Digital Magazine Marketing: 9 Ways to Promote your Digital Magazine

Missed opportunities in digital magazine marketing can lead to slumping digital magazine circulation

If you’re making plans for your own digital publication, it behooves you to also plan how to make money from it with strategic digital magazine marketing.

After all, buying a list and mailing a big direct mail package, in hopes of getting a bunch of people to subscribe as we all did in the old print days, is rather like trying to sell 21^st-century tablets themselves at an old-fashioned general store where hardware, ladies’ hats and pickles all shared the same space, and the proprietor fetched everything on your list, then wrapped up your purchases in brown paper and twine.

In those days, really big publishers could afford to advertise on TV, or in other magazines and newspapers. But most niche publishers relied on direct mail and the occasional bind-in or blow-in card. Not exactly a rich mine of marketing opportunities, was it?

But when it comes to digital magazine marketing, you have many more options than you did with print. Some of these ideas may seem obvious, but I suspect there are at least a few you might not have thought of before.

1. Digital Magazine Marketing With Your Website

Naturally, you already have a website where you drive traffic via organic search, convert visitors to email subscribers and sell your numerous products, right? Don’t forget to sell your digital magazine there, too – believe it or not, we’ve stumbled across many publishers who make it nearly impossible to figure out how to subscribe to their digital edition, and focus entirely on their print edition. Why are they hiding it? We’d love to know.

Create a bold “subscribe” button or tab on your website, so that users can easily take an action. And rather than separating print subscriptions from digital subscriptions, place them side by side in the subscription forum. Offer a digital archive with your digital magazine? Create a third option to gain all-access and include the web library. Use your digital assets to make the sale!

2. Digital Magazine Marketing with Email Ads

Just like offering digital subscriptions along with print on your website, you should always include an offer in your emails. Yankee never misses an opportunity to let you know about their subscription, which includes their digital library, in every daily email newsletter through the use of display and text ads in between articles.

3. Digital Magazine Marketing with Sampling

If you have an app, there should be at least one free issue inside that a user can view. For web magazines, many of our publishing partners are using metered paywalls, which allow users to sample several pieces of content before being met with an access-challenge page.

4. Digital Magazine Marketing with Library Previews

Let us introduce a Mequoda favorite email marketing tool: the editorially-driven creative known as a Library Preview. The Library Preview is all about promoting subscriptions through thoughtfully featured excerpts of some of the most captivating paid content available on your site.

Rather than leading with a direct offer, the Library Preview model instead focuses on the editorial material your site offers its paid subscribers. Library Previews attract consumers with a compelling piece of content before making a brief, but persuasive, sales pitch to entice them to subscribe in order to continue enjoying all of the content your site provides for paid subscribers.

Library Previews almost always follow the same formula, and in our experience it has proven to be a winning one, especially for those with metered paywalls because it entices non-subscribers to use up their clicks. Once they hit the paywall too many times, they subscribe.

5. Digital Magazine Marketing with an All-Access Pass

There’s no better way to market a digital magazine than with a better product, and the only thing better than a subscription to your magazine, is an all-access membership that includes your print magazine, digital magazine, and access to your digital magazine archive, which allows them to get new issues, and also search through old issues. Many publisher with content on additional platforms like video will sweeten the deal by bundling those products into the digital magazine membership as well. By offering an all-access pass, it allows you to price the digital magazine and the all access-membership at higher price points than your print editions, causing a significant increase in your average price per order.

6. Digital Magazine Marketing with Six Sigma

Six Sigma methods are used in direct marketing to test a control against a number of variables. You test each variable against the control in order to declare a winner and this continues until all the variables have been tested. This can take place over the course of a month, or over the course of a year depending on how many variables you have to test. 

In subscription marketing, we adapt this structure to continuously test both offers and creative. For many of our publishing partners, we offer Six Sigma subscription marketing services. For one of our publishing partners, we launched a high-frequency Six Sigma email spotlight program focused on selling more magazine subscriptions. We increased the number of magazine spotlights from the standard 2-3X per week to 5X per week and introduced editorially-driven creative to alternate between offer-driven creative. We saw a 70% increase in their TOPX (total orders per 10K email subscribers) from this program. The email campaigns for this particular publishing partner were planned and measured in 2-week cycles, where we’d identify the 5 best performing spotlights and the 5 worst performing spotlights in a given 2-week cycle. We’d keep the 5 winners and include them in the next 2-week email cycle, and we’d replace the 5 losers with brand new creative.

Meanwhile, we are also testing the offer. For example, for this particular publishing partner, we ran one offer for 4 weeks and we ran a different offer for the next 4 weeks. While this approach is a significant amount of work, requiring active coordination between editorial and marketing, on-the-spot analytics, great copywriting, and interaction with fulfillment to manage the offers, we have seen it work and strongly recommend all publishers try it.

7. Digital Magazine Marketing with Social Media

There’s no excuse not to use one digital medium to promote another. But believe it or not, some of the biggest players have yet to figure this out – and yes, it absolutely makes a difference! Below is an example from I Like Crochet, who is promoting their latest digital issue in the example below, with a big image of the cover, and a link directly to the online table of contents. For non-subscribers, this will lead to a metered paywall, that asks for an email address to view 3 articles, and as they click through the table of contents, they will quickly be asked to subscribe. Keeping the table of contents along the right-hand side of the page for consistent navigation as a part of your digital magazine design is a great way to get non-subscribers to get to the subscribe prompts more quickly.

 

8. Digital Magazine Marketing in the Newsstand

While we believe web magazine are the superior versions of digital magazines because they don’t require an app to access, there are still many publishers delivering digital apps. And let’s face it: If you have a  digital magazine app and it isn’t available in Apple’s app store, it doesn’t exist for the vast majority of digital magazine buyers. Other options you may also have already considered include Amazon, Google, Barnes & Noble, and Zinio. If you have a digital magazine app, make sure it’s a part of the most popular marketplaces. You lose a cut, but you gain an audience.

9. Digital Magazine Marketing in Print

If you have the resources, you could be buying space to advertise your digital magazine in other publications. In the past we’ve seen Bon Appétit advertised in Glamour. And you should definitely be including an offer to go digital when you renew or bill your print subscribers via snail mail.

This post was originally published in 2013 and has been updated.