Mistakes That Will Kill Your Marketing: part 1
9 November 2005We all make mistakes – usually because we lack information.
That’s OK. In subscriptions marketing, ignorance is a perfectly acceptable excuse.
Most marketing mistakes, however, are due to a refusal to accept there is a better way of doing things.
In publishing there is no room for a closed mind. It invariably leads to a great deal of unnecessary expense and lost revenue.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Yet many marketers in the UK do just that. They continue to copy their own and each others mistakes day after day, year after year in a downward spiral of ever-reducing response.
But it’s folly to copy a publishers’ promotion or method unless you have it on independent authority that response has been good. You will also need to discover what lies behind its success, because it’s often not obvious. Indeed, it’s in the originator’s interests to keep it hidden.
The secret behind every successful publishing business
The key to boosting subscriptions income is to understand why something has worked and how – and if – you can adapt that principle to your own publication. That specific knowledge is vital to your business success. It’s highly unlikely, however, that the marketers who developed the winning technique will tell you how they are doing it. That’s their secret.
That’s why, as with accounting, law, horse trading, blackjack and other potentially lucrative work you need an independent authority or inside source to explain the best way to proceed.
The purpose of this article is to lay down the framework for a successful subscriptions business. With that in place you are more likely to spot useful methods you can use, get a feeling for where the money is, and quickly bring it in.
The subscriptions business is, after all, about making money.
Let’s start at the end
Copywriting is easy. The difficult bit is bringing the money in. Every salesperson knows that closing the deal is the hardest part of the sale. That’s why so many promotions don’t work too well.
Creating a promotion is about pressing the reader’s ‘want’ and ‘need’ buttons. If you know and understand your readers and get each stage of the sale right, you can close easily and in large numbers. Starting with the close of the sale means you don’t lose sight of the purpose of all that activity.
(Which is why you can’t use editorial staff to write a promotion — they generally don’t understand what makes their readers buy.)
Why it’s time to catch up
We began this article by talking about ignorance and closed minds. There is an easy cure for ignorance and that’s finding a reliable source of information. A closed mind, however, is much harder to fix. But unless we continue to learn, we can’t grow. Unfortunately, when it comes to progress it seems that most of our readers’ hands are tied. A look at the average renewal series or in-magazine promotion reveals that most publishers are still between five and ten years behind current best practice standards.
As for direct mail packs, believe it or not, most publishers probably don’t have one! That’s a killer mistake. Creating a direct mail pack must, surely, be your first step; otherwise you are not in business. Once you have a pack that is proven in your marketplace all other kinds of promotion can swiftly follow.
The reason for publishers’ reticence in commissioning a direct mail promotion (or the equivalent in email format) could be a basic misunderstanding about the place subscriptions marketing has in the publishing mix. Or it could be you have tried a subscription promotion in the past and been disappointed. Or (more likely) it’s because your company refuses to invest the money. We address those points below.
The Internet – a new way of publishing
Now is the time for new thinking. The face of publishing is changing more rapidly now than at almost any time in recent history, mostly because of the web. There is lots of subscription money in most markets. No matter what kind of publication you produce, in whatever market and in whatever format there are techniques that can be transferred to suit your operation and lift profitability.
You may have been publishing for two hundred or just two years. You may have a tiny or huge market. Whatever decisions you have made in the past and whatever problems you have come up against, it’s worth testing a new approach.
I would urge publishers to consider another of Einstein’s observations:
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
In the second part of this article, we investigate the fourteen common marketing mistakes I most often come up against in periodical publishing:
Mistakes that will kill your marketing: part 2
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