Shifting Sources

Circulation Management, May 1, 2003

Addressing Source Shifts: B-to-B Magazines

For B-to-B titles, rising mail costs and declining response rates are only part of the circulation challenge. Business books have also found themselves trapped in shrinking universes, constricted by the budget crunches, job cuts and wholesale company shutdowns that accompany tough economic times. All of this has a dramatic impact on a circulator's ability to develop new sources and find innovative combinations of traditional sources at a time when the demand for such is critical.

The picture isn't pretty. "We hear it from our renewals," says Ken Turtoro, circulation director of Chemical Week Associates. "Of those who don't renew, at least half of that number is no longer there. It's not that they don't want the magazine. There's nobody sitting in the chair."

Getting whoever remains on the phone seems to be circulators' best hope these days. Among controlled business books, the shift from direct mail to telemarketing in the last few years has been dramatic.

Although a third source, email, is showing increasing possibilities, tried-and-true methods still deliver the bulk of new business. "It's not so much 'new' sources," says Michael Zane, director of audience development for CMP's Business Technology Group. "It's more about what we're doing inside the old traditional umbrella of sources."

B-TO-B CONTROLLED: TELEMARKETING RINGING OFF THE WALL

"Telemarketing is just going out of sight for everyone, myself included," says Jim Wessel, circulation director for Mount Morris, IL-based Watt Publishing. "More and more, we're just going straight to telemarketing." The numbers seems to bear out that trend: according to CM's 2002 survey of controlled B-to-B circulation, telemarketing accounted for an average of 32.2 percent of new subs, virtually twice that of the next source category - direct mail.

"Everyone is frantically trying to get new subs in the most cost-effective way, and it seems to be coming around to telemarketing," observes Barry Green, VP, director of circulation for Hearst Business Media. "I'd say in the last four years, more and more publications have gone that route, either eliminating or severely cutting down on their direct mail."

Green observed also that circulators who previously kept a tight rein on the percentage of new telephone subs they generated seem to have fewer qualms now that direct mail's cost-effectiveness has eroded. "There was a time when the directive was, we shouldn't go more than 15 percent telemarketing on the file. Or, okay, if we have to, we could get 25 percent. Now we're in the 60s," Green says. "The reason that a large chunk of the new subscribers is from telemarketing is because of the decrease in direct mail responses. The written requestors that you have available for requals - the cover wraps and broadcast fax efforts - you don't have for new subs." Green estimates that about 8 percent of his new subscriptions come from direct mail - a number that would have been 50 percent five years ago.