The September / October issue of InPublishing magazine was mailed out on Friday. (Not on our mailing list? You can register here, and, if you want, put your home address in the ‘comments’ box when it appears…)
One of the highlights of the issue was our first ‘subs special’ (sponsored) – a twenty page deep dive into one area of publishing that has grown considerably in the past six months.
Here are just a few of the many bits of good advice from the article:
- Make it easy: confusing customer journeys are a prime cause of ‘click-away’.
- Build a culture of continual incremental improvement for your subs marketing: test, learn, iterate, repeat.
- Increase personalisation: a one-size-fits all communication strategy, be it for renewals or any other aspect of subs marketing, is destined to under-perform.
- Build engagement and a sense of community amongst your subscribers. Engaged subscribers tend to renew; unengaged ones, err… don’t.
- Nail that first communication: a long delay between subscribing and hearing from you or receiving that all-important first issue, saps subscriber enthusiasm.
- Your renewal programme should kick in the second they first subscribe.
- Put as much resource into renewals as acquisitions.
- Work out your KPIs, share them with everyone who needs to know them, and report on them regularly.
- Invest in your product. The moment your core brand stops evolving and improving is the moment your subs numbers start to dip, however good your marketing.
- Let the lifetime value (LTV) metric be your guide. Everything you do should be informed by LTV considerations.
There’s lots more where that came from in the piece.
I can say, with some confidence, that if you follow all the advice in the feature, your subs will do very well. If you’re already following the advice, you’ll know that already.
