Digital Magazine Marketing: 7 Ways to Promote your Digital Magazine
By— Don Nicholas • 10/01/2018
Missed opportunities 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 21st-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.
Consumers are telling us loud and clear what they want—are you listening? How much would you pay for that information? Download a copy of our 2018 Mequoda Magazine Consumer Study for FREE instead, to find out how you can improve your digital magazine rapport with subscribers. Download now.
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 app and web magazine there, too – believe it or not, I’ve stumbled across quite a few otherwise savvy publishers whose digital magazine is mentioned nowhere on their site!
The Economist uses the bottom half of their screen to promote “full access” to their magazine, which includes the online and app editions.
Right on the homepage, they promote the current issue of their magazine which links to specific feature articles. This gives the premium magazine content high visibility for potential subscribers.
Similarly, The New Yorker makes their digital editions front and center. Directly below the masthead on their website, they feature their digital magazine app and the archive that readers get access to when they subscribe. The text reads, “All magazine issues since 2008 are now available in The New Yorker Today app. Download now.”
In the niche publishing space, look no further than our client the Biblical Archaeology Society, who features the all-access pass to their web library on their homepage below featured content.
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 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 clients, we offer Six Sigma subscription marketing services. For one of our clients, 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 client 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 client, 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.
4. 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.
5. Digital Magazine Marketing in the Newsstand
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. There are also new partner options worth considering, like Next Issue, a joint venture of Condé Nast, Hearst, Time Inc., Meredith and News Corp.
6. 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 clients are using metered paywalls, which allow users to sample several pieces of content before being met with an access-challenge page.
7. 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.
If you’re a legacy publisher with a valuable archive of evergreen content, schedule a free consultation with a member of our executive team to discuss how we can help you dramatically increase your subscription revenue and profits.
This post was originally published in 2013 and has been updated.
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Posted in Digital Magazine Publishing
All the points above are good insight however I do disagree with point #5. We have been publishing an iPad app version of our magazine for 20 months and started out by offering a free sample. Sales were flat. When we removed the free sample we saw sales increase. When we decreased the preview from 10 screens to 6 screens sales really took off. From our own research data the less free content consumers are offered the stronger the end sales.
Thank you Ron. Can you tell me the market you are serving? It doesn’t sound like this was A-B tested of course, which would provide the most compelling evidence, but of course we often have to make do with imperfect information. I am interested to learn more about your experience if you’re willing to share with us. If you’d like you can contact me off line at Ed at Mequoda.com.
Fanatstic artice Ed, much needed and very useful, I am sharing and ditributing this to all our Digital Magazine clients, especially the new ones.
In addition to the 6 great tips I would add:
a) Bundling – selling packages that include both print & digital.
b) Push notifications – Careful on the frequency though.
c) Print to Digital mechanisms, like QR Quodes, Interactive Print
elements like augmented reality experiences instigated from
the print from mobile devices that then deliver or link to the
digital edition versions.
I have a range of examples and case studies if anyone wants access to them (Free) just email les.csonge@yudu.com
Thank you Les. Regarding bundling, I recently wrote a post about decoy pricing for bundling that publishers are using to substantially increase the average order size. The New Yorker is just one of many that is having great success.
(http://www.mequoda.com/articles/digital-magazine-publishing/decoy-pricing-the-biggest-little-secret-in-the-publishing-world/)
Hello, can you please tell me more about this statement: “as long as your website includes content and isn’t simply a rival retail site, you can have the Apple newsstand actually fulfill these sales, and you don’t have to give Apple a cut of the sale. You also get to keep the data you’ve just gathered, which Apple doesn’t share.”
We have a website that includes content, but we still pay a fee for sales through Apple and we don’t get to keep that data…
Would love more info on this!
HI Anila — in the hopes of clarifying, let me reiterate, you get the data and don’t pay Apple a fee if you sell the subscription through your site. It sounds like you are talking about about having Apple sell the subscription on their site. Then you do lose control of the customer data, and Apple takes a share of the subscription price.
Hey Ed, but how can you sell subscriptions through your own website? In the End, we want Apple to handle all the billing, right? Is there a tool ne can use? And the latest rumors tell us, that Promo Codes should be available for inapp purchases anytime soon, too, right? Any information on this?
Hi Ingmar — do you want Apple to handle everything? Most publishers don’t. When you sell the subscription on your site, you are able to offer bundles, and the bundled pricing we like to be able to to offer to make decoy pricing work (see our separate posts on decoy pricing if you haven’t already). You have to distribute your app through Apple but for most niche publishers, your marketing is going to generate most of the orders. Going “all in” with Apple it’s going to be hard for most to get the visibility you need to maximize your circulation.
In response to an offline comment from a reader, I wanted to add that having some content included for free with the app is important but that can be a wide range of content, not just an actual live sample issue. As in the old direct mail days, a compiled issue may do better than an actual live issue. Also, publishers are experimenting with other types of free content including their free daily email newsletter content. We are still in early days but the good news is we’re not completely starting from scratch. Let’s not forget the lessons we learned in the pre-digital age.
Being able to view and use Edition on Smartphones is an increasing, vital and fundamental requirement (I have recently seen some fantastic examples of this, happy to share).