"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 use the principles of economic behaviorism, contrast pricing, and Six Sigma marketing to maximize magazine membership revenue and renewals
Last week, we discussed how savvy publishers are combining their legacy magazine subscriptions with magazine libraries to create magazine memberships using the Internet.
This week we take a look at how publishers can use contrast pricing and the principles
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
“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 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.
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
This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:
Password:
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
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.
What’s “free” to the naked eye isn’t exactly free. It costs money to produce a product, even when it’s recycled. And for the user, they pay either with their eyeballs and data on an ad-driven site, or with their email address on a product-driven site.
Just think of all the “free” that you give away on your website:
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 2018 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
In 1926, a long-form print ad for the U.S. School of Music was written by John Caples, and the headline read, “They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano, But When I Started to Play!” It’s been noted as one of the most perfect headlines ever written.
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.
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.
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.
A multi-platform website enables a publisher to create dynamic content on multiple platforms. Some of these platforms might be online streaming through a membership library of training videos, or it could be a web magazine—formatted for, and read on the web.
But multi-platform website doesn’t just refer to the number of ways you recycle content across text, video, graphics and other mediums. It also means your website is responsive and will show visitors these different types of media, no matter what device they use: desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, phablet, whatever you’ve got. More thoughts on responsive design.
12 subscription marketing offers you can test with your existing email subscriber list
Think selling magazines is hard? Look at Netflix. Their offer is that you can try out their video streaming service for 30 days, then pay $8 a month. Not $10 or $12 per year like a magazine, but $8 every single month. And is
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.
This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:
Password:
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.
What makes you open an email? Urgency? Benefit? Brevity? What we’ve found is that the most attention-grabbing subject lines rarely have a lot in common at first glance.
If you search around the web for the best performing subject lines, you’ll find ones like, “I was right – and that’s not good for you” and “We’re starting in 5 HOURS” from Sumo.com. You’ll also see “I have good news and bad news…” and “Let’s fix your offer together” from digitalmarketer.com. But what do these email subject lines have in common?
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
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
How often do you read something digitally? If you’re reading this, then you’ve done it at least once today. I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t your first time.
Any time your website drops in Google, it’s scary. But the one thing to know is that any drop in SEO traffic will be uniform. You won’t lose traffic in one zone of your website, it will be across the board. The ebb and flow of traffic is normal and not an algorithmic hit, it’s just the price
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
If you don’t register for the next Mequoda Digital Publishing & Marketing Intensive by midnight, you’ll have to wait another year to start your journey to multiplatform publishing success.
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 Gold Members has experienced after launching a high-frequency
Every experience you’ve ever had building and rebuilding a magazine website typically begins with you explaining what you want, and then you telling a group of developers and designers what to do and what to fix. But when did you become an expert in digital publishing strategy and website architecture?
I’ll keep this to the point, because I know you’re busy. Registration for the upcoming Mequoda Subscription Marketing & Publishing Intensive on May 17-18 in Boston closes in one week.
This year’s Intensive is newly updated to focus on subscription and membership revenue. The event will highlight our tested and proven strategies for increasing audience, revenue and profits. Here
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).
“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.
Today is the last day you can save on your seat to this unique and powerful subscription marketing and publishing event
If you have been thinking about registering for our Subscription Marketing & Publishing Intensive this May, today is the last day to save at least $300 on your seat. Don’t delay. It’s a great time to register and pay
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.).
“Frugality includes all the other virtues.” – Cicero
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 the Mequoda Subscription Marketing & Publishing Intensive ends next week.
Maybe you noted our Early Bird deadline of April 18 and told yourself
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.
Stop wasting your money on unprofitable marketing channels
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
This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:
Password:
If you’ve ever joined a club, purchased a membership, or even became part of a team, you understand the benefits of mutual collaboration and teamwork. This year, our goal at Mequoda was to help our Gold Members run and grow their subscription marketing and publishing businesses even more by creating a publishing network of like-minded publishers.
Your magazine SEO efforts will determine how much traffic arrives and eventually converts into subscribers – what are you doing to find and plug any holes in your website?
Google is the business we all love to hate. If you run a big website, one of your jobs is magazine SEO for your website. There will
“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.
Spend two days with us, and you could become our next success story.
If you’re a magazine publisher in the digital age, you’re certainly savvy enough to succeed. And perhaps you’re satisfied with your revenue and business growth as they are.
But do you know the secrets to boosting revenues by as much as 20% over the
If you publish a variety of subscription products for a single audience, you have the makings of a super club. Super clubs are the easiest money you will ever generate because their high profit margins are driven by content you already own and an audience that already trusts you and your brand.
One thing we’ve noticed about the most successful publishers we know is that they have three major things in common. And it has nothing to do with being a household name, a ton of charisma or a rampant following on social media.
If you are a legacy print-only magazine publisher, not understanding multiplatform publishing strategy – the future spells doom for your magazine and your publishing career.
Did you know that most media executives don’t attend best practice workshops regularly, or take part in networking and peer groups?
They are the MVPs of their teams, but unlike star athletes, most don’t have a coach.
This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:
Password:
All you need is a seat at the Intensive and the discipline to execute our strategies
In a little over two months, you could be starting a new path to subscription marketing and publishing success. But only if you hurry and register for the Mequoda Subscription Marketing & Publishing Intensive. If you register today, you can still save $300
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.
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 Gold Members who launched a high-frequency Six Sigma
Learn how to increase your subscription revenues while riding the duck boats, or taking in a show, shopping in Quincy Market, and eating at world-class restaurants in Boston, Massachusetts.
Spring is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the historic city of Boston Massachusetts. It’s after all the snow is gone, and the city is
"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 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 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 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
"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
"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
