"We've used Mequoda's strategies and techniques to sell thousands of books, videos, and subscriptions."
- Charlie Spahr, Executive Director, The American Ceramic Society
How to turn six email analytics metrics into a big picture about the performance and plans for digitally marketing your publication
Your 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 project
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.
If you’re going to be an online subscription marketer, there are three things you’re going to need, in no particular order:
A content management system (CMS). Not only should it be dynamic and responsive, it needs to be conditional and respond differently to a known and unknown user. It should know who you have a relationship with,
As you surely understand, your website is made up 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.
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.
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.
Page views are a precious thing, and you should try not to waste them.
In today’s Strategy Spotlight, Don Nicholas, Chairman & CEO of Mequoda explains the goals of a “smart website” and why having one built by publishing veterans can help you avoid waste and chaos.
“It’s more effective than direct mail and as effective as telephone – and so much less expensive.” That’s a quote from ClickZ’s latest report, Email and the Age of First-Person Marketing. While marketers were saying just three years ago that social would consume email, it’s proven to become even more powerful and celebrated during that time, especially in magazine marketing. A study by the Direct Marketing Association shows that “email campaigns conducted with house lists achieved an ROI of 30% to 32%, compared with 15% to 17% from social media, and 18% to 20% for direct mail using house lists.”
What to look for in an email management system from Haven Nexus, to MailChimp to Constant Contact
Managing email marketing has become an increasingly critical issue for every type of business. Publishers, like everyone else, use email to communicate with customers and prospective customers, on a regular basis. But like all powerful tools, email can be mismanaged
Now that more than half of all Internet users block pop-ups and Google has banned them from use by PPC buyers, there are two more good reasons to drop this once effective website design technique and look for a better way to increase landing page conversion rates.
If you’ve ever been to one of our events, or you just got dropped on your head when you landed on one of our articles, you’ve probably seen the acronym OFIE here and there.
Around here, using OFIE it in a sentence (pronounced OH FEE) is as common as saying the words “website” or “conversion”. Say it with me, OHHHHH FEEEEEEEE. Or you could spell it out… oh, eff, aye, eee!
If your freemium conversion rate is less than 2, you can use these resources to create better, more compelling and more clickable freebies.
Email is by far, the most profitable marketing channel most publishers use. So it’s no surprise that building an email list is one of the most important items on a publisher’s to-do list
At Mequoda, we talk a lot about individual pieces of the Mequoda System in our Daily posts. But the Mequoda System, known in full as the Mequoda Multiplatform Media Management System, is complex, consisting of hundreds of moving parts, and reading about them at different times and in different places can’t give you a complete understanding of it.
For the first many years as a publisher, you had one goal and only one goal: increase magazine subscriptions.
It’s no secret that Mequoda is the leading strategy-centric content management system provider for magazine and newsletter publishers looking to lock in on a multi-platform system. If it is news to you, then, hey, nice to meet you!
The larger projects online publishers face when becoming multiplatform publishers are often broken into multiple phases to keep the work manageable and the project moving along. Phasing brings focus to the work as it helps employees avoid mental exhaustion that can occur with large, daunting projects.
When building Haven Nexus systems for our clients, we are often transforming a standalone website into a fully integrated multiplatform publishing and marketing system. This isn’t exactly a small task, so we focus on a few phases to prioritize and stay focused.
Consumers will respond to memberships over subscriptions and publishers will thrive with more integrated publishing systems
The one thing you can count on as a magazine publisher is that there will always be subscribers. Except that in 2016, they’d prefer you stop calling them that, because they’d prefer to be members who subscribe to your magazine.
The best content management system for publishers doesn’t stop at content or management
If you’re a publisher in business today – congratulations!
You’ve already navigated some stormy times and maybe even stabilized your core business. But the environment keeps changing. How can you respond to that change so that you not only survive, but actually thrive? What’s
Are you acting as the general contractor of your content management system when it’s supposed to be managing itself?
Catch up on the Mequoda Daily’s blog posts for this past week
Can your email management system do all this?
A Mequoda System is built as a package to be SEO optimized, full of content, withstand a ton of traffic every month, accept payments and easily distribute content through social media and email marketing. To do this, we have ongoing relationships with companies like PayPal (payment processing) and WhatCounts (email delivery) and custom API’s built to move everything around seamlessly. While the system is based in WordPress, once we’re done with it, it’s a complete content management and e-commerce system.
Contextually, how would you define a well-crafted email newsletter?
Personally, I’d say it has to have catchy snippets, be skimmable, include valuable information, direct users to social networks, and present related products. These characteristics provide a content-rich email newsletter for recipients, and ways to generate revenue for publishers.
Make your WordPress content management system’s email process less time consuming
Plug-ins are designed to make tasks easier and more time efficient. The premium Mequoda Email Builder Plug-in does just that.
For every online publisher and online editor who has found it tedious to create a daily email newsletter, the Mequoda Email Builder is a technological blessing.
Online publishers should not have to worry about managing their email system, especially with all other responsibilities they have. This is why we offer services from WhatCounts, an official tier-one email service provider.
Mequoda System publishers that choose to utilize WhatCounts’ services receive customer support, training and whitelisting services. This is coupled with Mequoda’s best practices for email management.
A look at our half-day intensive on SEO at the Mequoda Summit West 2011
In the Mequoda Daily yesterday, I discussed persuasive online copywriting.
The skills associated with SEO copywriting will be taught at length during our half-day Mequoda SEO Workshop at the Mequoda Summit West 2011.
Helpful hints on choosing software vendors
As publishers increase size and scope and become more popular with an audience, there are times when upgrades to their software are necessary. We’ve experienced this before as many publishers have as well.
When it comes to successfully making these updates, it’s important to consider all options. Blindly jumping into a sizable commitment could go sour if the software involved doesn’t fit your needs, and you end up wasting a lot of money in the process. We’d continue this a bad business practice and one all publishers should avoid.
Learn detailed information from three technology professionals using these content management systems first-hand
Let Nancy Horan & the Mequoda Website Scorecard Make Your Home Page Perform Better in less than 90 Minutes…
Convert a Content Management System into a state-of-the-art Content Marketing System without spending a dime on software.
Using floaters is just one (but very effective and powerful) way to increase the amount of website visitors you convert into email subscribers
Maximize your subscriber file size with aggressive email conversion architecture.
Discover how to forecast and increase profits with the Mequoda Email Circulation Calculator.
Fundamentally, there are only two ways for any business to increase profits.
Want to make more money? Either increase the number of customers, or increase the average sale per customer. Or both.
The success of your online publishing business depends on the same two factors. The important variables are:
"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
