FILMFEST DVD
a magazine from BroadcastDVD.
Way ahead of its time, FILM FEST DVD showcased the best from the world’s Film Festivals as well as high-def trailers and exclusive interviews with the stars, directors and creators making the best new films.
We created a subscription marketing launch plan as well as helped develop new packaging ideas and strategies for exploiting newsstand sales.
Video magazine for sport compact racERS and their fans
vmotion video magazine presented by vmotion racing takes you inside the world of sport compact racing like no other DVD. From the hottest racers to coverage of recent shows, races and events, vmotion is the DVD by racers for racers.
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.
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.