8 Ideas You Can Use to Satisfy Your Subs

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2003

* Be a revolutionary: Cut your best customers a better deal.

Hachette Filipacchi Media is turning the tables on the industry-wide practice of offering the highest sub price to the best customers. "The notion was, because the pool for new business was so deep and so vast, and the introductory offer for new subscribers was such a big net, that we could pull anything we wanted to," says David Leckey, HFM's senior vice president for consumer marketing. "But that doesn't exist today, at least not for mature magazines." Hachette is now offering longtime subscribers - those who have been with a magazine two or more years - its lowest subscription prices, early in the renewal process. Adds Leckey, "A lot of people jump on that offer."

Additional reporting by Katie Caperton and Sarah Gonser