848) Go here for the website for

Hilite Direct Marketing

Creating effective advertisements- part 2

Where are the benefits?

Most of the copy you see in an advertisement describes the features that appear in the publication, so it’s not benefit driven.

Offering a benefit lifts response. Here’s a headline that worked very well:

‘The London Review of Books costs less than a Sunday newspaper – but provides far more intellectual substance, lasting value and sheer enjoyment.’

An illustration within the advertisement re-enforced the headline: the six free issues of the London Review are shown and the caption describes the offer:

‘Six issues free and 50% off’

So the proposition is expressed immediately by the three most attention-grabbing elements in the promotion, which communicate, repeat and re-enforce the offer:

1. The headline: publication’s name, subject matter and offer

2. The illustration: six issues of the publication

3. The caption: six issues free and 50% discount

Creating copy
In an effective ad, nothing should interfere with the messages given in the headlines, body copy and coupon.

Crucially, there should be no important query or potential objection that you haven’t answered satisfactorily.

The coupon
The coupon summarises the proposition. You should always do this as many readers don’t read much of the copy – they jump to the coupon to see what the deal is.

The coupon must be as simple and easy to compete as possible. It should not, for example, be complicated by the small differences in overseas rates.

Check list
Here is a summary of the ingredients that go into an effective off-the-page advertisement:

1. An attractive proposition

2. The proposition clearly communicated in the headline

3. Body copy and coupon that re-enforces the proposition

4. All questions answered within the advertisement

Remember that once you have created an advertisement it is always necessary to read it again and again — and to show it to others asking:

“Is there any material question or objection to subscribing that I haven’t addressed?”

This query goes to the heart of why the publication itself is successful or not. It is the reverse of our first question of the editor or publisher:

“What is unique about this publication and why should I subscribe to it?”

Creating effective advertisements - part 1

Selling subscriptions is said to be the hardest of direct marketing tasks. If this is so, then using an off-the-page advertisement must be the hardest way to sell subscriptions.

The usual financial target of a subscription promotion is to get the cost of the advertisement back, but making an advertisement meet this target is very tough indeed.

That’s why most publishers don’t even bother.

Even a top advertising agency will find it an impossible task. No matter how clever the headline and copy it creates, response will be poor.

This is why, for many years whenever you saw a magazine marketing advertisement in the national press, it had the dual purpose of selling newstrade copies as well as subscriptions. That way, no-one knew how well it worked.

These days we see lots of magazine marketing advertisements — and they are all the same kind:

12 copies of Esquire for £12

Get She for just £1

Free copy of Men’s Health

And this brings us to the core of the problem and the solution to it. The reason we rarely saw magazine marketing advertisements was two fold:

1. Publishers were afraid of upsetting the newstrade

2. Magazine marketing advertisements are difficult to create

The advertisements we did see were usually created by an advertising agency. (There weren’t any subscriptions marketing specialists around then). They would always produce a clever and witty headline. And that is where they all went wrong.

A clever headline looks good to the agency. It looks good in the presentation to you – the client. And it looks good in the newspaper, surrounded by other clever headlines.

Unfortunately, the advertisement would never be good enough to sell many subscriptions. After an initial burst, the advertisements would never be seen again – a clear indication that they hadn’t worked (an effective advertisement can be used until it fails to cover its cost).

So what makes a great off-the-page advertisement:

How to construct a subscriptions advertisement
Here are some rules:

Communication is not what you say in the advertisement. It’s what the reader hears and understands. Your advertisement succeeds therefore only if the reader understands, and is interested in your message.

It follows from this that your proposition must be direct and simple: bold, bald and clear.

The reason for this is that an off-the-page advertisement is fighting against every other inch of copy in that newspaper for the reader’s attention.

But unlike the other stories and ‘awareness ads’ not only must you succeed in attracting the reader’s attention, you then have to get the reader to act – and put his money in the post!

Why you need a unique sales proposition
Selling magazines cheaply gets around the problem of creating effective headlines, which is where your proposition will appear.

Unless you give an immediate and clear reason for subscribing your prospect will turn the page and you’ve lost him.

The first question we should ask is:

“What is unique about this publication and why should the reader subscribe to it?”

If the editor or publisher cannot answer that question he is failing to communicate a key message. Most publications are launched with a unique formula, even when surrounded by similar looking competitors.

That sometimes forgotten formula will become the proposition that attracts your target audience.

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Subscriptions marketing: confidential information for sale

The Subscriptions Strategy newsletter publishes International case studies of ‘best practice’ marketing for the Internet, newsletters, books, websites and magazines etc.

In our particular niche we live or die by results. If a promotion doesn’t work, we lose money. If it works we record the results and use it on our own, and our clients’ websites and publications.

How you benefit by removing risk
As far as we are concerned, our testing means the difficult and costly part is over. As far as you are concerned, you can benefit from this tried and tested knowledge because the risk of failure has been removed and profitability is assured.

You can order sample issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter now on free trial:

Please click on one of the options below to place your trial order. You receive:

1. 20% off the full price of an annual 6-issue subscription to the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter (a saving of £40)

2. Subscription Marketing Workbook worth £66: 15 Subscriptions Marketing Innovations Every Publisher Should Know

3. Subscriptions marketing ‘rapid update’: three special issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter worth a total of £105 to bring you up to date with best practice marketing procedures for online and traditional subscription marketing

Option A: 7 day free trial by Paypal

Your first month’s payment is delayed by seven days, so if you cancel your trial subscription in the first week, you pay nothing. If you decide to continue using our marketing services, we’ll keep your subscription rate down to £12 / $20 a month for your first complete year.

Option B: Annual payment by credit card

You pay just £157, a total saving of £211. If the material does not come up to expectations, email, write or phone for a full refund. This guarantee is valid for the lifetime of your subscription and can be exercised at any time.

*Credit card: click here to order an annual subscription




Poor subscription marketing can kill


Creating a direct mail pack, home page and series of email promotions are all vital steps in subscriptions marketing today.

The big ‘announcement pack’ comes first and all other promotions follow – loose inserts, landing page, advertisements, billing series, emails, upgrade and renewal series etc.

To maximise response and profits the messages must all tie in. You are ‘branding’ your product and your readers will remember why they subscribed.

If your renewal series, for example, doesn’t bring back to mind why the subscriber decided to buy in the first place, then he’ll be more likely to lapse. That’s why discount-led promotions that don’t establish benefits are a short term solution. Readers are wise to early discounts that suddenly jump in price six months or even three months later. You can only count on inertia among customers when money is not a consideration.

The value of market leadership
If you are quick you can capture market leadership before the opposition knows what you are up to. Direct publishing is fast and discreet!

Becoming the market-leading publication is worth a great deal of kudos that translates directly into money. Advertisers and sponsors are very impressed by the top publication or website in its market. During a recession, weaker competitors fall away and fold, leaving the top two or three to bounce back even bigger when the upturn comes.

The need for speedy subscriptions marketing
One client of ours, launching into a very busy sector build 10,000 subscriptions in just 8 months using these techniques. Why the rush? The magazine needed more paid circulation to leap ahead of a rival about to distribute thousands of extra copies.

These days of financial hardship, the only way you can replace lost circulation and advertising revenue is to build subscriptions. But you have to move fast, before your competitors.

How long will the recession last?
Don’t wait too long to start marketing your publication in earnest. I am not an economist, accountant or financial journalist, so am much better qualified to forecast what is likely to happen next in this recession.

The law of probabilities indicates the recession will last around the same length of time as all the others I have been through. We all go down two years and then up two years. During most of that time banks limit or call in overdrafts and weak companies haven’t enough to pay suppliers and salaries – so they go under.

That’s why you have to move fast – which means creating valuable leads through Internet and mail marketing to convert into paid subscribers.

Make them respond quicker
There are tried and tested examples of effective consumer and business ‘urgency tactics’. Not only does this speed up response, but it increases response too.

The famous ‘free trial’ offer
This isn’t used much by publishers because they are not sure how they work. Get it right, however, and your mailroom will be overcome with orders. The best direct mail packs always use a free trial offer and no free trial offer is complete without a good billing series.

Billing series
You need a bespoke state-of-the-art seven part series from welcome letter upgrading your new subscriber, all the way to the ‘last chance’ notice. Today’s methods bring in more cash and large numbers of early-bird renewals.

A few useful lessons for us all

By Drayton Bird, Marketing Magazine

A couple of years ago, the top US direct mail writers were asked who they thought was the best of them all. A friend of mine won. He and his partner, who gets second billing, like many art directors in direct marketing – perhaps undeservedly – live in some splendour in Sonoma, California, never deigning to visit clients, who must needs come to them.

Apparently they charge up to $40,000 for a mailing depending on the results. They have a long waiting list. Hardly surprising because in a survey of America’s most successful mailings – those that beat all they were tested against over the longest period – they again came top. They have even been featured on the cover of the New York Times Sunday magazine.

This remarkable duo, like many leading U.S. freelancers, specialise in selling magazine subscriptions, probably the hardest of direct mail tasks. It gives you a complete (often bruising) education which, with a little imagination, you can apply to just about anything. That’s why, whatever your business, I recommend a newsletter called ‘Subscriptions Strategy’.

(Incidentally, most UK publishers won’t pay for decent work and with a few exceptions – like The Reader’s Digest, The Economist and Which? – don’t recognise it when they see it. This publication will, I hope, educate the publishing ignoramus.)

My criterion for a newsletter is simple: does what you learn repay the cost, this one qualifies easily. Every issue carries at least one article of value to most businesses. For instance: how to find out if a mailing list will work – before you mail it; which offers work best; how to reduce bad debt (vital as money gets harder to make, and customers less honest); how to profit from your mailing list; and how to work out the value of a customer.

Each issue analyses at least one mailing or ad. Most agency writers would learn much from these pieces. There are good inside stories, too, such as interviews with two publishers, Sylvester Stein, of Running and other magazines; and John Gomes of Penny Share Guide and Competitors Companion.

Sylvester Stein is extremely clever. Few have heard of him, yet he has made millions out of publishing first, newsletters and later, magazines. I bought the Business Ideas Letter from him twenty six years ago, thus acquiring a costly education. John Gomes once pumped me over lunch to find out what I had learned from that experience about newsletters. If he had listened to me carefully he wouldn’t have done nearly as well as he has: he must be dreadfully rich now.

Perhaps the most interesting story concerns a company I have worked for a little and admire greatly: computer publishers Ziff Davis, How did they build a very successful business, though late into a market dominated by three competitors?

The answer is satisfying in view of what I wrote above: they went for subscribers, ignoring the received wisdom (ie, stupidity) that the British don’t subscribe. That is what Subscription Strategy tells; what is not mentioned is how they corset their advertisers – another thing most publishers could learn from.

——————————————————————————————————————

Subscriptions marketing: confidential information for sale

The Subscriptions Strategy newsletter publishes International case studies of ‘best practice’ marketing for the Internet, newsletters, books, websites and magazines etc.

In our particular niche we live or die by results. If a promotion doesn’t work, we lose money. If it works we record the results and use it on our own, and our clients’ websites and publications.

How you benefit by removing risk
As far as we are concerned, our testing means the difficult and costly part is over. As far as you are concerned, you can benefit from this tried and tested knowledge because the risk of failure has been removed and profitability is assured.

You can order sample issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter now on free trial:

Please click on one of the options below to place your trial order. You receive:

1. 20% off the full price of an annual 6-issue subscription to the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter (a saving of £40)

2. Subscription Marketing Workbook worth £66: 15 Subscriptions Marketing Innovations Every Publisher Should Know

3. Subscriptions marketing ‘rapid update’: three special issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter worth a total of £105 to bring you up to date with best practice marketing procedures for online and traditional subscription marketing

Option A: 7 day free trial by Paypal

Your first month’s payment is delayed by seven days, so if you cancel your trial subscription in the first week, you pay nothing. If you decide to continue using our marketing services, we’ll keep your subscription rate down to £12 / $20 a month for your first complete year.

Option B: Annual payment by credit card

You pay just £157, a total saving of £211. If the material does not come up to expectations, email, write or phone for a full refund. This guarantee is valid for the lifetime of your subscription and can be exercised at any time.

*Credit card: click here to order an annual subscription




Online advertising - Haymarket and Google

‘Is there money out there? Then go and get it.’

The advertisement director at Haymarket Publishing was giving a typically blunt command to a classified advertisement sales person working on one of its consumer magazines.

Classified advertising, like marketing, is a backwater zone for most publishers – its potential is neither fully understood nor exploited. At Haymarket, however, the classified sales person well understands that his income and job depend on his performance – at Haymarket, all advertising is treated like classified.

Classified is a tough and exciting business – like direct marketing. If performance is lacking you go bust and get fired. How’s that for excitement? And that brings us to a company that has combined the two disciplines of direct marketing and classified advertising to become the greatest success story in publishing history: Google.

In issue number 72 of Subscriptions Strategy, we look at how Google exploits its advertisers – and how we publishers can exploit Google to create highly effective headlines, concepts and copy. Oh – and build hot lists too.

How publishers view Google
When publishers discuss Google, they are mostly concerned with search engine optimisation and copyright issues. They see Google as a way of distributing and publicising their web offerings, or as a competitor. Those publishers are missing the point.

Because Google’s operation is digital and originates outside mainstream publishing, many publishers don’t realise that Google is a publisher just like themselves, and has pulled off the greatest classified advertising success story in history.

Luckily, we publishers can exploit that success for our own ends.

How Google got rich
The founders of Google became absurdly rich not just by inventing a different kind of search engine (others have done that and remain struggling) but also by exploiting the effectiveness and earnings potential of classified advertising. Any of the other search engines could have done the same, but didn’t. Likewise, any publisher could have done the same, but didn’t.

So what does Google do that others don’t?

It is both fascinating and puzzling to discover how novel Google’s approach is. Fascinating (to me, anyway) because it’s clear there are mountains of money to be earned through classified advertising – and puzzling because the majority of publishers just don’t get it.

Classified advertising sales
For those who don’t know, classified advertising sales (generally lineage and smaller ads bundled into subject categories) are usually consigned by traditional publishers to junior and ‘hard-nosed’ sales staff and managers. Classified is treated either as a training ground or somewhere to put people who can sell but don’t quite belong in the world of major advertising agencies and clients. When a new launch of a consumer title is announced, you won’t hear much talk of classified revenue. It’s just not seen as an important or mainstream field to work in.

The exception to the rule among big consumer publishers is the Guardian newspaper, where the managing director is appointed from a classified advertising background. Perhaps that is because the newspaper began as a regional publication in Manchester where classified advertising was always a major source of revenue. Whatever the reason, it’s why the Guardian makes so much money while other big media owners don’t.

The equivalent in the world of traditional advertising would be if the Independent newspaper began to carry lineage and other classified ads in the borders of editorial pages and developed editorial to match demand. The newspaper would suddenly break into enormous profit and overtake the Guardian. Instead, the Independent loses an estimated £10m a year.

To read the whole article, click here for your free trial: Subscriptions Strategy free trial

How much does a subscriptions copywriter cost?

A subscriptions marketing copywriter delivers far more than just copy. His marketing advice can include techniques for:

Too much to do – too little time
Often, a business owner hasn’t the time or experience to do all these things. They are, after all, specialised marketing areas. People who work flat-out every day on a business can become out of touch with what new prospects want to hear. It’s only a matter of time before that happens …

An editor, for example, through day-to-day pressure, may not find the time to talk regularly to readers and investigate changes in what they want to read.

A publisher may not have time to carry out regular market testing among prospects and existing customers: only market-testing will reveal what people are actually willing to part with money for (this is where price testing really pays off.)

A managing director may be a great ideas person, a great administrator, a great ‘people person’ or a great marketer, but rarely all of them.

This is why most successful companies in any market, employ outside marketing and copywriting people – to keep fresh and ahead of the field. Unlike with the usual kind of ‘consultant’, it is clear as soon as the response comes in what kind of value your marketing copywriter can bring to your business. Those cheques, direct debits and credit card orders tell their own story.

Freelance subscriptions marketers see more
Remember – a freelance subscriptions marketing expert knows better than most what is pulling the most reponse in the market today. He works across many disciplines and is better placed to see what’s working. You can profit from that.

Here are some figures from a successful website:

Email promotion revenue

This is the response achieved from an subscriptions marketing email message sent out to new registrants:

Website receives 500,000 visitors a month

5% of visitors register = 25,000

50% of registrants open the first email promotion: 12,500

1.45% of registrants who open the email buy a subscription = 181

181 @ $70 for the annual subscription = $12,688 a month

Total annual revenue: $152,250

Supposing the subscription marketing promotion pulls half the response?

The email promotion response figures shown above are for copy created by an expert freelance subscription copywriter.

Let’s look at what happens if the promotional email you send out to your new prospects pulls in half the response, 90 subs.

This is a more typical figure and is around what a good in-house copywriter will achieve. The annual revenue will drop to:

$75,600

So you with your best in-house effort, you have $75,600 less annual revenue. Now I will turn our original question “How much does a copywriter cost” on its head:

How much would you pay an expert subscription copywriter to create copy that brings in an extra $75,600 a year?

——————————————————————————————————————

Subscriptions marketing: confidential information for sale

The Subscriptions Strategy newsletter publishes International case studies of ‘best practice’ marketing for the Internet, newsletters, books, websites and magazines etc.

In our particular niche we live or die by results. If a promotion doesn’t work, we lose money. If it works we record the results and use it on our own, and our clients’ websites and publications.

How you benefit by removing risk
As far as we are concerned, our testing means the difficult and costly part is over. As far as you are concerned, you can benefit from this tried and tested knowledge because the risk of failure has been removed and profitability is assured.

You can order sample issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter now on free trial:

Please click on one of the options below to place your trial order. You receive:

1. 20% off the full price of an annual 6-issue subscription to the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter (a saving of £40)

2. Subscription Marketing Workbook worth £66: 15 Subscriptions Marketing Innovations Every Publisher Should Know

3. Subscriptions marketing ‘rapid update’: three special issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter worth a total of £105 to bring you up to date with best practice marketing procedures for online and traditional subscription marketing

Option A: 7 day free trial by Paypal

Your first month’s payment is delayed by seven days, so if you cancel your trial subscription in the first week, you pay nothing. If you decide to continue using our marketing services, we’ll keep your subscription rate down to £12 / $20 a month for your first complete year.

Option B: Annual payment by credit card

You pay just £157, a total saving of £211. If the material does not come up to expectations, email, write or phone for a full refund. This guarantee is valid for the lifetime of your subscription and can be exercised at any time.

*Credit card: click here to order an annual subscription




.

Press Gazette closes: no marketing

There is a lot of affection in publishing for what has always been known as the UK Press Gazette.

More than one publisher thought he could buy-it-up-and-turn-it-around.

Media magazines, like the local press, have terminal problems

The Press Gazette couldn’t attract enough advertising. It was too focused on journalists and there just are not a lot of advertisements for them anymore.

That is one of the reasons, by the way, the other media magazine Media Week was launched all those years ago around 1984/5: ‘media’ had separated to become a huge budget area for companies – and advertising agencies were dividing to specialise. Tim Brooks, Media Week’s editor, and the publishers were ahead of their time, but unlike their close rivals Marketing Week, had overlooked and misunderstood an important revenue source: classified advertising. Publishers and editors often do.

The original idea for Media Week was being touted around to prospective investors three years earlier. The idea was to achieve a broad advertising base to take on The Guardian. The Guardian in the 80s was taking the Mickey by carrying ten or more pages of media vacancies supported by just one page of editorial. (These days, most newspapers write about the media but don’t carry much advertising. Talking to yourself isn’t going anywhere is it?).

Media Week also struggles. Like the Press Gazette, Media Week has become just a body, passed from one company to another, motivation to motivation, make-over to make-over. It has never been able to exist alone, never earned its own pay packet, always relying on others for support. Why? It’s a great idea, looks good too. But if we hark back to its parents we find neither Media Week nor Press Gazette were ever able to take their rightful place in the world.

Media Week failed because the young turks who originated the concept and touted the idea to prospective investors back in 1980 had inserted a ‘poison pill’ in their launch plans in case the idea was ‘borrowed’ and launched without them by a prospective investor. Which it was.

Ripped from its natural parents, Media Week became a foster child. And like Press Gazette, isolated from proper medical (marketing) attention.

Press Gazette moved parents regularly: Timothy Benn; Maclean Hunter; Emap; Quantum; Piers Morgan/ Matthew Freud; Wilmington.

Press Gazette grew up damaged.

Wilmington Publishing and Press Gazette
Wilmington Publishing is an advertisement sales company. Subscriptions marketing is mostly outside its remit. That kind of marketing is a specialist task. To show what I mean, I have put a link below to the Press Gazette subscription marketing page. Whoever decided this page of copy would appear on the Press Gazette’s website was instrumental in the death of the magazine.

Press Gazette, Quantum and Piers Morgan
Before Wilmington, Press Gazette was owned by Quantum. Quantum’s marketing people were highly regarded and we carried a piece on their subscriptions marketing team and their promotions in issue 50 of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter.

Quantum sold Press Gazette in 2004/05 to a Piers Morgan consortium. The marketing supremo at Quantum tried to meet with those responsible for taking on the marketing and circulation functions but was ignored. So the Piers Morgan people were never given the database built up over many years to market the title.

The new owners didn’t even have the renewal series the previous team had written and knew nothing of the subs marketing planned. Apart from the list of existing subscribers, they didn’t bother to take anything.

This is why the medical analogy serves us well: Press Gazette came with its vital organs removed, so how was it supposed to survive?

For a product that was 90% dependent on circulation revenue, the new owners ignored the most important element. Pretty much the same can be said for the newstrade distribution, albeit this was very low.

Anecdotal evidence is that over a year after the sale a piece of subscription marketing went out offering to convert free copies into a discounted subscription. It appeared the new team didn’t know who they were sending free copies out to.

Investigating the murder of the Press Gazette
I would recommend sending for Lieutenant Columbo, Homicide, to investigate this death, but he has Alzheimer’s according to Hollywood gossip.

Press Gazette RIP

Why is Wilmington’s Press Gazette subscription page a killer? Because it offers a monthly magazine for £115 (around £10 a copy) and fails to explain why it is worth it. The only real attempt to sell the content is to claim the magazine contains editorial ‘not found on the free website’. That’s not a bad line at all – other magazines should use it – but it’s not enough to defeat the Alzheimer’s our patient the Press Gazette has now developed.

A magic cure was needed. More ‘selling the benefits’: the lifeblood – and restorative – of any marketing strategy.

The title needed a marketing doctor, but all it got was quack after quack.

So – a slow death brought on by ignorance. Watch this website for more of these announcements over 2009 as we wend our way through the headstones of recently dead publications and dig them up for a grisly autopsy.

Click here for more about Press Gazette from Journalism.co.uk

Click here for the Press Gazette subscription page. Try not to cry

Why copywriters must convey the truth

The actor, singer and copywriter have one thing in common: his words will never be accepted unless he conveys the truth.

Sinatra was a top singer and Oscar winning actor because people believed his words whether he spoke or sung them.

David Ogilvy was a top advertising copywriter because readers recognised the truth in his headlines. Ogilvy created perhaps the most famous headline in the car business:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”.

Ogilvy also said:

“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create”

Creating and selling are the two fundamentals of business. If you are not doing either of those you are merely a bystander.

Drayton Bird, the UK’s pre-eminent direct marketing expert puts it like this:

“The art of persuasion starts with saying something so clearly true that people believe what you say next”*

As Drayton Bird explains in his headline above, the words in a promotion must be believed or they won’t sell much product. You may sell a few here and there, but what usually happens is mediocre response and just enough sales, maybe, to keep business level.

And Peter Hobday, subscriptions marketing copywriter says:

“Truth is the world’s best motivator”

A great copywriter must do much better than keep business level. His words must make the client’s business richer.

Here then, is a link to an example of an ad created by Drayton Bird that made tons of money. Usually, no-one gets to know who created an advertisement – they are perhaps the only works of art that never have a signature. So save these files in case you ever want or need to learn how to sell ..

Drayton Bird advertisement

Here is a link to an advertisement created by Peter Hobday. It helped take Right Start magazine to the number three magazine for parents.

Peter Hobday’s Right Start advertisement

You can find more about Drayton Bird here:

Drayton Bird marketing tips

Drayton Bird blog

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Subscriptions marketing: confidential information for sale

The Subscriptions Strategy newsletter publishes International case studies of ‘best practice’ marketing for the Internet, newsletters, books, websites and magazines etc.

In our particular niche we live or die by results. If a promotion doesn’t work, we lose money. If it works we record the results and use it on our own, and our clients’ websites and publications.

How you benefit by removing risk
As far as we are concerned, our testing means the difficult and costly part is over. As far as you are concerned, you can benefit from this tried and tested knowledge because the risk of failure has been removed and profitability is assured.

You can order sample issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter now on free trial:

Please click on one of the options below to place your trial order. You receive:

1. 20% off the full price of an annual 6-issue subscription to the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter (a saving of £40)

2. Subscription Marketing Workbook worth £66: 15 Subscriptions Marketing Innovations Every Publisher Should Know

3. Subscriptions marketing ‘rapid update’: three special issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter worth a total of £105 to bring you up to date with best practice marketing procedures for online and traditional subscription marketing

Option A: 7 day free trial by Paypal

Your first month’s payment is delayed by seven days, so if you cancel your trial subscription in the first week, you pay nothing. If you decide to continue using our marketing services, we’ll keep your subscription rate down to £12 / $20 a month for your first complete year.

Option B: Annual payment by credit card

You pay just £157, a total saving of £211. If the material does not come up to expectations, email, write or phone for a full refund. This guarantee is valid for the lifetime of your subscription and can be exercised at any time.

*Credit card: click here to order an annual subscription




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Autoresponders - how they work

Subscription delivery

Many visitors to websites opt-in to receive a free newsletter.

The newsletter is delivered as a subscription by email. Most professional sites use a ‘sequential autoresponder’ to collect the leads and deliver the subscription.

The free subscription you offer is a series of newsletters written to build a relationship and promote your products. An autoresponder is one of the most effective subscription marketing tools a publisher can own because it removes the usual worry and stress over deadlines and copy.

You can create your copy whenever you feel ready. And there is no prescribed length – you decide how much to write. You also decide what to write about. You can file 10 articles in one day, go on holiday and write nothing until you get back. Or, like me, you do it the other way around: you go on holiday, write all your articles, come back and put them on the autoresponder.

The only problem with doing that is a laptop screen is difficult to read in the sunshine – all those pics of guys using a computer on the beach must be staged..

What – no editorial deadline?
If you have ever worked in a publishing environment, you will see all that as totally anarchistic! All those decisions and deadlines are laid out months in advance by the editor and must be followed to the letter!

Yes, an autoresponder has changed the way we work. You build a stronger, more lasting relationship with your customers and increase your income too with an autoresponder. Let’s take a look at how the subscription marketing process works and how to use the service to turn visitors into real prospects.

How autoresponders are used in subscription marketing
Many small-business owners are intimidated by the thought of putting out a regular newsletter simply because of the perceived effort required. They may be too busy to learn HTML.

The autoresponder has become an indispensable feature of the top marketing sites. They automatically collect and manage email lists and the messages you send out to the lists. This is an essential ingredient in the four steps to establishing a profitable, long-term business:

1. Attract quality prospects

2. Get to know them

3. Get them stay

4. Sell to them

Attracting quality prospects and establishing a relationship with them is, of course, a perquisite to all business.

Knowing your customers and how your product can help them is a fundamental early lesson in every sales training book or course.

You can read more about how an autoresponder is an essential element in converting people who register on your website in the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter.

Autoresponder conversion rates
The Subscriptions Strategy articles show some typical websites, how many visitors they receive, how many sign up for the free newsletter and how many of those convert to paying customers.

So it’s a three-part process.

That three-part process is fully automatic and is the basis of most successful websites today. Not all the websites we analyse are from publishers (unless you count every website as a ‘publication’). But all use subscription marketing to maintain constant contact.

Some sites are selling one-off items such as software, a book, report or information product. Some have just a one page ‘landing page’ or ‘squeeze page’ to capture the name and send follow up messages.

If you plan your website with subscriptions marketing and autoresponder coversions in mind, you can create dozens of landing pages, each with a product, quoting various prices and emphasising different benefits, all with the same purpose: maximising profits.

This follows one of the basic corner stones of good marketing: test to find the best price your market will bear.

You can learn more about how it’s done, with live examples, when you take out a free trial to our paid-for newsletter Subscriptions Strategy below.

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Subscriptions marketing: confidential information for sale

The Subscriptions Strategy newsletter publishes International case studies of ‘best practice’ subscription marketing for the Internet, newsletters, books, websites and magazines etc.

In our particular niche we live or die by results. If a promotion doesn’t work, we lose money. If it works we record the results and use it on our own, and our clients’ websites and publications.

How you benefit by removing risk
As far as we are concerned, the tests we run means the difficult and costly part is over. As far as you are concerned, you can benefit from this tried and tested knowledge because the risk of failure has been removed and profitability is assured.

You benefit directly from our costly market testing.

You can order sample issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter now on free trial:

Please click on one of the options below to place your trial order. You receive:

1. 20% off the full price of an annual 6-issue subscription to the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter (a saving of £40)

2. Subscription Marketing Workbook worth £66: 15 Subscriptions Marketing Innovations Every Publisher Should Know

3. Subscriptions marketing ‘rapid update’: three special issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter worth a total of £105 to bring you up to date with best practice marketing procedures for online and traditional subscription marketing

Option A: 7 day free trial by Paypal

Your first month’s payment is delayed by seven days, so if you cancel your trial subscription in the first week, you pay nothing. If you decide to continue using our marketing services, we’ll keep your subscription rate down to £12 / $20 a month for your first complete year.

Option B: Annual payment by credit card

You pay just £157, a total saving of £211. If the material does not come up to expectations, email, write or phone for a full refund. This guarantee is valid for the lifetime of your subscription and can be exercised at any time.

*Credit card: click here to order an annual subscription




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Lies publishers tell themselves to avoid marketing

Business plans for publishers are easy. You set out your projected revenue and estimate the costs to deliver your product.

But how did you arrive at your revenue estimates? What market testing have you done to support your income projections?

Publishers who put forward business plans without a marketing plan are usually rejected by company directors, seasoned investors, bankers, accountancy firms, other publishers and successful entrepreneurs. Backers need to see the figures.

But usually, the ‘marketing plan’ lacks the ‘real’ component: scientifically conducted research.

In other words, market-testing on real people.

Who will believe your figures?
The marketing plan must show where the money comes from, how much it costs to get it and how much people will pay for your product.

If you ‘estimate’ (make up) those figures no-one will believe them. People may like you and your team, and maybe you can get the money based on your experience and likability. But a good marketing plan needs more substance.

Marketing lies at the core of any business because unless you understand how people are likely to respond to your offer, and can show evidence, no professional is likely to be convinced.

How to be convincing
A simple measure of your believability is this: if it takes longer than around 120 seconds – two minutes – to prove your case, you’ll fail.

It’s is called the ‘elevator pitch’, because it’s about how long it takes to ride the elevator. Two minutes, and the benefactor or investor will make his mind up.

Without a tested marketing plan that shows how many and how much people are prepared to pay your forward projections are unlikely to be accepted.

The wrong kind of market research is no better than no research at all. The very best position is to have research results that you can take to the bank – and that means cheques, credit card and direct debit orders in your hand to show your prospective partners-in-business.

That is what real test-marketing gives you – handfuls of orders. Numbers that can be prudently extrapolated to show real revenue when you roll-out.

Test marketing – a real example
The best way to test if a proto-type vacuum cleaner will sell is to use it on the prospect’s carpet. The sale takes around 120 seconds. The proof of sale, the money, quickly follows.

No-one, not even your harshest critic, can argue with the hard cash that comes from sales.

Testing your market
Luckily, in our business of publishing we have methods of testing markets that are:

1. Inexpensive
2. Fast
3. Easy
4. Convincing
5. Backed by years of test-case studies

In case you think money will flow into your business without doing any marketing, or that you ‘cannot afford marketing at the moment’ here are some questions you will be asked:

1. Does your business plan contain a marketing plan?

2. Does your marketing plan contain real test-results that are indisputable?

3. Are you a recognised marketing and sales expert in your field? If not, where is he / she?

4. Do you think you are saving money by not marketing?

5. Do you confuse marketing with ‘promoting’ your product?

6. Are you ‘waiting until later’ to do your marketing?

7. Do you think your prospects will see the virtues of your product and buy it without promotion?

8. Is having a ‘better’ or cheaper product enough to be successful?

9. Will prospects automatically buy your product rather than another?

10. Should you involve someone who knows as much about marketing as you do about your business?

11. Have you tested an integrated Internet strategy into your plan?

These questions are the ones you should also be asking yourself. The answers should be the basis of your rationale for your new venture.

You think your product is best?
If you think that providing exceptional or cheaper products to a consumer is sufficient to have a successful business then you’re in big trouble.

There are fifteen common marketing mistakes even experienced publishers make when launching or promoting a publication. So if you have fallen into one, two or even all fifteen of the traps you are not alone. Many more companies fail than succeed.

To avoid trouble, create a marketing plan with an expert who knows as much about marketing as you do about your business.

Unless, of course, you already know such things as how to plan and execute a test-marketing programme, how to write copy, the difference between Web and direct mail copy, how to build a list of leads and how to combine online and offline marketing tactics.

——————————————————————————————————————

Subscriptions marketing: confidential information for sale

The Subscriptions Strategy newsletter publishes International case studies of ‘best practice’ marketing for the Internet, newsletters, books, websites and magazines etc.

In our particular niche we live or die by results. If a promotion doesn’t work, we lose money. If it works we record the results and use it on our own, and our clients’ websites and publications.

How you benefit by removing risk
As far as we are concerned, our testing means the difficult and costly part is over. As far as you are concerned, you can benefit from this tried and tested knowledge because the risk of failure has been removed and profitability is assured.

You can order sample issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter now on free trial:

Please click on one of the options below to place your trial order. You receive:

1. 20% off the full price of an annual 6-issue subscription to the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter (a saving of £40)

2. Subscription Marketing Workbook worth £66: 15 Subscriptions Marketing Innovations Every Publisher Should Know

3. Subscriptions marketing ‘rapid update’: three special issues of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter worth a total of £105 to bring you up to date with best practice marketing procedures for online and traditional subscription marketing

Option A: 7 day free trial by Paypal

Your first month’s payment is delayed by seven days, so if you cancel your trial subscription in the first week, you pay nothing. If you decide to continue using our marketing services, we’ll keep your subscription rate down to £12 / $20 a month for your first complete year.

Option B: Annual payment by credit card

You pay just £157, a total saving of £211. If the material does not come up to expectations, email, write or phone for a full refund. This guarantee is valid for the lifetime of your subscription and can be exercised at any time.

*Credit card: click here to order an annual subscription




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