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Peter Hobday
As a leading copywriter, it’s easy for me to write about how great I am. But I won’t. Here’s what others say:
“Peter Hobday taught me more in a week than I dare admit to in public”
Drayton Bird, Drayton Bird Direct
“Just wanted to let you know some great news about the mailing for the Primary Assembley File. We’ve had only 6 days worth of responses, but we have already had 60 orders .. this campaign is going to work extremely well. You are a genius!” Emma Rogers
“Peter Hobday is one of the countries leading copywriters in the subscriptions promotion field”
Marketing Week
“We’ve been using Peter Hobday as our main copywriter for several years now and he has helped us make our sports science list very profitable. We’re still using copy Peter wrote four years ago – and it works every time. Plus he consistently comes up with new ways to sell to our list.” Mark Edwards On-line Marketing Manager Electric Word plc
“Subscriptions Strategy … the leading source of creative marketing advice in the UK”
UK Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Association
[Email promotion] It’s an oldie but a goodie!
“I think you’ve probably written the majority of our best emails, Peter. If it does well, we’ll never stop using it!”
Laura Gardiner
PP Online
“Peter Hobday is the UK’s leading subscriptions copywriter”
Strategic Marketing
“You’ll be pleased to hear the packs have been doing very well. ROI’s are comfortably within target and we have brought on 1,100 new paid subs since the first round of mailings. We are really pleased especially given the poor management of the magazines previously – we thought recruiting new subs was going to be much tougher.”
Emma Rogers March 2008
“We are extremely pleased with the results of the promotions Peter Hobday devised .. we have reached over 13,000 subscriptions. You can now add us to your successful subscription campaigns list”
Sarah Bagnall, Macworld
“Congratulations! The Grocer has now reached 10,000 subscriptions”
Mark De Lange, William Reed Publishing
“A fear of the unknown is preventing many publishers from entering this lucrative area in a major way. Subscriptions Strategy will prove to be invaluable to them.”
Ann Saundry, United Magazine Distribution
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. “
Drayton Bird
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