Hard Offers Come on Strong

Circulation Management, June 1, 2004

Byline: KRISTINA JOUKHADAR

For the first time in recent memory, hard offers have surpassed soft offers as a share of total offers tracked by MarketRelevance.com, ParadyszMatera's promotion-tracking service.

What's more, "the growth we're seeing has been driven by lots of new mailers using them or trying them," said Paul Freibott, associate director, research for ParadyszMatera.

"Much of the growth of hard offer usage can most likely be attributed to the runaway success that subscription marketers have seen in recent years with the universally appealing and highly versatile voucher package," Freibott continued. "While not all voucher packages use hard offers, the vast majority do."

And because the main selling point is the price (not editorial, fancy images or sophisticated teaser copy), there is little need to serve a free preview issue, Freibott continued.

Of course, not all of the hard offers being mailed are tied to vouchers, said Freibott. It's not uncommon for niche titles to tie a hard offer to a double postcard or edit package, and a handful of bigger titles still do the same.

These offers are often incentivized with attractive premiums to make the bill-me offer more appealing.

"While circulation people may have mixed feelings about voucher ubiquity (some find it frustrating to ever beat them in a creative test), there is no denying that as the dominant industry trend, they have contributed to the shrinking share of soft offers and the growth of hard ones," Freibott said.

Freibott noted that the top hard-offer mailers (as determined by number of pieces tracked) haven't strayed from using their own hard offers in years.