Subscription Marketing – Email and Direct Mail Working Together
Centaur Publishing recently demonstrated that Email and Direct Mail can effectively work together in a bid to boost paid subscriptions of its weekly magazine MarketingWeek.
From the outside the campaign incorporated a free subscription period reinforced with an integrated Direct Mail and Email strategy to push the benefits (A new profile section, A Marketer2Marketer section, An updated trends section, new columnists and more) of signing up to a paid subscription.
Without knowing the finer details the campaign seemed to contain the simple process of ‘Offer’ & ‘Reminder’ as a Direct Mail Piece and Email. This can be seen in the diagram below.
The offer and reminder emails were very simple, and clear, with the benefits of why someone should take up the offer being very apparent.
Inital offer and stage 2 email
Subscribers were given the option to subscribe for the free trial by email or fax, and were also encouraged to pass the offer on to interested colleagues in a bid for Centaur to further broaden the reach of the campaign.
Once a subscriber had enrolled they received their complimentary magazines for a set period. Then when it came to the last free magazine they were informed that this would be their last unless they continued with a ‘Paid’ subscription. Anyone that did not sign up to a paid subscription was then targeted with a dual approach by Email and Direct Mail.
Creating this type of targeted campaign that uses both Direct Mail and Email is not as complicated as it may seem. All it takes is a little planning and the sharing of information between both the CRM and the email platform. For instance, Adestra’s MessageFocus platform has the ability to automatically target subscribers on multiple levels due to different behavioural traits and automatically export custom reports for use by other marketing mediums such as Direct Mail.
I don’t normally take much notice of DM pieces due to my natural bias towards email, however MarketingWeek’s campaign did catch my eye when I received a postal reminder and an email reminder with the strap-line ‘M ss ng Someth ng?’, They really complemented each other really well.
To learn how you can run effective campaigns like this and get the most out of your database, please refer to Adestra’s whitepaper ‘The power of automatic data filtering and recurring email campaigns’ or get in touch with your assigned client strategy consultant.
Daniel Murphy, Client Strategy Consultant
