Is your loose insert intrusive?

6 June 2008

To be successful, marketing must be intrusive.

As subscriptions marketing advice, that may sound surprising. Intrusion is a violation of your reader’s peace and quiet. It’s annoying.

But the fact is – unless you push your message into enough faces you won’t gain market share.

There is a limit to how far you can push, of course, but most publishers don’t go anywhere near it. Fear and a lack of knowledge hold them back. But although it is unwise for your promotion to get up someone’s nose, it needs to be pushed firmly beneath it.

Intrusion is what consumers usually respond to best. But many marketers don’t use any kind of intrusive promotion. They see too much of them and they don’t like them.

That is where the mistake is made – our personal attitudes have little relevance to professional marketing.

At the last big publishers’ conference I attended, a key speaker spoke out against pop-up email capture boxes on websites. (An email capture box is simply a digitalised loose insert). His rationale was:

“Pop-up boxes are intrusive. They are annoying. So don’t use them.”

The first two points I agreed with: those boxes can be intrusive and annoying. But how he made the jump to ‘So don’t use them’ mystified me and a number of other delegates who use them.

Issue 69 of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter explains how to make a seemingly innocuous common-place card measuring 6×4 inches into an intrusive and effective builder of market share.

If that sounds like a tough brief, you are right. Building market share is something that inserts rarely achieve.

You can order issue 69 of the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter here:

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