"We've used Mequoda's strategies and techniques to sell thousands of books, videos, and subscriptions."
- Charlie Spahr, Executive Director, The American Ceramic Society
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
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.
A publisher’s minimum information unit (MIU) is the bedrock on which the best multiplatform membership website models are built.
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 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 new relationships
You may be sitting on three significant hidden assets that you can use to build your email marketing lists quickly
Do you realize that you might be sitting on a few opportunities to increase your email marketing lists? In the investments world, hidden assets are considered those that don’t show up on a balance sheet. Real
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.
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.
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 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.
The past year has definitely been a time of development at Mequoda. We have been working on new technology, new Haven components, and new marketing initiatives.
We introduced you to the Six Sigma program, and this was the focus of our annual Summit in October.
We rolled out the Haven Prospect Onboarder. This plugin allows a large
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.
How to turn six email analytics metrics into a big picture about the performance and plans for digitally marketing your publication
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.
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?
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.
The most effective blow-in cards of the 21st century aren’t made of cardstock, they’re digital. And since offering a sample of your magazine is less effort for the user when it’s done online, you have more opportunities.
In this week’s Freebie Friday spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda, explains why using monthly pricing to accommodate a user’s desire to sample, is just one key to selling more subscriptions. From there you can download How to Use Contrast Pricing to Increase Subscription Revenue to learn more about pricing your print and digital magazine subscriptions.
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 publishers we know are leveraging more than paper to increase profits.
What are they doing exactly? They’re adding
If you’re a publisher who maintains multiple websites, making the correct choice of a subscription management system is one of the most important decisions you’ll make, because doing it over and over again cuts into your profits and resources. We’ve watched numerous multi-website publishers trap themselves into a path that was too expensive to upgrade easily and efficiently because of the way they expanded the system in a nonstandard manner.
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As someone who’s looked at your website every day for a long time, you probably have no business reviewing your own website. There are probably things in the back of your mind that you’ve kept a mental checklist of – items that need to be optimized, altered and updated. Have you been writing these things down? Often, when we finally get the chance to update our websites, it’s months after we’ve discovered the original issue.
That’s why I’m going to give you a quick little checklist, based on our internal website design scorecard, to remind you of the items you should be paying most attention to. While these guidelines are by no means the complete list of website design practices, they are essential to sound, effective website design. We’re sure that implementation of these practices will result in happier, more satisfied, readers.
Losing subscribers without gaining new ones is a universal fear for any subscription-based organization, and rightly so. When a decrease in active subscribers leads to an overall decline in revenue, publishers may find themselves facing uncertainty about the staying power of their product, or worse: the future of their business.
But what if we told you
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 publishers we know are leveraging more than paper to increase profits.
What are they doing exactly? They’re adding a web magazine, back issues and special collections to their magazine offers and are creating an
Five steps to increase your email capture rate starting today
Converting website visitors into email subscribers is a key metric driver of your subscription website. If your Email Capture Rate (ECR) is 2% or lower, you should spend time trying to optimize your website, through disciplined testing.
For example, last year, one of our Gold Member clients
You don’t get from point A to point B without goals and milestones. This applies to most situations in life, from a cross-country road trip, to training for a marathon, to a career in publishing.
In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains the four most important goals a publisher should hold close to their heart, in order to thrive as a multiplatform subscription publisher.
Adam Smith, the father of economics, believed that economic progress was most possible by the division of labor into specialist groups. That an organization could be hugely more efficient by breaking down production processes into many small tasks, performed by specialists.
“Frugality includes all the other virtues.”
Old Cicero certainly knew what he was talking about. That’s why I wanted to remind you that your chance to exercise frugality in attending our Multiplatform Publishing Strategy program ends at midnight this Thursday, March 31. You’ll save $200.
Your email capture rate (ECR) is calculated by dividing the number of new email subscribers your website captures each month, by the number of unique new visitors passing through your website in a 30 day period. Your goal is to capture email contact permission from your website visitors by making generous offers that include free incentives.
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Our top-read audience development posts of 2017 give valuable insight into email and copywriting best practice methods.
We’ve put together our most-read audience development posts from 2017 on the Mequoda Daily. These posts included advice on how to design and send better email newsletters and how to improve your social media optimization skills for better audience
Consistent channel conversion zone architecture (3c), when applied to a publishing website, is a fancy way of saying that every channel (or portal topic) consistently aligns with a product that converts the user into a subscriber or paid user of your website. Together, they create what we call a zone. Using this zone to increase website to email conversion rates can be easy, if you let it. This metric is called your email capture rate.
Your floater, also referred to as a pop-up is most likely the most effective conversion element on your website. For most publishers we know who have floaters, they see 60% of email captures come through this element. And for those who launch them, they see a 20-50% lift in email capture rates right away.
A Rapid Conversion Landing Page (a.k.a. “name squeeze” page) is essential to building a database of free email newsletter subscribers. It, along with other landing pages on a website, act as the team that builds an email list. However, the RCLP is extra special in that its main purpose in life is to drive a ton of traffic from search in order to build your email list.
As a publisher, you should make your website’s top goal to maximize your TOPX (Total Orders Per Ten Thousand) page views by making sure that every page on your website is ready to convert visitors into buyers and subscribers at any moment and increase publishing revenue.
Your Portal is the main page where you give away free articles and content. For many magazines, this is on their main domain, like TIME.com or People.com. If you’ve been following along with Mequoda you know that we advocate for every page on your Portal to have a set of best practice conversion architecture we call 3C Zone Architecture.
In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains how open source software systems can actually hinder growth if you’re not careful with selecting your service providers.
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It’s hard to determine how to spend both your time, and your resources within a business. The way we look at every decision you make is this:
Is whatever you’re thinking about doing, going to help you build an audience, improve capture rates, increase engagement rates, or monetize more visitors?
Your audience development efforts fall into three of those buckets, which means that audience development, in essence, makes up 75% of your overall publishing goals. If it doesn’t, then how will you have enough people to convert into customers and monetize?
When building email circulation, by most accounts, email capture rate is a proxy metric. You’d be mistaken to say that it’s an exact metric because when we talk about email capture rate, we’re usually talking about the number of people who came to your site from search and social and hit the email capture conversion architecture.
But in reality, that’s only about half of the people who sign up for your email list.
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A quick conversion optimization hack that will eliminate abandons in your email capture flow
It’s not often we can tell you about a conversion optimization tip that will offer you an immediate improvement in your email capture rates, but there is one we are currently adopting with all of our new clients, and we just can’t
Over the last 3-6 months desktop and mobile conversion best practices have changed in response to Google, who continues to challenge us in an effort to make the web a more pleasant place to search and learn.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then adversity is the father. And Google has given us some adverse conditions to work with as they try to accommodate the rise in mobile devices, and the rise in mobile traffic.
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Ultimately the goal of social media is to improve your search scores and drive traffic to your website. But social can be used to build an email list, and vice versa, email can be a great way to build a social following. And if you can capture a visitor on both platforms, then if they unsubscribe or unlike, you may still maintain a relationship on the backup medium and you haven’t lost them forever.
This week we’ll review our mobile best practices for collecting email addresses without ticking off the Google gods. Most of the adjustments we make to mobile conversion architecture is for Google’s benefit, but it also offers better usability for your users. Read below to see how to adjust your own website if you’ve seen conversion rates declining since January.
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Most of the multiplatform media publishers I work with are rich with content assets.
If they’re not rich with revenue, it’s usually because they don’t know how to leverage those assets. Efficiency is key to success in a multiplatform publishing environment. Before you can design a system that minimizes manpower and maximizes automation, you need to do a thorough inventory of your content assets.
Your multiplatform content assets may be spread out in places that you haven’t thought of as repositories. Some of those places may be channels and others may be platforms. It’s also possible that you have a dusty warehouse full of old copies of magazines, books, and other content assets that no one has touched in years.
A Mequoda subscription website Portal generates value from both users and sponsors
Mequoda has guided the development of more than a 300 successful niche media websites on a wide variety of niche media topics. Our best practice is to pair a free subscription website Portal with any premium subscription business model like a magazine or newsletter.
When you charge
"We've used Mequoda's strategies and techniques to sell thousands of books, videos, and subscriptions."
- Charlie Spahr, Executive Director, The American Ceramic Society
"We have used the Mequoda Method to deliver a real-time online magazine that features individual issues and our amazing archive of premium content."
- Paul Belliveau, Vice President New Media and Production, Yankee Publishing
“We’ve used these techniques to boost sales of our higher-priced products, and dramatically increase our multiplatform subscription revenues.”
- Susan Laden, Publisher, Biblical Archaeology Society
"Adoption of the Mequoda Method has produced three benefits for us. First, we are seeing sustained growth in subscription revenue. Second, we monetized a content archive with two decades of news and information. Three, our new customers have immediate access to the content they seek."
- Robert Michel, Founder, The Dark Intelligence Group
"We have used the Mequoda Method to increase our revenue by more than 60% while completely eliminating direct mail from our marketing mix. Unsurprisingly, this has allowed us to dramatically increase profitability and our ability to fund our mission-driven programs."
- Gail Odeneal, Director of Marketing, Program on Negotiation Harvard Law School
"We have used the Mequoda Method to create two successful online magazines that generate subscription revenues that are completely independent of our advertising driven legacy business model."
- Stuart Hochwert, Founder and CEO, Prime Publishing
"We know there’s demand for individual subscriptions based on our limited marketing efforts, but we needed the resources of a top-tier marketing organization to effectively and aggressively scale our individual subscriptions business. Mequoda has the best business processes we’ve seen for getting the job done."
- Hampton Stephens, Publisher, World Politics Review
"Mequoda’s knowledge of the fundamental practices and technologies at the core of the media business is unsurpassed by any other group of consultants I know. If you’re in the media industry, Mequoda would be a valuable ally."
- Bryan Welch, Publisher
“The team I worked with at Interweave successfully transitioned a leading print enthusiast media business into the digital age. The folks at Mequoda were an important part of this team and the company’s most valued strategic advisor. We could not have done it without them.”
- Clay Hall, Former CEO, Interweave
"With more than 3.2 million monthly unique visitors, Mother Earth News has increased its revenues 39X over the past 10 years, using these strategies.”
- Bill Uhler, Publisher, Ogden Publications
