E-Marketing: By combining tried and true database techniques with the power of the Internet, magazine publishers are taking subscription and circulation campaigns to new heights

Circulation Management, Nov, 1999

Indeed, while commercial and technological impediments remain, few doubt that e-mail will become a major force in circulation marketing in the years ahead. And the reason for that is simple: e-mail's potential, if managed properly, is enormous.

For starters, e-mail allows publishers to reach readers and potential customers at significantly less cost than traditional methods, simply because there are no postage, paper or printing costs. "Even if I highball the cost of Internet transactions, and I lowball the cost of postal, I still show that doing campaigns over the Internet costs about one-third what they cost using

traditional means," says Gray, adding that, "Other analyses show four-to-one, or five-to-one differences. So in addition to being a more robust way, it's much more cost-effective."

Beyond economic considerations, email, when combined with database technology, is infinitely customizable. That is, any message or combination of messages can be sent to an individual based on their demographic and psychographic profiles, as long as their e-mail address has been appended to the subscriber file. "If you had information about people who are interested in boats, and you knew one group had boats valued at $25,000 or less, then you might make a selection based on the value of the boat. They might receive a broadcast e-mail sponsored by a particular advertiser, while those with boats above $25,000 might receive a different message with a different advertiser," notes Gray, adding that, "If you knew what type of boat they had you can embed that in the message too. This adds a one-to-one marketing element; when you can send an e-mail out to a person that has information very specific to them it's obvious when they get that message that you know something about them and it's not just a shotgun approac h."

The key to doing this successfully, according to Brad Seller, sales leader at Conway, Arkansas-based Acxiom, is to ensure that e-mail addresses become part of the marketing database, and are not stowed away in a separate file. "This will allow you to do reverse appendages by taking those people and their e-mail addresses, and flipping them back to data we already have so that you can make more intelligent business decisions based on the data coming in."

Finally, the fact that e-mail operates virtually in real-time (under ideal circumstances, the recipient receives the message almost at the same time it is sent), means promotion campaigns and subscription drives can be measured in days, as opposed to weeks or months.

SPINNING A WEB

Of course, e-mail is just one facet of the Internet. Another, which most publishers are already exploiting as an editorial medium, is the World Wide Web. Beyond providing another way to present content to readers, the Web holds almost boundless potential as a mechanism through which they can provide feedback to magazines, including the type of information about themselves that is extremely valuable to marketers and circulators.

Nowhere is the more true than in the business-to-business arena, where circulators must qualify readers according to strict audit criteria. With that in mind, a number of B-to-B publications have begun moving their qualification cards to the Web, where they can get detailed feedback from prospective readers without the cost of printing blow-in cards or a big direct mail campaign. To date, publishers report that this method is proving highly effective. For instance, Miller Freeman's Rockwell says that, while the company's Web-based subscription efforts are still in their infancy, a full 10 percent of its new subscriptions are coming in over the Internet. "One thing we are doing now is, if you fill in a paper form and give us your e-mail address, our system will automatically acknowledge you with an e-mail. It might note that you are not qualified and would you like to pay for it? Or it might ask five levels of opt-in questions."