Tag: subscription marketing

How to excel at subscription marketing with a web library by writing compelling copy
In the past, we have reviewed how to use the concepts of Six Sigma in subscription marketing and testing and then creative offer testing for subscription pricing.
We shared a story about one of our publishing partners who launched a high-frequency Six Sigma email

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.

While the challenge of choosing the right subscription and single copy pricing strategy is not new to magazine publishers, it’s virgin territory for most subscription website publishers and many publishers exploring the digital newsstand landscape.

Even magazine publishers are faced with new economic realities.

The marginal cost of delivering a digital subscription to your own website is near zero. The cost of delivering digital issues via the Apple, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble digital newsstands is based on remit and the cost of delivering a digital issue paid to your digital publishing software provider (Mag+, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, etc.).

It’s amazing to look back to just a year or so ago, when digital magazines were still something of a novelty. Today, it’s a given that print publishers will soon create a digital version of their product if they haven’t already.

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

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.

12 subscription marketing offers you can test with your existing email subscriber list
Think selling magazines is hard? Look at Netflix. They’ve been able to get customers to pay $9+ per month as a membership website. Meanwhile, magazines have a hard time getting people to subscribe for $10 for a whole year. Netflix is also currently worth

“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.

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.

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.

These subscription business model facts will help you take a new look at your current approach to subscription marketing.
Most of the subscription business model facts you usually hear likely pertain to percentages and numbers that don’t apply to you and instead reflect someone else’s business. But the ten facts below give you permission to take a step

Creating an abundance of value within your subscription products is the key to subscription marketing and transforming your publishing business in the digital age
From time to time, it’s a good idea to sit down and think about the value proposition you provide prospective buyers in your subscription marketing efforts. When you are running a Six Sigma

In subscription marketing, the type of magazine content you sell, matters. However, the strategies you use to sell it, work across niches and industries.
In our last bi-annual Mequoda Magazine Consumer Study, we discovered that out of all the paid types of magazine content available online, adults in the US pay for news, most. If you’re in

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

In theory, it should be very easy to use basic subscription marketing principles and write a direct mail campaign for content that already exists, rather than content that does not. But we find that copywriters don’t typically love to work that way.

How to write Spotlight emails that win your Six Sigma subscription marketing testing efforts
In the past we have reviewed how to use the concepts of Six Sigma in subscription marketing and testing and then creative offer testing for subscription pricing. We have shared the success that one of our publishing partners has experienced after launching a high-frequency

How to use the principles of economic behaviorism, contrast pricing, and Six Sigma marketing to maximize magazine membership revenue and renewals
We’ve 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 behaviorism to maximize

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).

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.

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.

One of the biggest secrets to success in subscription marketing is leveraging the word “free” in your copy
Unlike most other marketers, those in subscription marketing can sell the same product at different prices each time it’s purchased. Our customers buy a new subscription from us at one price, and then we can use a different

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.

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

Premium newsletters and advisory services represent the pinnacle of subscription marketing, often commanding annual membership or subscription fees that are much higher than magazines.

Driven by marketplace shifts and changing consumer behavior, new membership marketing programs are multiplying profits for Mequoda’s publishing partners.

BOSTON, MARCH 1, 2019—Mequoda announces the launch of The Old Farmer’s Almanac 1792 Society, the latest Mequoda partner to take a legacy publishing brand and line of products and create a value-centric and engaging membership.

With The Old