25 ways to customize your magazine - using selective binding and ink-jet technology

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Annual, 1994 by Steve Rees

How to use selective binding and ink jet technology to meet reader and advertiser needs.

1. If you're printing multiple versions of your magazine, integrate those separate versions into a single zip stream, and realize postal savings and bindery make-ready efficiencies while also improving the speed of delivery.

2. Give your ad marketing group the opportunity to send custom messages to the comp list. It's a good way to sell custom messaging using the technique itself, targeting your message only to advertising decision makers. You could even include the appropriate sales person's name in each advertiser's message.

3. Welcome new subscribers on their first issue with an inside insert between the cover and the first signature, containing an ink-jet message. Catalogers do this frequently.

4. Bind an actual invoice inside the issue, using selective bindery technology. When the bill accompanies the issue, pay-up often improves. Use ink-jet to image price and term.

5. Customize messages to subscribers under renewal promotion. This is a good way to show them your appreciation. For instance, an association could imprint a message which reads, "A continuing member since 1975." A consumer magazine could vary its message by issues-to-go, price or subscriber status. A trade publication could image the subscriber's industry, title, and function, and simply ask for confirmation or changes, and a requalifier's signature.

6. Survey small samples of your subscribers about editorial issues, binding in the survey only for those nth-name subscribers selected. Make sure to include the subscriber's match code or account number, and in turn link their answers back to their subscriber record.

7. Poll your subscribers about their favorite products in the markets served by your publication. Verify that each reader voted only once using ink-jet imaged match keys on the reader poll itself. This is an easy, inexpensive way to protect yourself against the possibility of advertisers stuffing your ballot box.

8. Offer additional editorial matter for sale to your subscribers, binding and delivering it piggybacked on your primary publication. The initial offer is most easily built into the renewal offer. Selective bindery technology allows you to deliver this extra matter for only a very modest incremental cost premium.

9. Personalize insert cards and use them for soliciting gift business, and watch response jump.

10. Personalize your bingo card, and watch reader service activity climb. You can even capture product request information yourself, and retain this information with the subscriber record, as long as the subscriber's match key or account number has also been imaged on the bingo card.

11. Combine the binding run for two or more monthlies, and co-mail the publications together.

You can also save money by gaining finer postal presorts and reducing the number of bindery set-ups.

12. Create new test opportunities for circulation inserts or outserts without incurring higher postal costs. Selective bindery technology keeps all copies in a single zip stream.

13. Create unusual regional splits for further refining both editorial and advertising matter. Even city monthlies could handle advertiser inserts for certain zip coded portions of their run-of-press, just as the newspapers zone their coverage by neighborhood. Offering greater relevance to your readers should translate into higher reader loyalty.

14. If you're a publisher who sponsors trade shows, or if your advertisers sponsor events, imprint a bound-in "ticket" containing the subscriber's name into your publication. The subscriber's use of this "ticket" indicates evidence of the pull-through power of your magazine.

15. Offer your advertisers the opportunity to test creative with a pure A/B/C split at very low cost. Selective bindery technology can realize this split without giving up continuous zip sequencing.

16. Offer your advertisers the opportunity to add to their print campaigns with additional insert materials directed only to a key segment of your readership. A regional monthly could offer an appliance retailer only those subscribers who have moved in the prior three months. Your magazine will begin winning dollars budgeted for direct mail.

17. Allow subscribers to request the suppression of strip-scented perfume inserts. Those readers who find the perfume scent noxious will appreciate the extra effort you take to please them. And your perfume advertisers will appreciate your avoiding the creation of any ill-will among the buying public.

18. Compete with coop newspaper dollars your advertisers are spending elsewhere. Establish a geographic link between your advertiser's dealer list and your subscribers' zip codes. Then image the name and address of the nearest dealer, either right on the page itself or on a direct response card. Eliminate those nasty vertical one-third page dealer listings in five-point type.

19. For association publications with radio or TV programs you sponsor, link your subscribers' zip codes to the ADI market reached by your broadcast. Then ink-jet image specific program information in your publication. It's a great member service.