A portfolio marketing approach has been at the heart of our success – allowing us to cross-sell extremely effectively, with a very large proportion of the file purchasing at least two products or more.
The portfolio marketing opportunity has been leveraged in two main ways:
1. Creating portfolio marketing campaigns that deliver maximum reach and cross promote all titles at once.
2. Leveraging scale and cross promoting brands to our overall audience.
Portfolio marketing campaigns
Seasonal occasions fall into two main categories – gifting occasions and special offers targeting personal subscriptions – with tempting special deals.
Many large and small publishers now create Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and other seasonal campaigns, as well as January and Summer sale activity. This activity has many benefits but the main two are extending reach and delivering economies of scale.
At Immediate Media, we run a significant number of cross-media portfolio campaigns: January sale, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day, Summer Sale, Back to School, Halloween, Clocks go back and the BIG one, the Christmas campaign.
Campaigns run across all magazines and are integrated cross-media campaigns using a significant number of marketing channels. These include online ads, paid search, email and direct mail activity, affiliate promotions as well as page ads, carrier sheet and onserts in subscription copies, inserts in newstrade copies and telemarketing.
Targeting a Good Food reader with a solus Top Gear offer, or a Radio Times reader with a solus Countryfile offer may well work – but the stakes are a lot higher than targeting the same reader with a pan-portfolio offer. There is far more chance that the Good Food reader will like card making, cars, television guidance, gardening, antiques, astronomy, science or cross stitching than a single interest area, or that they know someone who would love one of these titles as a gift.
Analysing the results of previous activity as well as developing new activity, trialing new propositions and testing different offers and formats are a key part of making portfolio activity successful.
Getting this right requires a great deal of planning. So we have two portfolio planning days a year – one to plan Christmas, which is usually held in April, and one to plan the rest of the activity. With up to 26 people in attendance and large amounts of data to absorb, these days require meticulous preparation in themselves. The aim is to get everyone on the same page as quickly as possible in order to facilitate the brainstorming of new ideas and assigning who works on what over the next twelve months.
Importance of analysis
We look at which titles get the most orders and differences in purchasing patterns pan-media. One key metric we describe as the generosity index, which, in percentage terms, tells us how likely certain groups are to give gifts to other people. Digging into this further, we also look at whether they like to give to friends with similar or different interests.
Analysis of campaign performance is done at a number of levels: overall response to particular channels, which is split into host magazine, email / address lists and other sub-group source breakdowns. To get this insight involves setting up thousands of codes to allow granular level insight into what is performing best. All this data allows us to optimise the activity plan and ROI.
We also look at behavioural analysis via the single customer view Arrow database. This tells us how many customers buy or give multiple subscriptions and has allowed us to track over the years the increase in cross-sell penetration driven by our marketing activity. It has also helped us to set targets to increase this KPI.
Working with other publishers
If you have scale as a publisher, this is clearly an advantage for big portfolio campaigns. That said, looking at smaller portfolios, where publishers often specialise in magazines that cater to specific and related interest areas, this is still a big area of opportunity. While the cross-sell opportunity is less in terms of absolute volume, the results can be still very high in terms of the percentage successfully cross sold to.
Even where publishers have a more diverse small group of titles or even a single brand, the portfolio opportunity can be accessed by working with partners in several different ways.
1. Organisations / Agencies such as Dovetail are proactive in the cross-marketing space, facilitating list sharing across publishing clients to send seasonal campaigns to the shared audience featuring titles from participating clients.
2. Publishers have banded together in the past to produce joint marketing campaigns, such as the old Cultural Publications group.
3. Working with third party e-tailers such as 3PM or iSUBSCRiBE, who use seasonal marketing opportunities very proactively.
A word on direct debits
Acquiring subscribers on direct debit and converting subscribers to direct debit on renewal is also a key pillar of our subscriptions strategy. This is a key influencer on what payment methods we offer and influences how we use pricing as a lever to incentivise taking out a subscription on direct debit.
There is a truism that people won’t give gifts on direct debit payment terms, as setting up a continuing subscription feels at odds with the usual practice of giving a subscription gift with a fixed value / fixed term (which is usually one year). However, we have promoted direct debits (particularly on renewal) and as a result we have nearly one third of the donor file paying by direct debit. Having looked at the data, there is a direct correlation with direct debit payment and giving a gift to a spouse, family member or partner living at the same address.
Leveraging scale
Operating as a portfolio publisher (either independently, or through joining up with others) also creates an opportunity to use scale to streamline systems, make processes more efficient and deliver cost savings.
For example:
1. Buying print across the portfolio for all campaigns in a single RFP process.
2. Negotiating mailing prices and downstream access postage savings.
3. Using one creative treatment across portfolio activity saves cost and improves response by increasing reach and recall.
4. Increasing the amount of campaigns that a team produces for each title with the same level of marketing resource.
Using the portfolio to support a launch
This article has focused so far on the benefits of portfolio campaigns, where many titles are featured to deliver maximum subscriptions for the minimum cost for each title.
That said, using other magazines within your own (or others’) portfolio to cross-promote is a tried and testing method to get good new subscribers on the file, at a decent cost per order.
This technique comes into its own particularly when launching a magazine, and magazines such as Lonely Planet and Countryfile have been launched successfully through a portfolio led approach.
Launched three years ago, Lonely Planet magazine now has an ABC of 62,204, of which 31,409 copies are subscribers. Growing this volume of subscribers and a subscription penetration of half the circulation saw us greatly benefiting from being able to target and cross promote to the portfolio, in addition to targeting external sources of likely prospects, and reaching out to the core Lonely Planet UK audience.
Understanding how the editorial proposition and target demographic mapped against existing reader and subscriber profiles, enabled us to work out where the overlap was, and to plan an integrated campaign with repeat contact points with very significant reach.
As well as creating core themes and consistent offers for the Lonely Planet campaigns that targeted the portfolio, the marketing team tailored the creative where possible to have maximum appeal for prospects. For example, the team using different images aimed at different groups of magazine readers.
The results can be cut in a number of different ways – analysing which individual campaigns, channels and prospect groups have performed best, as well as analysing at customer level to see cross-over between live subscribers to multiple magazines.
Intelligent cross-promotion planning
Where you have a wide range of opportunities to intelligently target different customer groups with different offers, you will also have competition within the portfolio for space, from individual brands and products.
Planning and prioritisation is essential to making sure that the business overall is getting the best return on investment.
Analysis of past performance and using a combination of interpretive, analytical and other techniques to predict future performance is a great starting point for getting this right.
Building this discipline into an ongoing marketing planning cycle is another important step, ideally synchronised so it works within the annual budgeting and forecasting cycle.
That said, for digital channels, as we are increasingly using more and more data sources to tailor and customise offers for different customer segments, there is much opportunity to optimise offers and activity on a daily basis, through test and trial and observing the consequent behaviours.
Final word
Portfolio marketing is fundamentally all about cleverly leveraging opportunities to cross-sell and target similar audiences with different products and offers. Behind this sits a very clear and in-depth understanding of the customer base and their behaviours. Within a test and learn culture such as ours, trying new things throws up a number of surprises in behaviours which then informs future plans.
This portfolio marketing approach has been a major driver in Immediate Media’s subscription success. Through harnessing new technologies and continuing to enrich our data and analytic skills base, we will foster even more in-depth relationships with our consumers going forward.
