Marketing

You know your industry, you focus on what your subscribers need and have a set formula on how to deliver it. Tracking your marketing results from start to finish, you’re able to understand your customer’s behavior on the web, how they renew and what channels work best for them. You even know the content that engages them most from your web analytics tools. So why even do market research? Why compile a customer survey and ask what your subscribers want when you already know?

Market research can help your business. As a general principle, basing marketing around your subscribers’ needs rather than your own intuition is a good strategy. Your customers have specific pain points they helped solve by buying your publication, and laying down a marketing strategy without taking their needs into account risks alienating yourself from what drives your business. Below are three main areas where market research can help you.

Grow your circulation

Circ marketers are diligently analyzing marketing results, web analytics and customer behavior to figure out what tricks will work to put net circulation on an upward trajectory. So where does market research fit?

• Learn the compelling reasons your subscribers buy your publication: You may know how customers find you and what content they like, but why did they buy your publication in the first place? What problem did you help them solve? Knowing this can inform the communications you use to different segments of your target market. It can also help uncover new lists to purchase.
• Find out what specialized language your subscribers use: How do your subscribers talk about the information that you sell them? Figuring this out can help you write better marketing copy, develop more effective search-engine-marketing campaigns and compile a more targeted overall strategy to market your publications.
• Investigate where your subscribers spend their time: Which channels do your subscribers use? What do they read? Which events do they attend? Can you replicate your marketing in those areas to drive more orders?
• Explore your publication’s strengths and weaknesses: Making sure you compare favorably to your competitors gives you the edge in your industry. And if you don’t, you’ll have an action plan to improve specific areas of your content.

Increase renewal rates

Looking at customer behavior can help you assess what types of efforts to send, when to send them and which offers to present. But again, marketing research can help you:

• Refine your message: Remind your customers of the emotional need they had to buy your publication. Not knowing this will cost your company subscribers.
• Assess your content’s weaknesses: You need a barometer to correct problems with editorial and make your subscribers happy before they expire or cancel.

Learn any reasons for subscriber dissatisfaction: Perhaps developing new content, improving customer service or approaching customers in a different way will help you retain them. If anything is happening that might lose you subscribers, know about it before it’s too late.

Evaluate new opportunities

Specialty publishers often find themselves trapped in a certain industry, unsure of how to expand their businesses. Success in one vertical doesn’t always mean sales in another. And just because you have a captive audience for one type of content doesn’t mean your subscribers will be motivated to buy something else from you.

• Systematically evaluate areas where you could launch new content: Is there a real pain point you’re helping to solve in the area you want to launch? Will there be a critical mass of subscribers to make your publication successful?
• Discover why your customers trust you: Can you capitalize on that trust to build new business with them using different content?
• Complete due diligence to properly assess a launch: When breaking into a new vertical, ask prospects if they have the same compelling arguments to subscribe as your current customers. What types of content do they want to see? Is their need strong enough to buy from you?

Conclusion

Good market research will have objectives tied to it. Whatever the strategy you pursue, asking your customers what they think can be a great guide to the direction you should take. If you wonder what your copy should say, how to approach your customers and what benefits to showcase in your marketing, there is only one easy answer: ask your customers.

You need web marketing to reach your target market. But when your prospects interact with your publications online, what do they do? Do they jump off your page? Do they find one article, stick with it and never visit anywhere else on your site? How well do they convert to paid subscribers? Below are some basic web metrics you need to know to effectively market your publications online.

1) Click-thru rate

Click-thrus are how visitors come to your site (they “click through” from an email or keyword campaign). Mostly, you want higher click-thru rates, but not if your funnel does little to drive visitors to the next step. Paying for clicks with search-engine-marketing campaigns is a great way to generate quality traffic, but if there’s no apparent goal upon a visitor’s arrival to your landing page, then you’re wasting money.

But with Google Adwords campaigns, don’t wish for a low click-thru rate regardless of your funnel. Because Google wants to make money, click-thru rates are more important than bids when deciding which position your ad will get. To illustrate this, consider two ads. A has a 10% click-thru rate and B a 1% click-thru rate. For B to make Google as much money as A, they need to pay 10x the amount that the first ad bids. If A bids $3 per click, B will need to bid $30 to reach the same slot. And if you’re not in the top 3, you won’t get much Adwords traffic.

2) Cost per click

How much do you invest for someone to click and enter your site? This is important because, presumably, you track your visitor-to-trial conversion rate and your trial-to-paid-subscription conversion rate. Therefore, you know the approximate value of each new website visitor.

For example, if you sell a newsletter for $1,000 per year, and you convert 5% of visitors to trials and 20% of trials to paid subscribers, then out of 100 visitors, you’ll get 5 trials and 1 paid sub for a 1% overall net conversion rate. That means your 100 visitors yielded $1,000. A click from outside your site is worth $10 to you. In your online marketing, you can therefore profitably spend $9.99 to buy your click.

Keep track of how much your clicks cost per Google campaign, per keyword group and any other way you think makes sense. In this way, you optimize your online campaigns for a better ROI.

3) Unique visitors

When marketers look for an overall metric by which to judge the popularity of their site, they used to talk about hits, which is the number of client requests made to your web server. With greater sophistication in web tracking, we now look at unique visitors.

Unique visitors are the individual people who come to your website, and it is probably the best overarching metric to use in circulation as it ties most closely to a subscriber. Tracking visits helps you determine how well your funnel works in converting visitors to members to paid subscribers.

As a side note, sometimes the number of unique visitors will look wrong depending on your time filters. For example, let’s say you records the number of unique visitors and find 2,000, 3,000, 2,500 and 2,500 over four weeks (10,000 total). But filtering over the entire four-week period gives you 9,000 visitors. How can this be? A visitor who returns in weeks 1 and 2 will be counted twice in the first search, but only once in the second.

4) Pages per visit

This metric shows engagement. When 10,000 visitors look at 30,000 pages, you average 3 pages per visit. This will change from week to week. If you have an extremely popular article, pages/visitor could drop as more readers only look at that single article. That doesn’t mean your website has failed, it just points out how users experience your brand over time.

5) Conversion rate

Track all the rates at which your marketing converts people to the next step. In web metrics, conversions refer specifically to moving a unique visitor to a specific goal. Most likely, the goal is the thank you page of a free trial form, but it could also be a particularly important download or engagement in a social media campaign. Track conversions on every step of the way but, most importantly, make sure you know how many visitors become trial subscribers.

6) Cost per conversion

Like cost per click, this will help you determine whether your Adwords campaigns are working. Knowing your free-to-paid rate, you can calculate how much to pay for a conversion. If you find yourself happy with your cost per click, but with no conversions, then give your site’s users a stronger push to a form or ask for less information from visitors who you want to sign up.

7) Bounce rate

A bounce rate shows how many visitors abandon your site at a certain spot. Each of your pages has a bounce rate, and high bounce rates are normally frowned upon. But in some scenarios, a high bounce rate is good. At an FAQ or customer service page, a high bounce rate indicates that customers have found their answer and are ready to move on. But if you have a high home page bounce rate, it means your content isn’t sticky. During big redesigns, pay attention to this metric to determine success or failure in showcasing your content.

8) Return visits

How many visitors do you get who are new? You’ll want to drive this percentage upwards when you’re campaigning to new audiences. As publishers with a lot of recurring visitors, this rate will be far higher than other businesses.

9) Time on site

Another way to evaluate the stickiness and quality of your content is to see how long your visitors spend on each page. By classifying your articles, you can determine where subscribers spend the most time. This will help you figure out which content to offer more.

Other things to look at

Path analysis: Figuring out the paths your users take through your site can help you understand their behavior and where they may be getting stuck.

Traffic sources: Where does your traffic come from? Hopefully you have a good mix of organic and paid search, social media visits and links from other websites. Seeing how your traffic comes to you can tell you a lot about who your customers are and what they care about.

Geographic locations: Where do your visitors live? Are you ignoring a huge potential market in The Netherlands, where visitors stream onto your site only to discover that you publish North American-specific content?

Service providers: Do any service providers stand out amongst your visitors? If you still have a lot of unidentified visitors (meaning those who haven’t signed up for anything), you may want to look here to identify any larger organizations where lots of visitors come to you. Maybe you could call those companies to sell them a site license or research the content they want to buy.

Browsers: Which browsers do your visitors use? Are they coming from their iPads? Have you made sure your site is optimized for the Android, which 10% of your visitors use?

Your web site is complicated, and it is the biggest door today through which your subscribers will find your content. So make sure you understand what they like, how long they stay, how engaged they are and, most importantly, that they can take the actions which will make your business successful.

After flying back to the relative quiet of my home in Oregon, I took some time to think about the Direct Marketing Association’s yearly Circulation Marketing Day. The conference was a great opportunity to learn new things and meet other circulation marketers. Below are 10 things I learned plus some questions I had on further reflection.

1) Big publishers are ahead of the game on mobile devices (because they have to be)

Tablets are changing the way publishers present and sell their online content. Forrester projects that, by 2016, 82 million Americans will use tablet computers. At the conference, publishers called tablets their “second chance” to properly sell web content. Indeed, they give publishers far more flexibility in giving their subscribers an interactive brand experience.

In my opinion, reading a magazine on a tablet is far nicer than reading the same content on a laptop. For a great example, check out The Economist app, which gives users a pretty slick presentation of its articles.

2) In driving ROI, there is no match for great database marketing

Database marketing promises great returns on investment for the publishers who can do it right. A good, custom-built database can mimic and surpass many well-known marketing automation platforms by allowing customer segmentation based on demographic and activity, presenting offers based on past behavior, renewing and approaching customers in the media they prefer and making sure advertisements for discounts only reach the prospects they are meant for.

3) Excel is still the visual analytics tool of choice for publishing executives

From what I saw and heard at Circ Day, Excel remains the most-used tool for presenting and consuming analytical information. Other reporting mechanisms have proven too difficult to use across organizations as marketers and other information consumers tend to ask for data they can manipulate and transform themselves. Despite its limitations, it looks like Excel is here to stay.

4) Things are definitely looking up

As the economy recovers, publishers are excited to sell more content online and transform their businesses in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The mood seemed upbeat, as evidenced by the “Back in the Black” theme. But attendees understood that selling information would not be the same as before. Still, they are more confident that their journalists produce enough value to charge for it, regardless of the medium.

5) Great creative comes from the gut

I always trust tests and analysis as the best way to develop creative. But testing creative doesn’t let you out of your self-imposed box. Sometimes you need to rely on your gut to completely revamp the marketing pieces you send, and your prospects will thank you with higher conversion rates.

6) Future revenue will come from a mix of pay-wall content and advertising

Publishers will no longer rely exclusively on advertising for their revenue. Good content created by professional journalists has value, and shouldn’t always be free. Going even further, paid content may even convince advertisers that their prospective audience is more committed to the information community in which they are participating.

7) An email and landing page are really the same campaign

This sounds like common sense, but a lot of marketers design an email first and think of the landing page as the afterthought. Marketers should think of both as a single campaign to help drive customer conversions.

8) It really does take a village

From all the keynote speakers who had done wonderful things with their businesses, we heard that it takes a team. If you want to do testing, database marketing, develop content for the myriad mobile devices out there and produce great creative, you need an amazing team of professionals who can get it done.

9) For some, get the email address. For others, get the money.

Some publishers find more value securing as many email addresses as possible, and then moving prospects to a credit card form. Others like prospects to fill out all their information at once. If you value a larger database, it makes sense to ask first for an email before scaring away potential signups with a credit card form. But if net sales mean more, get the commitment up front. If you’re not sure which option will work better for you, test!

10) Everyone loves a bookmark, especially in publishing

I hope everyone enjoyed the bookmark I handed out on Circ Day. Here is the full article on the 11 Essential Metrics for Paid Circulation Marketers. If any of you have different formulas for calculating lifetime value, I would love to see them.

4 Questions

1) Will micro- and segment- advertising take off with Tablets?

Yes, tablets create a total brand experience for information consumers, and they allow publishers to place ads in much the same fashion as in print publications. But how will tablets allow for advertising segmentation? For example, will publications be able to serve up ads based on users’ geographic area or other, self-entered demographic information?

2) How far will publishers push progressive profiling?

Some publishers are asking first for an email address and following up with a full form. What about asking for an email, then billing information and then filling in certain demographics each time a subscriber visits your site? The questions could be listed in a sidebar and not required. Interested subscribers could fill them in and give you more information on how to help them. Later on, that information could be used for segmented advertising or serving custom content.

3) Are publishers selling themselves short on email analytics?

In one presentation with email results, I saw mentions of open rates, clickthrus and conversions. But with more powerful email analytics tools available (check out Litmus), you can also track the below:

–          Who read, scanned or skimmed your email

–          Which email client they used

–          Whether they forwarded or printed your email

Using these, you can know your email recipients’ engagement, and you can determine which email clients IT needs to code for. You can also connect this data to individuals and use it to target emails. For example, you could send iPhone users emails on your next new app.

4) A lot of publishers have great data on their customers, understanding them by their purchase actions. Where does market research fit?

One thing that struck me about Circ Day was how well publishers know their customers by their actions.  But they didn’t say much about speaking directly to subscribers in the form of a focus group or survey. Do publishers have effective market research that they can incorporate into their offer copy? Do they survey subscribers to discover new content to launch? Do they have a strategy to connect questionnaires and reporting to their business objectives? See my article on how to create a great survey.

Are you drowning in data? Do you dread the day when your manager asks you about a certain metric that you didn’t even know about? The amount of data produced by circulation marketing builds up fast. From web engagement to lifetime value, it can be hard to represent everything in a concise way that stakeholders understand and appreciate.

An Excel graph is the basic form of data visualization we almost all work with. It shows us trends over time, and it is easily understood in the few moments a manager has to look at it. But the human brain can comprehend a lot more than a trend line, even in a few moments. And with new products like Tableau Software and Tibco Software to help us, we need to go further in helping our stakeholders understand all the various metrics that affect our businesses.

How would visual analytics help a typical circulation marketer? For one, more items can be graphed in the same space. A typical excel graph allows for two, possibly three dimensions – x for time, y for quantity and bubble size for a different quantity. But a product like Tableau Software allows you to use x, y and size like Excel, but also color, geographic maps, patterns, shapes and filters for other dimensions.

In this circulation marketing dashboard example, we see a circulation report, renewal report and geographic representation of subscribers. But contained in each chart are multiple dimensions we can use to view our data. In the circulation graph, the number of new orders is represented with both a label and the thickness of the line, whereas color shows publication. For the renewal report, thickness shows the size of each expire pool so you can tell where a low renewal rate will really hit your net circulation. Filters on the left side allow you to drill down into the numbers for a single publication. The map breaks down all paid subscribers by country and by industry segment.

In analyzing lists, response rates, new orders, circulation, renewals, lifetime value, satisfaction and what happens on the web, we need to get smarter about the reports that we produce. Excel tables will still have their place as the source data to feed our visual dashboards, but because we need to get more information into less space, we must start using more sophisticated visual analytics tools.

How do you show your potential subscribers the value of your products? Do you keep in touch with them throughout their buying cycle in a way that is both scalable and customized? Static web pages no longer work. Batch-and-blast emails treat everyone the same, unless you hire a team to parse out industry segments and content clicks. But a wide variety of platforms let you automate your marketing based on profile fields and activities.

Getting new subscribers

Picture the visitors to your website. They see your content and fill out a simple email form. Their activity history is pulled into a table that you can use to send emails. Each time they return to your site, you collect more demographic information via a progressive profiling form, making sure you have lots of data with very little intrusion.

Your visitors will now receive emails based on demographic, activity, geography or any other data you have collected. If they identify themselves as working for a financial firm, but download a whitepaper on CRM software, your platform automatically sends them an email focused on customer relationship management in the financial industry. Based how they react to that content, your program emails them again with something more. What you place on your goal landing pages also reflects these activities and demographics.

In this way, you sell your publications based on who your customers are and how they have interacted with your content. You recognize that different subscribers buy your newsletters for various reasons. With marketing automation, you can present your prospects with a specific value proposition that applies to them.

Cross-selling existing subscribers

How do you systematically present new offers to existing subscribers when you have multiple publications? For example, say a subscriber gets your lowest-priced, online offering. You know that those types of subscribers typically can be sold a print newsletter for more money 6 months into their subscription.

With marketing automation, you can schedule a series of three emails to all new online subscribers that sell them your print offering. Knowing which content they viewed in the online subscription will even help you tailor your cross-sell offer. You can also prevent prospects from receiving promotions on other products, keeping your marketing smart and focused.

Nurturing corporate-level leads

Depending on which leads your sales team values, you can set up rules for scoring and sending leads to your CRM for a follow-up call. Maybe a CEO who purchases subscriptions to two different publications is a definite target for sales, while a Marketing Manager who has a free trial is not. Maybe you want to narrow your prospects by which activities they take. You could include information on package subscription products in your emails. If a paid subscriber to two publications clicks on that information, then your CRM schedules a task for sales to follow up with her.

Conclusion

Marketing automation products are expensive and can take a lot of time to manage. Most are built for working with prevalent CRM systems like Salesforce.com, not for the fulfillment databases many publishing companies use. But B2B publishers who sell their content should ask themselves how much it’s worth to develop and implement a clean, focused online marketing strategy. If it meant 4-5 more multi-user deals worth $100,000 each or an increase in cross-sell rates of 5%, then the revenue may be well worth the costs.