nextstepsmarketing.com

    July 14th, 2010

ONLINE

5 Successful Tips for eGifts

1. Think about ‘em early. While they take less time to “mail,” they can take a heck of a lot of time to iron out the kinks as far as design, and back end implementation on both your site and your fulfillment house’s site.

2. Mail them late—the beauty with eGift blasts is they take one second to be received and approximately 72 hours max to be responded to. So, consider launching them later than any of your other gift promotions.
   
   
3. Test subject headers before you go out. Just like any other email marketing, you want your biggest bang for your buck. So, shoot out 2-3 subject headers to a subset of your group, and once the responses come in, send out the highest response subject header.
   
   
4. Have at least 3 entry points to the order form/landing page. Do not make it a block image, as tempting as that may be. If you have to choose between sending out a block image (jpeg) and a text-only blast, choose text-only.
   
   
5. Match it up! Make sure your emailed efforts are promoting the same price, premium(s) and term as your mailed effort. If you want to promote something different, make sure it doesn’t undermine whatever your very much more expensive but effective mailed efforts are.

PRINT

Would you believe an envelope that goes both ways – who knew?

Maybe you’ve heard about this nifty 2-way envelope – the same envelope you mail out is mailed back – no more separate BRE inventory – but thought it was too expensive to consider. As we all await the outcome of the exigent rate case that the USPS has just filed the idea for this envelope may truly have come. Audrey at Light of Consciousness Magazine tells us that this particular envelope from ecoEnvelopes sports the following characteristics:

• Easy to use – an (admittedly) unscientific test revealed that even the most “unsavvy” quickly figured out how it works.
• Printed on 100% FSC certified paper.
• An oversized window (lots of room for unique messaging).
• Cheaper than using a #9 return and a #10 window for each mailing.
  
  

RETAIL

Pricing Our Magazines on the iPad  

The jury is out on how we will be able to price our magazines on the iPad. Here's a few data points to chew on:

• Wired, which sold 93,000 copies of their first ever iPad digimag issue (about 20K more than average newsstand sales), is dropping the price by a buck on their second issue to $3.99.
  
  
• Pop Sci aficionados are squawking at the $4.99 single copy iPad price, saying they can get a sub for so much less in print.
  
  
• BCG Media did a mongo survey in March 2010 that found readers willing to pay between $2 and $4 for a digital magazine on the iPad.

The good news? They are willing to pay! The not so good news? They are not yet recognizing the benefits of the digimag that make it in all ways equal in value to the print magazine, in some ways superior.