We’ve stopped apologizing for our content … and it feels good.

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For many years now, I have been working on a variety of b2b and “pro-sumer” magazines and news products here at Access Intelligence and elsewhere. As I have learned (and sometimes unlearned) subscription acquisitions best practices, I’ve come to understand all the rate-term-offer tactics that make up most control packages. I’d like to think I understand how and when to deploy soft offers, manage free trials and exploit a wide array of other direct marketing techniques. Despite all that fluency, all I really need to know now is how to not apologize.

In our pursuit of ever more responsive marketing offers, we have trained our audiences and potential audiences to expect deep discounts or worse. We have taught professionals that all business information is free–free from payment and free from having to truly qualify for the content. In effect, we are often saying to our audiences, “Oh please read our content. We’re not sure it’s worth much so here’s a big discount, a generous free trial…We’re sorry, we’ll leave you alone now.” And as we deeply deploy most or all of our content online, we have the added issues of the common notion: Isn’t everything on the Web free?

Clarity Is Key

At a recent conference on online marketing, one of the speakers said that clarity is extremely important when selling subscriptions online. We’ve been taking this literally– basically saying to our content audience, “We’ve been working hard at this content, this news, this analysis…it’s good stuff. This is what it costs, and you have to pay to see it.” No heavy discounts, no clever offers (OK, a few clever offers) and no bait-and-switch when it comes to free subscriptions.

In b2b magazines, we have usually focused on managing the audience to maximize the quality of the BPA statement for obvious reasons. This means that in hybrid paid-controlled environments we’ve had to take a middle ground, flooding the space with free subscriptions or having extremely high CPO numbers for paid subscriptions. With our Web sites and online offerings bringing us new and exciting channels of sale for all types of customers, the message to potential readers and site users has to be even clearer, better integrated and more focused.

We have the tools and the technology to go way beyond forcing customers to purchase the way we want them to, when we want them to. Online and offline, we’ll use these tools to get our pay-to-play message out in a straightforward manner. Our no- apologies strategy affects our pricing, as well. We have simplified all our internal and external pricing tables, removing many special offers that were reinforcing the, “We’re sorry, please take a subscription…here’s a huge discount” policies of the past.

How have these new strategies affected our subscription sales? I’m happy to say positively. As we’ve been clearer about pricing, subscription options and what content is available, we’ve seen stronger Web site traffic, new customers testing and paying for our services and our traditional customer base paying more. So much of what we’re doing is basic direct marketing technique. Now that we’ve gotten our content marketing strategy back on track, we can focus on the downstream variables to truly exploit these opportunities.

It’s time to abandon “fulfillment”

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For more than a year now, I, and our team at Chemical Business Media division of Access Intelligence have been working on making major transitions in how we create and present content online. We’ve been devising major changes in how we monetize that content, all the while revamping every process we use. Part of that transition was moving fulfillment vendors and re-tooling our entire back-end systems for customer information and order processing.

Why then did we simply move our databases from one fulfillment vendor to another instead of truly revamping how we think about maintaining customer information and how we interact with it?

We started with a very simple “brief”. Our new systems must be able to maintain traditional “BPA auditable subscriber files” while managing and gating our websites, expanding our overall marketing database functionality and helping us to consolidate customer information.

The key variable here being “maintain traditional BPA files”. Our thinking was, as is the thinking of most of my circulator colleagues, that outside fulfillment vendors and/or traditional “inhouse” software packages are required to manage and deploy our traditional print magazine subscriber files and audience metrics.

But, is this true anymore? Are we at the point now where we can manage all our traditional “circulation functions”, control our websites and expand our audiences armed only with a good database and a smart web development team?

For the past few years, when I work with our smart IT and web development people, they are very interested in building registration forms and databases. Simple forms and reg processes are relatively easy for them to create and deploy quickly. The downside, of course, is that each process and request on our site is managed and maintained separately and all the traditional check and balances for BPA audit are not present. Additionally, make this a paid order and issues around earning/deferring revenue, taxes, refunds, etc. become problematic.

More recently, even the above issues have become less problematic as we’ve been able to straightforwardly deploy these “in-house forms” and handle these traditional back-end functions. The one area we have not tasked them with is handling the processes and tracking necessary to manage a subscriber file to BPA’s rigid standard (rigid being a good thing in this context).

I think now that we could do this “in-house” with enough web developer time and some savvy on the part of our audience development team. In others words, eliminate the fulfillment vendor completely.

Now, before I get angry calls from my friends at the fulfillment vendors, the operative words above are “with enough web developer time”. Because the dynamics of building your own “bespoke” in-house system vs. working with an outside vendor are always tricky and often hard to quantify.

But, the economics of leveraging your web development team to create and maintain these systems are fast becoming much more compelling, as are the inherent benefits of working more closely with your in-house IT team.

The tighter integration that is inherent to having the entire registration, gating, and authentication process in-house means you should be able to test and deploy new offers, workflows and functionality quicker.

Plus, the “connective tissue” between your master marketing database and your website structure is much more robust, allowing you to personalize the user-experience and subsequently increase registrations and orders. And, most importantly, with one team handling the whole process, technical issues and workflows are better managed and maintained.

Additionally, the conventional wisdom of, “doing fulfillment in-house means you spend money to be always ahead of the curve technologically and hardware wise” no longer is problematic. Online media almost requires you to have extensive, ongoing systems development and enhancements. Now, more than ever, the requirements of websites, e-messaging and related technologies mean we can have continuously improved and re-developed database and registration/ordering systems.

In this vision of a fulfillment-less world, do our existing vendors and partners have a role. Of course, especially if they build on their traditional strengths of efficient, high-volume order processing and management of demographics in an audited environment. But, they only have thsi role if their solutions are easier to scope and deploy, more “turn-key” and much more “bleeding edge” than they are today.

I’m hoping our traditional partners can help us build everything from “one-click” ordering systems to elaborate, context sensitive e-commerce and customer data management solutions. But, if it’s getting easier for us at CBM (a relatively small content provider without a large IT infrastructure) to internally deploy forward-thinking site management, access control and user interface systems, it’s only a matter of time before we move all these functions in-house and leverage all the exciting development work we’re already doing.

Audience measurement in 2008 – the wrong metrics?

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I think I’ve been working in B2B magazines and media far too long. For more than 20 years I, and the professionals around me, have been tightly bound to the almighty BPA “Circulation Statement” and its rigid codification of our audience and their value to advertisers.

I’m tired of all that. (And no, this is NOT a rant against BPA and BPA statements!)

It’s not a big surprise that how we measure the audience, who we’re measuring and when has changed. As more and more news and information (as well as business intelligence) is created for and consumed via the internet, everyone in magazines and business media has been asking questions about changing metrics and our responses to them.

But, I wonder, have we been talking about the wrong changes? The wrong “new metrics”?

For the past few years I, and many of my colleagues have been refining our “circulation strategy” working to integrate “digital editions”, understand new ways of gathering “requests” deploy new types of subscriber demographics and figure out how to record telemarketing calls.

All of this is central to our ability to maintain traditional audience numbers and satisfy advertisers’, but is it the central question of our audience development work anymore?

New sites and new behaviours

Recently, here at Chemical Week and Chemical Engineering we underwent a major re-deployment of our websites, e-messaging and overall online offerings. While not “bleeding edge” by any measure, our new websites have met or exceeded our own internal goals and forecasts. This is true in overall site traffic and other standard web “metrics” as well as advertising and subscription revenues.

We have a good story to tell concerning our web statistics, but that “good story” even more clearly shows the holes in our overall understanding of our customers’ current behaviours and future behaviours.

Our advertisers, and sponsors want to know not only how many site visitors viewed content, or clicked on ads, they want to know who clicked on what content and what ad. It’s not rocket-science, its basic lead generation.

In addition, we need to know how content users and site visitors are testing, buying and using all of this information we have for sale. It’s not rocket-science, it’s basic direct marketing.

We struggle to identify, manage and report these numbers because we have not completely connected our site traffic measurement systems to the traditional “metrics” and systems we’ve always relied on (fulfillment vendor databases and BPA statements).

Are we ignoring the elephant in the room?

A recent posting by Randall Rothenberg of the IAB summed it up nicely. Referencing an article on audience measurement in The New York Times, Rothenberg lamented the lack of emphasis on one of the web’s primary purposes, “the ability to match buyers and niche sellers through the perfect media vehicle.”

I couldn’t agree more. Despite many years doing just that with print media (crudely, to be sure), online we seem to focus on broad measurements like page views and ignore the very measurements we’ve traditionally provided … quantifying the direct connection between buyers and sellers.

Even assuming some naivete on my part concerning online metrics, why is it that publishers like us here at AI are having to request and custom build the systems to capture these metrics? Why is it that all the database, audit and fulfillment vendors we work with seem startled by our need to connect site usage behaviours to customers in our databases?

While we in audience development have been focused for example on the minutae of “digital editions” (forcing this new technology into existing metrics “buckets”), we’ve not been pushing vendors and systems to link-up website behaviours and our extensive customer databases.

We’ve not been requiring our vendors to be “best of breed” database AND e-commerce/order management systems (ok, so I’m starting to sound a little web 1.0!) . Until these systems seamlessly allow us to capture customer order data, gate/manage site access as well as customer privacy/permission information, we’ll continue to be forced into deploying parallel systems … once again ignoring the critical final step. Connecting customer ordering behaviour with website usage behaviour.

We want to make this final connection NOT because it’s great to have MORE data, but because it’s a natural extension of the types of information/metrics we’ve always provided advertisers and sponsors.

Action items for 2008

Deploy “connected” systems. Without raising the long festering “central database” issues/concerns, I do think we’ve gone beyond “nice to have” when it comes to connected online registration/database/ordering systems. Not only will we be completing these feedback loops this year, we’re going to assume all our vendors are ahead of us getting this done. From the moment a customer clicks through to our websites to when they consume the content, we’ll directly link all their behaviour to their master record. No more will we rely on broad aggregated metrics, we’ll know who’s using what information/tools/site features and when.

We’ll be armed and ready when advertiser clients demand and get “the ability to match buyers and niche sellers through the perfect media vehicle.”

Ahead of the curve systems-wise, for once. It’s time for “legacy” vendors and partners to be ahead of publishers. In 2008, I don’t want to have to scope out every detail of how these systems should work, I’ll expect my vendors to have done the R&D and be ready to tell me how to make these connections.

We’ll be spending our time educating and enlightening advertisers and clients, our vendors and partners will have the “turn-key” solutions ready to go (or, they won’t be our vendors for long).

This year, I’ll put up with training a partner on “who is BPA?” to be able to use and exploit the cutting edge website and audience development tools being deployed by large and small online content and information suppliers.

It’s time for me to know more about what IAB is doing than BPA. 2008 is the year that I’m going to “walk the walk” when it comes to full understanding (is that even possible?) all the “new metrics” and ways to exploit them. And, I’m hoping BPA will help me “talk the talk” by helping me use and exploit the new metrics and measurements that are relevant to advertisers and inegrated marketers.

I’m hoping we’ll spend our time learning to quantify how our customers engage our content, not how to record telemarketing calls (a current audience developers and BPA obsession). OK, that was a small “rant” at BPA.

And fun was had by all …

Whether it’s finally making these connections happen systems-wise, catching up with advertiser needs and wishes, or simply pushing the envelope with BPA and vendors, I’m excited to be handling audience development jobs and projects. Let’s hope all my colleagues and vendor/partners enjoy the ride as much as I will.

Damien Yeung works on database project

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Damien Yeung, one of B2BCIRC’s audience development consultants has been working for the past year with our largest client, Questex Media Asia LTD. on our redeployment of their database systems and ongoing audience development. Besides attending and managing Questex’s participation at several major industry events in Hong Kong and India, Damien has been working directly with Asian IT and telecom associations to build better kinks and partnerships for Questex’s publications and websites.