Did you know that a sunflower is not just one flower, but more than a thousand small flowers, all stuck together on one head and a single stalk? Even what seems like the petals of a sunflower are considered individual ray flowers.
You might consider a publisher’s website the same way. You see TIME.com and think, oh that’s TIME’s website. But in fact, it’s a subscription marketing system. The site isn’t built just to give away free content, it’s built to collect new subscribers and generate revenue. Its web magazine alone, time.com/magazine, is just one petal of the sunflower that is attracting and converting new magazine subscribers, both free (email) and paid (digital and print).
If you struggle with determining paywall pricing and strategy, you’re not alone.
In recent years, publishers have been testing paywalls, and for good reason. Hearst, for example, tested a paywall that changed based on what the reader was consuming. Instead of letting editors choose which content was free, and which was premium, the habits of first-time readers predict
Meet the Experts at Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop
You might be wondering, how does one become a membership marketing expert? And how can these experts tell you how to run your company more profitably, without ever having walked a day in your shoes?
Widely recognized as the leader in membership marketing for magazine publishers, Mequoda Systems
Headlines have been brimming lately with news publishers like The New York Times, The Guardian and Wired taking back their profits with paywalls and paid content. The New York Times made 60% of last year’s revenue from subscription sales, The Guardian’s 800,000 subscribers are now accounting for more revenue than advertisers, and Wired has followed their lead by instituting a new $20 annual subscription. It’s clear that publishers are no longer afraid to charge for content, and subscription revenue goals are at the forefront. And I think there are three reasons for it.
You’ve Been Gifted: $500 Off Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop, the publishing industry’s event of the year!
As a reader of Mequoda’s daily membership marketing secrets, you’re eligible to receive $500 off your registration to our Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop on May 20-21, 2020 when you accept our invitation to attend today.
This is THE event
Your membership site developer should be more than just a technological jester, they should be your sherpa.
If you’re a publisher, or are selling a subscription-based information product, it’s likely that at some point you’ll be looking for a new membership site developer. We know this because most of our clients have come to us after years
5 Reasons to Attend Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop, the publishing industry’s event of the year!
Have you registered to attend the two-day Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop next spring, yet? It’s designed exclusively for magazine publishing senior executives who have the vision and resources to grow their businesses. Those who want to transform their organization into
Three ways membership offers beat subscription marketing offers
We are big proponents of both web magazines and web libraries, plus various collections and special issues that can be derived from them to create robust membership products.
We recently had the privilege of taking over all membership and subscription marketing for a long time publishing partner and winner of numerous community awards.
Join Us at Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop, the publishing industry’s must-attend event of the year!
So, where do I start to explain our Membership Marketing Secrets: 2020 Workshop?
First, I should tell you up front what isn’t a secret—having a metered paywall at your website. Yes, thanks to many news-oriented publishers, metered paywalls have become commonplace
Would you like to triple the response to your current email promotions and sales pages? Because that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen when publishers stop promoting their magazines and start promoting their web library.
This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:
Password:
If you think that your website should be the main driver of your revenue, think again. Email subscribers are responsible for between 60 and 80% of all digital revenue generation, while passing website visitors and social followers make up the balance.
Over and over again, we’ve found that passing website visitors don’t immediately turn into buyers. They simply remain
When walking in to a massive library or bookstore, it’s hard to decide what to look at without becoming instantly overwhelmed by all the possibilities. The same goes for an online web library for your magazine or newsletter, and if you aren’t effectively capturing subscribers’ attention regularly, renewal rates can slip. Reminding them of what they have access to on a regular basis can increase engagement, especially if you curate the content for them.
How to turn six email analytics metrics into a big picture about the performance and plans for digitally marketing your publication
When most people think of digital magazines, they narrow their focus on digital magazine apps that can be found in a digital newsstand or app store, but data shows that apps aren’t where users want to digest premium magazine content.
At Mequoda, we have the privilege of marketing more than 200 premium subscription products including magazines, newsletters, and memberships that spark a myriad of ideas on how to create value.
Mequoda is a term to describe a method for designing and managing successful subscription marketing systems. Short for “media quote daily,” Mequoda is an approach to building these systems based on four core principles—ACEM in Mequoda-talk. Every publisher can leverage its principles for growth in all areas of business.
Multiplatform publishers are always looking for new ways to increase online revenues and profits. If you’re currently seeking new platforms and opportunities, consider these three ancillary media platforms for generating consistent additional income:
When we look at the most successful multiplatform publishers we know intimately, like our publishing partners and close colleagues, we are usually able to determine what sets them apart from publishing companies that struggle.
Even within our own Mequoda ecosystem, we have more than 60 special interest media websites, serving more than seven million daily email subscribers. Each month, our network welcomes more than 40 million website visitors. But these websites don’t all run the same. Just like Ferrari, we can build the same car for everyone, but some win a lot more races. So why is that?
A publisher’s minimum information unit (MIU) is the bedrock on which the best multiplatform membership website models are built.
I was speaking with a colleague recently who had crossed over from the magazine industry to newspaper publishing and back, about consumer marketing trends. We noted that it will be interesting to see how lessons learned from the newspaper industry move into the magazine industry over time. Daily newspapers are both financially larger than the average magazine
Why would you give away content for free, in order to make money? Sounds crazy, but that’s how the smartest publishers we know have grown at an exponential speed.
Selling magazine subscriptions and memberships is part of a four-step process that begins with giving away free content.
By giving away free content, like downloadable reports, you can build
“You live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.” Those are the wise words of Jessica Jackley, co-founder of the successful micro-loan startup, Kiva. And Eli Broad, 185th wealthiest person in the world, and the only person we know of who has built two Fortune 500 companies in two different industries confirms prioritizing and delegating simply isn’t done enough. “The inability to delegate is one of the biggest problems I see with managers at all levels,” says Broad.
An effective technique in information marketing is “self-liquidating premiums”—having the value of the premiums exceed the entire purchase price.
For example, let’s assume you have a product, perhaps a downloadable ebook, with a list price of $49.95. You’re selling it online at a discounted purchase price of $29.95.
Whenever we work with a new publishing partner, there are four words they become familiar with very quickly.
In this week’s strategy spotlight with Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains how these four words will change how you approach your business, and how you can learn more about them when you download our new FREE report, How to Increase Audience, Revenue and Profits with Multiplatform Publishing.
This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:
Password:
When you go shopping for a new car, you’re generally limited to the inventory on the lot. You might want gullwing doors like a Delorean or a new Tesla, but you can’t get them on an Audi. You can choose your color and wait a few weeks for your vehicle to arrive from another dealership, but you can’t get racing stripes without a custom paint job somewhere else. It’s not that different when buying proprietary software for your website and content management system, so why do so many publishers still head in that direction?
At Mequoda, we’ve crunched the numbers and discovered how beautifully email newsletters work to drive revenue. It’s not the traffic that comes to your site, which is the prevailing view among folks in all industries who jumped on the bandwagon early. Back in those days, it was all about impressions! Eyeballs on your page! After all, if they show up on your website, they’re bound to subscribe to your magazine, right?
Wrong.
In our webcast series so far, we’ve covered all the basics of the Mequoda Method, including all the individual pillars of ACEM (Attract, Capture, Engage, Monetize). We’ve also talked about Publishers Using the Mequoda Method, and the final module in our webcast series is called, How Do You Get Started With the Mequoda Method?
Publishers everywhere are seeing improved subscription revenue through premium membership websites, and surely you want to see the same results. In order to put subscription revenue first, you should know the three reasons why we think this influx is happening:
First, we all should be thanking Amazon, Netflix and other large online businesses who have trained
Using back-issues and other types of media to create a more robust and valuable magazine library
If magazine libraries and magazine memberships are being combined with magazine subscriptions to transform the publishing industry into a growth medium, magazine libraries are the nexus of this trend.
In this post, we’ll look at how two savvy magazine publishers have
In our webcast series so far, we’ve covered all the basics of the Mequoda Method, including all the individual pillars of ACEM (Attract, Capture, Engage, Monetize). Today we’re talking about Publishers Using the Mequoda Method.
In 2017, all major publishers and most independents have a website portal. What 95% don’t have is a web magazine. But those who do are flourishing.
In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains why he thinks the web edition is the best edition.
How to use the principles of economic behaviorism, contrast pricing, and Six Sigma marketing to maximize magazine membership revenue and renewals
Earlier this week, we discussed how savvy publishers are combining their legacy magazine subscriptions with magazine libraries to create magazine memberships using the Internet.
Now we’ll we take a look at how publishers can use contrast pricing and the principles of economic
In our webcast series, we cover What is the Mequoda Method? and What is ACEM?, which tackles the topics of A, attracting new visitors to your membership website, C, capturing email addresses, and E, engaging that audience. M, monetize, is another crucial strategy in making money online as a publisher, which we focus on in this week’s webcast, Can Monetization (M)
Your membership website is made up of a variety of parts. To accomplish the goals of increasing your audience, revenues, and profits, all of those parts need to talk to one another. The nucleus of this system is your CMS, or content management system.
This is not unlike any team, where you have specialists and a
How to transform your magazine subscription business into a magazine membership business with one new product, and three new types of recycled content.
A magazine membership includes two components; a magazine subscription and a magazine library.
Magazine subscriptions, of course, are quite familiar to you if you are a magazine publishing company— they are the future
This week we’re focusing on engagement, in How Can Engagement (E) Be Improved? The ‘E’ in the Mequoda Method’s ACEM, is really about retention, and the idea that if you’re a subscription-based publisher, that the link with relationship with your customer is key.
Premium newsletters and advisory services represent the pinnacle of subscription marketing, often commanding annual membership or subscription fees that are much higher than magazines.
How to use web editions, collections and libraries to double your revenue
Are you still selling your magazine on one platform? Sure, print magazines smell good and even look good on a coffee table, but the most successful subscription and membership marketers we know are leveraging more than paper to increase profits.
What are they doing exactly? They’re
ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.
In the words of David Ogilvy, “a good advertisement is one that sells the product without drawing attention to itself.” When selling a web magazine, one of the best ways to do so is by giving away enough content that it sells itself, but not so much that visitors don’t convert into subscribers.
The most significant
It’s entirely possible that your publishing business is worth much more than you might think. You might be trapped thinking about your company like a print publisher, and because of that, your assets are being under-leveraged. Let me suggest three easy steps to unlocking that value.
In his book, Free: The Future of Radical Price, Chris Anderson wrote, “People often don’t care as much about things they don’t pay for, and as a result they don’t think as much about how they consume them. Free can encourage gluttony, hoarding, thoughtless consumption, waste, guilt, and greed. We take stuff because it’s there,
“Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving,” said David Ogilvy, known as “The Father of Advertising” the “Original Mad Man”.
Even our best-performing publishing partners—who publish on multiple platforms, run several premium membership websites, and have helped define our pricing best practices—will see a drop in paid memberships when they stop testing. I told this to a premium content partner who went from having some of the highest conversion rates of our partners to having our worst performing rates, and we believed the culprit was a lack of membership offer testing with new offers, like a 30-day free trial.
In the last three to five years we stumbled upon a process we now call blockbuster management. Our blockbuster management program acknowledges that any given website over time might have thousands of posts, but the remarkable thing is a relatively small number will ultimately be capable of driving 80% of the traffic.
Web magazine consumers like to read their magazines like they read their news – online.
Users are becoming more accustomed to viewing magazine content in the form of web magazines. Web editions are built like web pages, so they can be displayed on any mobile or desktop device, and users are as familiar with the interface as
ACEM doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but if you’ve been following along for awhile, you know this acronym is baked into everything we do here at Mequoda.
Five steps to increase your email capture rate starting today
Converting website visitors into email subscribers is a key metric driver of your membership website. At Mequoda, we currently operate more than a dozen membership marketing systems in partnership with some of the country’s leading content brands including Harvard University, Hearst Magazines and Yankee Publishing.
Testing website conversion
You hear us talk about the Mequoda Method, and how we’ve developed it by watching the world’s most successful publishers transition from print to the digital world, but there’s so much more to it. Watch our webcast hosted by myself and our team, called What is the Mequoda Method? to find out.
“We have used the Mequoda System to create five successful membership programs that leverage our 227-year-old brand and the many books, calendars and issues we produce."
- Paul Belliveau, Vice President New Media and Production, The Old Farmer’s Almanac
“We partnered with Mequoda to create two successful all-access membership programs that are completely independent of our legacy advertising driven business.”
- Stuart Hochwert, Founder and CEO, Prime Publishing
“Even though we are a digital-only publisher, we’ve been able to adapt the Mequoda strategies to dramatically increase our revenues in less than 12 months.”
- Hampton Stephens, Publisher, World Politics Review
“Our all-access membership program includes our print edition, our amazing New England Travel Library, and our new PBS television series. We may have been founded in 1935, but our current strategy is fully multiplatform and digital.”
- Brook Holmberg, Publisher, Yankee Magazine
"We leveraged the Mequoda System and software to create two new capstone membership programs that have reignited our revenue growth."
- Ed Coburn President Cabot Wealth Network
