Finding new subscribers: original approaches

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Feb, 1989 by John Klingel

Finding new subscribers: Original approaches I was introduced to the magazine Low Rider when one of their employees attended a Stanford Publishing course at which I was speaking. Low Rider was directed toward people who equip their cars with customized hydraulic systems that position the car bodies just a few inches off the ground. The cars can then cruise up to an intersection, bounce up and down on their hydraulics and peel out.

The typical reader of Low Rider was a 16- to 21-year-old Hispanic living in a Spanish barrio near a major city. One of my first questions was how the publisher could reach the magazine's readers, since it isn't easy to find good mailing lists for such a specialized market. In addition, the market is probably too narrow for direct mail agents, and it's very difficult to control newsstand distribution by ethnic area.

Low Rider was sold primarily at the retail level by going direct to retail outlets and bypassing traditional newsstand wholesalers. The principal outlets were liquor stores. To sell these outlets, the publisher put a couple of young men on the road and paid salary plus car expenses. Often the salespeople would use local sales reps (did I imagine a hint that they used local gang members--and what liquor store could refuse that sales call?) to call on the liquor stores. When I asked about their newsstand sales, I was told, "We don't do very well. We only sell 90 percent." And they were serious. They really didn't know that a 90 percent sell-through was terrific.

The people from Low Rider also mentioned that they did a little direct mail, so I asked them what lists they used. It turned out that in order to develop a mailing list, they sent staff members to car shows and copied down license plate numbers in the parking lot. If they had been experienced magazine people, they probably wouldn't have come up with that great idea. What a terrific way to get the names of real enthusiasts for a special interest magazine!

Using your imagination

All this is by way of introducing the idea that most traditional sources of subscriptions were unique at one time. Before there were blow-in and bind-in cards, somebody had to come up with the idea. Today, the traditional source include newsstand, direct mail, insert cards, gifts, agents, space and TV--but at one time they, too, were new. Although there's no precise definition of unique sources, I use the term broadly to define any source that's not traditional or widely used. Although Low Rider used direct mail, they used a nontraditional or unique way to get names. And they used nontraditional methods to sell through retail outlets.

Accepting the challenge

When I was circulation director at Learning, our board of directors suggested that perhaps we weren't being aggressive enough in pursuing alternative ways to market the magazine. This followed a presentation that showed how dismal direct mail economics are as a method of marketing. Not being one to take criticism lying down, I prepared a 12-page report that documented the incredible number of new source tests we had conducted. And I put together cost recaps for each test. Most of our tests had failed. One of them cost us $10,000--from it we got 10 subscribers at a cost per subscriber of $1,000. And the tests had absorbed an enormous amount of management time.

If you spent a lifetime testing unique sources, the majority of the tests would be failures. And they would be costly in both dollars and management time. The odds against finding new sources ave very high. That may not be an encouraging observation, but it's a realistic one. Still, it's no reason to give up on the idea.

When you're trying to develop unique sources, think about what your readers do, where they go, their work environment, and other aspects of their lives. Teachers teach at schools, for example. When I was at Learning, I could get lists of teachers at schools, and of course I used them for direct mail campaigns. But because I knew that a lot of direct mail ends up in the waste-basket, I looked for alternative ways to reach teachers. We put copies of Learning in teacher lounges; and in addition to the insert card returns, we used the distribution as part of our ad strategy. When it turned out that the insert card returns were small, we looked for other techniques. And we came up with a concept we called Principal mailings.

The concept was to mail a package of order cards to the principal and have the principal pass them out to the teachers. Frankly, we didn't think principals would do it--but maybe their secretaries would. Then we decided to change the concept and mail the package directly to the secretary. The package consisted of 25 to 50 order cards, depending on school size, and a letter asking the school secretary to put the order cards in the teachers' mailboxes. We also enclosed a free poster that could be put up in the teachers' lounge. The poster showed an exhausted teacher with an ice bag on her head and the caption "No one ever said teaching was going to be easy."