Episode 6 | Interview with Greg Wolfe on magazine renewals and gift subscription strategies

Welcome to the Paywall podcast where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies. We will talk with some of the publishers that we work with at Zine 101. The things that work and the things that don't. There are so many amazing things you can do in the digital world as a publisher to not only increase your digital subscriptions, but also engage your audience. Let's get started.

All right, welcome back to another Paywall podcast. I'm Pete. I'm here with Greg Wolf, a very special guest. He is from Four String Media down in Connecticut. And we're going to talk about how to generate more profits from your existing subscribers. That's through some tactical methodology. Now Greg has been in the publishing space for 25 years or so. He brings a lot of knowledge from the print and digital world. And we're in this podcast. We're going to talk about print subscriptions as well as digital subscriptions and how to move them forward with, with your subscribers that may have credit card failures, need renewals and motivation to renew. We'll talk about motivating gift subscriptions and a lot more things. Now Greg has worked with some big publishers, Worth Magazine, the Atlantic, one of the largest newsletters in the country. And so we're going to dig in deep with, with the strategies behind motivating digital subscriptions. So Greg, welcome and thanks for coming on the, on the, on our little show here.

My pleasure. Glad to be here. And Pete, I would just say that I have worked with quite a few large publishers and sort of half a million million plus Cirque publishers over my career, but also worked with many very small, very specialty publishers as well. So I do have that background as well.

I can only imagine it. So the first question I just gotta jump out and ask you is, you know, you've been doing this for a long time, 25 years. Ish. And that means you've seen a lot. So you were back when you. Sounds like you got into publishing and the marketing of publishing just really at the dawn of the Internet. I mean 1995 I think is when AOL started mailing out all the CD ROMs, right?

Yeah. So I was in the business a few years before that right out of college and it was pre email, pre Internet when I first started working with print magazines.

So what have you seen? I mean we have this shift towards from print to digital. We still have some really dedicated print readership. We know the experience of print is really the best reading experience. I have not been in this as long as you have. I got started about 10 years ago. So we were full on digital when we started. But you must have seen a lot of ups and downs, especially on the print side. Is there anything in particular that has really sort of struck you about this transition to digital?

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that's really struck me is in the early days of email and the Internet, you know, people naturally start saying things like, oh, Prince is dead, right? Oh, that's it. You know, that's the end of print, that's the end of print magazines. It's all going to be digital. And you know, that was obviously very overblown, you know, and people were talking about, you know, five year horizons and things. You know, 20 years later there. As you say, there's a lot of print activity. It's different than it was 20 years ago. There's a lot less newsstand sales. That's a much smaller piece. But in the US newsstand sales was only 10% of consumer magazine circulation even 20 years ago. So it wasn't a huge part of, of the picture the way it was in other countries like the UK for example, where it was the majority of their circulation. But what struck me, I think is that as we went through this period of, you know, the digital, this digital revolution and how, what is it, what is the impact on magazines? And there have been many that magazines have been, have proven, I think, to be a medium that is very durable and an experience that just doesn't replicate that well on a phone or a computer screen, or at least it's a very different experience that you have with print magazines. And therefore consumers have demonstrated to us over the past 20 years that they really like reading print magazines, they're willing to pay for print magazines. And advertisers see that the engagement that readers have with the advertising is really powerful in a print magazine format. And I compare that really to the two probably main other print media that you would look to along with magazines, which is newspapers and books. And I think in both cases, the demise of print newspapers has been stronger and faster than the impact on magazines. But they've shown probably more resilience in the digital format. Pointing to major newspaper publishers like the New York Times or the Washington Post, who had just incredible experience and have now have very, very strong loyal digital readerships numbering in many millions of paying customers for those websites and the digital content and books as well. I would say obviously books jumped up to, I don't know what it is, 40% of sales being on digital readers, you know, fairly quickly once Jeff Bezos Got that Kindle reader figured out and started selling it for, you know, 100 bucks or something. And the price was right and he had the technology right. And it just ramped up really quickly. Nothing like that happened in magazines. Digital reading just didn't ramp up on iPads and devices and digital readers. It didn't ramp up in flipbooks. It just never took hold in the same way that it did in others like books. And so the print continued to be a very powerful part of the equation for magazine publishers. And that's what surprised me is the experience of, of magazines is unique. And so we have focused a lot of our energy on selling print magazines or bundles of print and digital online. And that's what's really opened up for the magazine publishing industry is the ability to have these new channels. Email being very, very strong channel for selling print or print and digital bundles and the website being a very powerful channel for selling and also for selling advertising. So that's, so that's, you know, that's been, that's increased a bit of way to increase business for publishers. One thing that I always think about is I think that magazines are a very unique medium also because I think they're really one of the only mediums where people buy the magazine not in spite of the advertising that's in it, but because of the advertising.

Really interesting.

I mean, and you can obviously think of some examples of that easily. Fashion magazines, you know, certainly, you know, people want to see those ads with those dresses or fashion in them, you know, and it's thick with ads. And that's a big part of the experience or think about any sort of, you know, sort of hobby or special hobby type magazine. You know, you want to see the gear, you want to see what the new, the vendors out there are selling, the latest equipment, the latest, you know, whatever it is. That's a big part. You're excited about seeing those ads and seeing those products and all that stuff. So that doesn't really happen. You know, you don't really look forward to the ads in most other places that they're delivering to you maybe, except with the exception of the Super Bowl.

Right. Well, it's what's interesting. You know, they call the magazine the lean back experience. The print, the print magazine and then the rest of the digital consumption is the lean in experience. So if you're on a desktop or you're on your phone and you kind of need to just kind of get through the content that you need to get through, but the lean back experience, I mean, it Seems to work because magazines typically don't, they're not reporting real time news, so it's not like a fire hose of information. And if they, they do a good job, you know, on a niche topic, then it's, it's something you look forward to. I can almost say the same thing, you know, for the local newspaper. I mean, I have friends who are, you know, absolutely dedicated print readers. They do not want to be bothered at all. And in the same conversation just recently, this weekend over Zoom, someone else said, no, no, I, the digital is way too convenient. I just want to go digital. So there's seems to be a very much a spl, you know, print versus digital on the, on the newspaper side. But on the magazine side, I agree with you. You know, what, what are the, what are the alternatives for a print magazine? The FlipBook and the PDF are just not very good in a lot of ways. They're not good on phones especially, which is probably the biggest drawback. And you don't get, you don't get, you know, that, that lean back experience. So it's pretty interesting. Do you see any, do you see any print magazines, sort of veteran publishers that are increasing their subscription base on print?

No, I would say I don't. I think that it's, it's, you know, I think they're all pretty much decreasing, but you know, some are decreasing a lot slower than others. And you know, everybody has struggled on the newsstand. As I, as I said, the subscription held up better. And so some of the big publishers still are hanging on to those, those larger rate bases. But I don't know, I would say not really of the big publishers. You know, one publisher that we were involved with that I did the circulation launch with was a magazine called Garden and Gun, which is a southern lifestyle magazine out of Charleston. And it won the National Magazine Award for general excellence twice. It's a very good magazine, very highly regarded. It's up to a circulation now probably close to about 500,000. It's probably 10 years old, somewhere in that range, I think maybe a little more. And that magazine continued to grow sort of year over year almost since it started. They had, you know, some bumps in the road when they first launched for a few years getting their act together. But after that, as Newsstands were shrinking 10% a year, as most publishers were not increasing their subscription basis, Garden and Gun was increasing every year, year over year. And it was just because it was a bit of a, it was a great magazine, it was very well done. Its design was Kind of unique and trend setting. And a lot of publishers followed in that footsteps. Their trim size was a little bit larger. Their cover stocks were matte finish instead of shiny gloss. They set some trends in terms of that and their design, and it really resonated. And then the subject matter, this southern lifestyle subject matter that they covered, which, you know, crossed a lot of different areas from food and travel and writers and music and, you know, events and all sorts of different things. Home, of course, and design. They covered, you know, a lot of different areas in a really interesting way. Really high quality editorial. And it really resonated with people, which, you know, is a lesson that I, that I've learned over the years as well. I think, you know, which is that, you know, that's the most important thing. You know, it seems obvious, but the most important thing to having a successful publication is having really good content that people want to read.

Absolutely. The key, I'll mention one thing that we experience as regards to pricing print magazines that definitely influenced sales. So a few years ago we helped Modern Drummer magazine relaunched their site and they packaged their subscriptions into basically two camps. One was, you know, digital only and one was print and digital. And so essentially they ran an experiment for over a year. I can't remember how long it actually went, but the, the price for a digital and print subscription I think was $30 per year at the time. And then we were sort of a typical, you know, print price point back back a few years ago and. But their digital price point was $60 per year, digital only. And so the idea was, okay, you know, the ads carry the revenue in print. How do we get print, you know, up quote unquote. And the digital ads don't carry revenue as well, so let's just charge more for the subscriptions. And the, you know, after a year, we had enough data that they shared saying, hey, you know, 80% of new subscribers came in on the print and digital side of the equation, which means that 20% went, decided they'd pay more for digital only to not have the print. Which I thought was amazing to me that 20% of people would actually pay more for digital only versus print. So, you know, they're not doing that anymore. They're not doing that anymore. Now it's more of an all access pass. But, but at the time, you know, it was a pretty interesting tactic, I.

Thought, and probably what it shows you too. Another experiment that they could have done, which, which would have been really interesting is comparing, you know, sort of a being the site with that Offer versus let's say digital only and print plus digital being the same price.

Right. Let's say that would have been smart.

Or even, maybe even a slight discount. And, and I think what it shows, it probably what it shows is that there were a lot of people that were very conflicted. They didn't really want the print magazine. They just wanted to read online, but they weren't willing to pay extra to read online. So they're like, yeah, I'll take the print if I have to, but I, you know, I'd really rather, you know, just to be digital. So. So probably for the same price, that split would go from, you know, 20% to, you know, 60%.

You might very well be right. And I think an a B test would have been a great idea or and still is today. I mean, why not? You can try it.

So I would imagine they were actually depressing their overall result, you know, because people were feeling conflicted. Wow. I don't want the print, but I also don't want to pay twice as much. So I don't know what to do.

Yeah, and at the time, it was the first stab at real stab it from subscriptions. So, you know, as new digital subscribers started coming on board, and they came on board pretty quickly, you don't have any baseline. You're just like, you're creating the baseline. As far as an a B test would have been a good idea for sure. All right, so I want to jump next into a little more tactical topics such as, you know, dealing with like annual renewals and fail credit cards and such. But before I jump into that, I really would love for you to tell your story to our audience on how the print sort of the print mailing database works or, you know, has worked for years. And so as far as, you know, we, when we talked last time, you told me that there, there are like 100 million households that are in this database. And the targeting is just amazing. Can you, can you unwrap that?

Sure.

That'll dovetail into, you know, follow up with, you know, with these renewals and such.

Sure. So what I was talking about was something that's, that's sort of come online into the magazine marketing arena more than 10 years ago. And it's, it's this concept of cooperative publishing databases where all these magazine publishers agree to put their subscriber names into a cooperative database. And there are four or so prominent ones out there that do this, which is interesting that there's as many as there are and that they're all able to Sort of exist or coexist. And they're all able to provide publishers with different names. Obviously, you're not going to multiple co ops to get the same name. So if you go to one co op and they do their modeling magic and they produce a list for you that they think will work well for you to mail in your subscription mailings, the other cooperatives generally can produce a different list, mostly different anyway. There's some overlap that you have to merge, purge out, but mostly different names that also work well. So they have, you know, which is very interesting because they're using these data scientists to do the modeling and scoring of all these names. So you have, as Pete, you said 100 million households in these databases, pretty much everybody and a bunch of data on them, multiple data points. Because of all these publishers that have contributed, you're able to analyze a lot of transactional data, which, as we know, is the most powerful data for modeling, for direct mail and for direct marketing, as opposed to things like people, you know, people get hung up on things like demographics and psychographics, you know. Yeah. I mean, how old somebody is. Can be. Can be important, certainly in certain publications or what their interests are. Yeah. Of course, knowing that somebody's interested in golf and you're want to promote a golf magazine, that's. That's important. But it's nowhere near as important as knowing that they bought a golf magazine through direct mail.

Right, right.

You know, it's 10 times less important the fact that they like golf, you know, because people like golf and they don't like to read magazine golf magazines or they like golf, but they don't. They buy their golf magazines at the newsstand or they like golf, but they, you know, they don't answer direct mail. They don't, you know, they don't like to use that. So they call up and order subscriptions on the phone or whatever. So, you know, there's lots of reasons why, you know, you could have a beautiful targeted person that you think is just right and it doesn't respond at all to your mailing or it responds poorly. So having this transaction data and knowing that they bought these other magazines and how many they bought for how long and that they renewed them or they bought them on credit or they paid for them. And all these different things about the transaction data that the cooperatives get and they're able to model enables them to really, you know, produce. And the modeling has gotten better and better year after year. And the transaction data has gotten better year after year because they've Gotten more of it. These publishers keep giving them more and more data every year. And so they learn, you know, who are the best customers from that publisher. Who. Who are the customers that have renewed for a few years now. The first time they got data, they didn't know that, but now they know it, they're getting more and more of it, and they build these models, and every year they build new models almost that take a little bit of a different tact with how to score the names, and they get better. So now, in my experience, they're probably 50% of the names that a publisher that's using direct mail to generate subscriptions on an ongoing basis, probably 50% of the names are coming from cooperatives as opposed to individual mailing lists, like another magazine publisher's list or whatever. And the response is, for the most part, the best response of any of the segments that would be in a campaign. So really important part of the publishing circulation, marketing, subscription marketing picture these days. Really, really important.

That's cool. So. So if I subscribe to a golf magazine and a tennis magazine and a, let's say, boating magazine just to pick free, that those, those transactions that I made with those three magazines end up in these cooperative databases.

So.

And if those publishers participate, okay, And I assume enough of them participate, so the hundred million households that are available have some pretty accurate data in terms.

Of very, very much. So all the big publishers participate in a lot of smaller ones too, as well.

Right, right.

There's a lot, a lot of data, and so that's why it works so well.

So is it just as maybe a crazy example. So let's say my tennis subscription is in part of this database, and a pickleball publication, which pickleball is growing like crazy in the US Wants to go after a list. I would be a pretty good candidate to go because a lot of tennis players do convert to pickleball, especially as they age. And. But although it attracts a lot of young players, too, I've seen both on the courts. And so that would be a great example of saying, okay, let's spend some money on a direct mail campaign. Send anybody who plays tennis or who has bought a tennis subscription this campaign. And then that converts.

Well, absolutely, yeah. I mean, that would be something that we would definitely test. So, you know, we would look at any tennis magazines, I think, that were on the market directly. And, you know, to your point, they may not be participants in any of the cooperative databases, so we might miss those names or at least the knowledge that those people, those people are probably in the database. But we wouldn't know necessarily that they subscribe to that particular tennis magazine. And so we would go probably to that publisher directly, you know, Tennis magazine, let's say, and say, hey, you know, we're looking to mail a subscription offer for Pickleball Magazine. What can we rent your names, you know, and try that directly as well as going to the cooperatives and having them do their modeling magic to try and find names for you based up. Because what they're doing, Pete, is they're taking. The only way that they can build a model is you have to have some names to start with. So if you're right out of the gate with a brand new magazine, there's really not a lot they can do for you. But once you've gotten some subscribers, let's say you've gotten some through your website, you've gotten some from insert cards, you've gotten some from various sources, you know, you've started your publication up and then you give them a list of maybe a few thousand people that have subscribed to your Pickleball magazine. They then look at those people, find them in their database because they're all probably in the database one way or another, and see who else that's in the database looks like those people.

Right, right, right, Interesting.

So it's not just the pickleball aspect. They look at everything about the people that subscribe to the Pickleball magazine and see, you know, all the attributes that they possess and then who has a lot of those attributes that's not currently on their Pickleball list? And those would rise to the top. And likely a lot of people that are subscribing to tennis magazines would rise to the top in these, in these models. Because that's the way the models work. You know, they figure out what's important.

Yeah.

You know, what's an important aspect. And they'll see that of these, you know, let's say 2000 new Pickleball magazine readers that a lot of them are subscribing currently subscribe to tennis magazines. Right. Wow, that's important. We have other people that subscribe to tennis magazines. They'll rise to the top in our algorithm. Algorithm.

It's amazing. The living. It's like a living, a living database. It's a smart. What a smart thing for the print industry to come together on.

Yeah, it's really been a lifesaver. It's, it's. You would think that the print industry would be too dumb to do that and see that they would Be like, you know, like you would think they'd be like, oh, no, I'm not going to share my name. That's, that's, you know, they're my own. I have to be protective. And yet this, this evolved to the point where, I mean, there are just so much data out there being shared. It is a blind database. These, all the major cooperatives are blind, so you don't know whose names you're getting. It's all behind in the black box. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. So you don't know who else is in the cooperative for certain unless they tell you and agree to make that public themselves, the publisher. But you just know they hand you that you hand them your names and they hand you a list back and say, this is who we think is good.

Yeah. So. And I know you mentioned this last time we chatted, but this would never work with email lists. Right.

No, you know, that, that's something that, that was sort of, you know, batted around for a while in the earlier days of the cooperatives and just has not taken hold. And I think the publishers have been, you know, like, a lot of marketing companies have been very reluctant to release email names, you know, for a lot of. They're just very different than postal names. Getting a postal name requires you to, you know, spend a fair amount of money to market to them. It's not like you can, you know, just, just send, you know, a huge number of marketing messages to them, you know, without, without an investment. So it's, it's a different dynamic. And, and we've, we've definitely learned that, that email marketing is a completely different animal than direct mail marketing. And, and so it is. Yeah, it's done very differently that we do not. It's basically as, you know, building your own lists, building up your own internal email databases and then marketing to those databases, you know, as people do with email marketing on a very frequent basis, sometimes daily, sometimes multiple times a week, you know, certainly many times a year, you know, is average for a good email name that you have in your database. So it's a totally different type of marketing and sort of renting or sharing names with other publishers has not been something that's, that's taken hold or worked effectively.

Yeah, it's too easy to get an address and too easy to get too much spam, of course. And the, you know, the other thing too with, you know, with digital is that relationship, you know, you have, you have the publisher has a trust with their audience and of course they're producing good content for that audience, but also the trust that they're not going to do something with their email address which is really the start of a digital relationship. And then from there, you know, with that whatever newsletter or free articles or whatever they're, you know, sending to the, to that reader, their next step is, is with subscriptions of course, is to convert the paid subscriber, which requires trust. And you know, you, you, that, that's like protecting your first party email data all the way in order.

Definitely.

So let's, so let's. Okay, so that's, so we have this awesome print database. We have. We have of course, first party print information for existing subscribers and then this, this print database. Let's jump into renewals as, as let's, let's pretend that we're working with a print publisher, print and digital subscriptions and they have as an example, annual renewals. We have email lists, we have first party print database. We have. We could talk about new subscriptions too. We have, you know, the cooperative databases. What, what, what do you see happening out there in terms of working well and let's focus on renewals for the moment in terms of do it. Do you know, are we doing, are you doing email campaigns out, Are you doing, are you doing a mix. Have you seen any trends in terms of what works well?

Yeah, yeah. And you know, sort of going back in the time machine again like we did earlier, we didn't have email when I started doing this, this type of thing. So standard protocol was to send out a multi effort mailed series. So you would start marketing your renewals four to six months prior to expire generally. Wow. And you would mail as many as you would mail different number of efforts depending on the source of the subscription. So new subscribers are less responsive to renewal. They renew at a lower rate. So you, so you can only afford to send a smaller number of efforts before the profitability becomes, you know, less than what you need. Whereas somebody who's been with you for two, three or four renewal cycles already, and as a dedicated loyal renewer of your publication, you might be able to be profitable sending as many as 10 or more mailed efforts. So that's not uncommon for that, especially for larger publishers where, you know, you don't get into things like the economics of setting up the inserting machine as much because the volumes are so big. You do run into that certainly and it can get more expensive to send out, you know, that many efforts. So that would be a little more unusual for a smaller publisher to get up that high. But not For a larger publisher.

Interesting, interesting.

I was working with Motor Trend recently in their renewal series. It's over. I think it's 11 mailed efforts. Wow. Yeah. So a lot of mail. So when email came along, you know, we thought, well, you know, if we get an email address then we could save all that money. We don't have to send any renewal notices through the mail. Right. We can just.

Right.

It's magic that way. Be fantastic. Sort of in the same way we thought, oh, now that we have the Internet and the iPad, we can just, we don't have to spend any money on printing and postage. We can just deliver everybody's magazine that way. Well, that didn't work out. Similarly, if you only promote your renewals through email, you get much, many fewer renewals in total than if you promote people with mailed efforts through the post office. So the best practices has become a combination of even if you have an email address and for a lot of subscribers, publishers don't have a good email address. More than 50%, I would say, of print subscriptions that are out there today, out in the wider world of subscriber land, the publishers don't have any networking email address, so they must send postal mail in order to try to renew. So but if you, assuming you have an email address, you know, the best practice is a combination. And usually we don't end up cutting back any of the print mailed efforts. We just layer the email on top. That seems to be the best practice. So, but, but you know, it could be something like, you know, six mailed efforts and four or five email efforts. And then often we layer into that a, a tip on, on the COVID or a cover wrap for the last issue that sort of screams loudly just to make sure that they, they got the message that the subscriptions at ending right. And so that sometimes the next to last and the last issue. Interesting. So for Motor Promoter Trend, it was both the next to last and last issue wrap was their standard series.

And what's the, what are the previous mailings? Are they postcards generally?

No, they're letters. So you want to have. Because such a high percentage of subscriptions that are sold through the mail are paid by check. Believe it or not, the vast majority are versus credit card or anything like that. Any electronic payment, you need to have an envelope for the check to come back in. So the standard format for a renewal notice these days is an outside envelope, a carrier envelope, some sort of a form letter usually combination that you can tear off a third of the form and send it back. And that has all your information about your name and address and all your codes and everything, account numbers and stuff, and the ability for you then enclose a check or ask to be billed or write a credit card down. But the percentage of people that write a credit card is fairly low, like less than 10% normally. So 90% are either asking to be billed or sending a check along with it. So you want to have a prepaid. In renewals, the best practices is a prepaid return envelope. You don't want to ask them to put a stamp on it.

Right, right, right.

In billing, when we bill a credit subscription, the best practices is to ask them to put a stamp on it. That seems to work the best, you know, in terms of the overall economics. But with the renewals, it's a marketing effort and you want to take away that friction and you want to just get that order in. And so the prepaid VRE envelope, so those are the standard components. You can put other stuff in there. You could put a little letter, you could put a little color buck slipper or something in there occasionally those are other items that you would see, you know, not infrequently. But 90% probably is just the three components. The outside envelope, the order form with an attached letter for letter copy, and then the reply envelope. So it's generally laser printed, you know, so that you can put the person's name and address as well as the various copy. Because when you're mailing 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 different efforts, you're, you're changing your messaging and you're becoming more, more urgent as you get closer to expire. Right?

Oh yeah, makes sense.

What's a buck slip?

What's that?

A buck slip is in direct mail. It's a very common promotion piece and I think it's called a buck slip because it's the size of a dollar bill generally. So it's a piece of paper. It's usually on coated, shiny paper and most often with four color printing. And what generally what it would be used for in a renewal is showing some color photos, some cover shots, things like that that you could. Because on the, on the order form it's most economical to just use black laser printing to print your messaging and all that. And then you can bring some color into it with a buck slip. And that's the same same situation with direct mail. In a direct mail package, you'd often have the same sort of dynamics of bringing in a little bit of COVID color and cover shots and other photos with Something like either a buck slip or a larger brochure. You know, something that had a few folds in it and was open up to a larger size. Cool.

So let me ask you this. I don't know if you know the answer to this, but you mentioned if you have an email address, there's a combination mailing where you use the print mailings are pretty much the same and then the emails get weaved in with the print mailings. Do you see, is there a higher response rate when you combine email with print or is it pretty similar? Is there any data on that?

Yeah, no, it does two things. I think it gives you a little bit more total response and it saves you money. Because if somebody responds to an email, it means you don't have to send them the next effort in the mail.

Right.

So it's making the overall campaign renewal campaign more efficient, getting more orders and mailing out less pieces.

Right, right. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Especially if you can cut off the need to send out print early on.

Which is why often the first thing we'll do is send out an email and just get a bunch of people that we don't have to send any print efforts to.

Right.

That makes total sense if they're email responsive.

And so is there. Do you see an effort by publishers with print subscribers that don't have email addresses to actually collect email addresses from them?

Yes. Yeah, that's something that has been a focus for publishers. They see the value in email, a lot of reasons, you know, certainly for the consumer marketing aspect, for, you know, selling and renewing subscriptions and selling gift subscriptions to their subscribers and things like that, but also for, you know, other things that they're trying to do. You know, successful publishers these days are multifaceted. They're not just producing a print magazine, they produce, they have a website business. So having an email address and being able to communicate with their people online and drive them to the website is obviously very valuable. Being able to potentially send sponsored emails that they get paid from somebody, a third party advertiser to send is very valuable. Being able to announce other products that they're selling or events that they're having efficiently through email is very valuable. So a lot of value to having that email address in addition to renewing subscriptions with it. Right, and so, yes, absolutely, that's. That's a key focus of publishers. They definitely want to try to get. Well, you know, we want to try to get our print subscribers to give us an email and we ask for it on paper Forms, you know, insert cards. We ask for it on renewal forms, we ask for it on direct mail forms. Not always, but a lot of times we ask for and then we do other marketing, you know, to try to get people to give an email address. So, and we do actually email pens as well where we go out to some of the big email databases, give them our names and ask them to look at the postal address and see if they have an email address that matches for that. And that can be pretty effective. You can usually get somewhere around 20% of a postal list you can match an email address to if you do this process.

Yeah, yeah, of course, it's quite efficient.

It's generally about 10 cents a match.

That's interesting.

What value addresses has certainly proved to be the lifetime value. Much higher than that.

Right. One of the things that we've sort of discovered with our, with our print clients is that a percentage and I'm going to say I'm going to pick a number. Around 50% of print readers don't want to be bothered with logging into a website. I don't know if you see that, but that, that makes, that makes it a little bit challenging when you're trying to of course collect an email address, but it also makes it challenging when we had a publisher who decided to stop printing altogether. And after about nine months of pushback essentially and all the, all the campaigns they sent, I don't know exactly what the numbers were and I don't, I don't know, you know, if they went after everybody six to 12 times or whatnot. But at the end of the nine month period they basically decided to go back to printing. Yeah, they went with a low volume print and, or, or medium volume on.

Demand digital print or something.

I think so, yeah, I think it was on demand. I don't know, I don't know, I haven't checked in recently. But they, they also, they also bumped their pricing from the 30 bucks a year to, I think their top end now is 120 a year for their, their top end offering. And they're getting it. You know, they're absolutely, people are paying for it and it's amazing.

Yeah, yeah. And interesting.

So you know, I, I, that sort of takes me into that, you know, print on demand scenario. We get a lot of questions about print on demand, especially from startups who, you know, they're maybe, they've been up for a year, maybe maybe two, and they're thinking about printing, you know, and what I find interesting is some, some publishers really have print right off the bat, print and digital as the sort of the double headed approach, they're absolutely committed to it and they're going for it. But I'd say that most of the digital only publishers are looking for some guidance on print on demand. And I don't know if you have, if you work with that segment at all and if there are any sort of, you know, either resources or things to just kind of look out for when going down that path.

I don't have a lot of insight into print on demand because most of the publishers that I've worked with are much larger and are printing in a conventional way with regular ink on paper type of presses as opposed to digital printing. But I think certainly I know that the technology for digital printing is very good and that at a certain level, level it's more economical to print digitally than to set up a printing press and print conventionally. And you know, it can be economic economical for somebody who wants to produce, you know, a few hundred or a couple thousand copies of a magazine to do so digitally where it wouldn't be at all economical to do it conventionally. So that's a help and that, that would enable some of these digital publishers to get into product print in a way that, you know, could be, could be profitable for them. And it's really just a matter of, you know, obviously every, every magazine is different. So it depends on how do you want to produce this magazine, how many pages, what kind of paper are you looking to use. Right, those sorts of things. And then how many copies are you looking to produce and, and you can get that pricing and, and the more copies you print, you know, generally the cheaper per copy. And so, you know, you have to price that out and see if that's going to work with you, with your publishing model. But it certainly is something worth looking at because it is not prohibitive and it could be effective. And as you said, you know, there are segments that really, of these, of these audiences, these publishers that, their audience that really is very interested in print, that is more interested in print and that would pay a pretty good price for it. So putting all those things together, I would certainly encourage those publishers to consider that and to do that pricing and to run those numbers and maybe do some of that testing and offer some print or bundled all access type of offerings and, and see how it goes. It's definitely something that they can afford to try. It's not prohibitive.

Right. And what do you think about if you really wanted to tiptoe into it, doing an annual like you know, maybe pre holiday book or something like that in print that you sell. Maybe it's a, maybe it's a coffee table book. Maybe it's a best of magazine, I don't know.

But I, yeah, I think that's, I think that's a great model. I think, Pete, you and I have worked together actually for a publisher that I think has done well with that Wooden Boat, with their, with their offshoot publication Small Boats, which I think it started as a print publication and it was an annual and it focused on small boats rather than sort of all classes as their other magazine does. And, and they put it on newsstand and that. I think that's pretty neat if you can, if you can put some copies out for newsstand sale. Yeah, sell copies to your audience. They have, you know, the folks at Wooden Boat have a lot of subscribers to their, to their flagship magazine. They have email newsletter subscribers, they have website folks. They have a lot of places they can promote so they can go out and sell that, that annual print magazine on small boats to their base. But then, you know, they, they, they expanded beyond that to a monthly digital version of Small Boats, which I know that you work with them on as well. And, and so, yeah, I think that's a nice pairing. Right. You could go the other direction. If they had launched it as a digital magazine initially and then thought about doing an annual print, I think that would have been successful too, I think either direction. So yeah, I think that's a good toe in the water to explore print. I'm a big fan of annuals. I think you can charge more from them. You can put in a lot of your best stuff editorial wise and come up with a really, really nice package and a good product and charge a bit more for it than maybe a normal magazine cover. Price, you know, over $10 often, you know, and sometimes even $20 for a annual and you know, put some, some extra pages in it, put some good paper stock in it, produce a nice publication.

Right.

And sell it to your digital readers and your, and your other folks. If you have email lists and website visitors and think about putting it on the newsstand as well. And you know, there are folks out there like me that can help with that, seeing if there's a potential to get that copies out onto the newsstand, sell some copies there.

I was going to ask you exactly that question, like, how would someone get on the newsstand? It helpful to have someone like yourself kind of guide them through the process.

I would say it's a fairly complicated situation. And it's very fast changing. There's been so much consolidation that it's very difficult for small publishers that are totally new to selling on the newsstand and are very small to navigate by themselves. And often that can be a scenario that isn't going to work out, that isn't going to be successful if they're too small. So. But yes, having. Having some expert advice on how to do and somebody with connections with the distributors to help navigate that process. That's a. That's a process where you have to have distributors and you have to have contracts with distributors.

Right, right.

So it's a whole process and you kind of need. You're not gonna. I think it's unlikely you'll be successful without having that knowledge and that guidance. So there. But there are quite a number of folks out there and consultants and things in the publishing space that can help navigate that and even advise right off the bat if it looks like it's something that would be successful on the newsstand and you should take the next step or probably isn't going to work out and maybe you should stick to direct marketing for your customers.

Yeah, we should talk. Maybe we'll talk later about T Journey. That's a very long form. You know, Evergreen High End Tea publication and probably make for a great annual. So I'll introduce you to the. And he's. He's been in the. In the coffee and tea business his whole life. So yes, I have a lot. All right, so I'm going to. I'm going to hit my list here of questions. We talked about renewals, the digital and the print sort of combination. Print only. How about like failed credit cards and canceled subscriptions? Is that sort of a similar approach that. Is there a different approach that you take with let's say a print or digital?

You know, I would say that you and I have talked about this, I think a little bit, Pete, and it's not a huge piece of the circulation. You know, it's not. The volumes involved in this are generally. Are not all that large. So it's not, you know, something that's focused on in a real. A lot of energy into it. But the most common is. Yeah, it's somewhat similar is you roll them into a more traditional mailed or emailed or a combination, you know, of efforts if the credit card isn't working, you know, so I think it makes sense a lot of times to go to them with a custom effort that says, hey, you know, the credit card, it wasn't valid and you know, can you, here's the link. Can you go back in and enter a new updated card to continue. But if that doesn't work and they don't update the card that, you know, you could get them to respond more traditionally and respond to either an email or a mailed effort where they can write in a new credit card or even pay by check if they decide they don't want to pay by credit card anymore. Or you know, the email of course clicks through to the, to the landing page and where they can put in the new credit card. So yeah, you know, some custom messaging about that and then rolling them into just hey, your subscription expired and yeah, you know, send us, send us payment either a check or put in a credit card to, you know, continue your subscription.

Right.

That's the approach.

Are you finding print publishers. Continue sending the issues beyond the, let's say the failed credit card date or. I remember back in the day when you used to get tons of print subscriptions, that was I think pretty typical.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's generally what that is, is a technique that more of the larger magazines that were advertising driven would use. And most of those magazines were selling based on a rate base and they were going through an audit through what was abc, the large magazine audit bureau, now called aam. And the rules for that allowed them to send three months worth of subscription of copies to a customer who had expired and not renewed and not paid for their renewal and still count them in the audit statement as part of their rate base, as their paid rate base. So they would do that in order to just sort of, you know, that's a way to a technique to get more rate base or have to get fewer new subscribers to replace expiring subscribers.

Interesting.

It wasn't never really a technique that was shown to be effective purely on getting more renewals.

I see, I see. Interesting, interesting. All right.

Get a little bit more renewals by giving them extra issues, but not much.

Right, right.

And you couldn't pay for the cost of the extra copies with the incremental rules.

Right, right, interesting. Yeah, I know that Stripe particular and other, other services available, they do a pretty good job of having people update their credit card information and retrying failed transactions. And it really works quite well. I mean, I don't know what the percentage is, but they recover a bunch of failed transactions.

Yes, yes. And that's. We and some of the service bureaus that the print magazines work with, like the large one CDS and some of the other smaller fulfillment houses have have that. They do credit card processing for most of their publisher clients, and they, and they have some, some options for credit card updaters that you can use that are cost effective. Yep.

Yeah, no, it's. That's money sitting there waiting.

Yeah. No, it's a good thing. You want to get as many of those credit cards to go through as you possibly can. And, and if there's some techniques with getting updates on the cards through the credit card processors. You want to do that. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, let's. Let's move on to the next bullet item here, which is related, but I think a little different. And that's gift subscriptions.

Yeah. Yeah.

One of. I know when we talked previously, we kind of. We went down the. The gift subscription thing and, and the thing that, that you taught me was the timeliness. Think of the relationship when somebody. Somebody signs up. But if I'm a. If I'm a print subscriber or a digital subscriber, you know, are there any sort of best practices for either upselling a new subscriber, which I think is. Is that honeymoon period or, you know, really focusing on. On holiday seasons being sort of the primary push? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah. For the most part, I would say the holiday period is the strongest period for selling gift subscriptions. So that's, you know, by far the largest sort of push and the largest volume. And that's true both of mailing, gift subscription marketing, you know, mailed efforts, as well as email, as well as promoting on the website. But, you know, sort of holiday special gift subscription. Give, give, give the magazine as a gift for the holidays that, you know, so the, the time frame, you know, the core time frame is sort of September to December. That. Yep. Publishers with large gift files and, and there are, there are quite a lot of magazines out there where gift subscriptions are a very large part of the subscriber base. And by large, that would be something around 20% would be a large gift file. Not unusual for a publisher to have 20% of their subscribers be gift subscriptions. And so for large publishers, it's sort of the same dynamic that we talked about with regular renewals. Renewing people for their own subscription is sometimes you can make money on a lot of efforts. And so we work. I worked on the Atlantic Monthly years ago, and they had a very large. It was about a 500,000 circulation magazine, and I think 20% were gifts. So that would be close to 100,000 gift subscriptions on the. Wow. So a lot of volume and the renewal series. So in gift marketing, the power of gift subscription marketing is being able to go to the donor, not to the recipient of the gift to get the renewal. Recipients renew their, their subscriptions at a low rate, but donors renew them at a very high rate.

Interesting.

And you just think about the dynamic on a gift subscription to understand why. Right. If I gave you Pete, you know that boating magazine last year and you were like, oh, Greg, that's so great, thanks so much. I love it, read it every issue and what am I going to do? Not renew it? No, he told me he loved it. Whether he was lying or not, he told me he loved it. And I'm not going to be a cheapskate and like, oh, what happened? He didn't renew the subscription, so I'm going to renew it for you. And so the psychological, the psychology and gift, you know, giving is very powerful. And so we go to the donor. And to go back to that Atlantic Monthly scenario, you know, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it might have been something like 10 efforts that we mail to the donor to try to get them to renew their gift subscriptions. Because there's just a lot of profit and a lot of very responsive and the numbers are big enough, you know, when you only have 500 gift subscribers, you know, those last four efforts aren't going to produce very much, just a handful. And it's just right. It's just not worth the effort to even bother with setting them up and mailing them. You know, it's a lot of work. So but with, with a hundred thousand gift subscribers, it's worth the effort. You could get hundreds more subscriptions, literally hundreds more, maybe even a thousand more by mailing an extra few efforts. So you know, that's, that's sort of the dynamic. And so, you know, you might even start in June promoting your gift subscriptions if you have a very large gift file. Right. And sending those rewards. You wouldn't send your new gift givers, your active subscribers who aren't currently donors until, you know, more like September, because you certainly can't mail 10 efforts and be cost effective. But you can mail multiple efforts to your active non gift giving subscribers to get them to give a gift. So we often will mail two, three or four efforts in the fall to, to the active subscribers with a special holiday offer. And the most powerful one for getting people to become a donor for the first gift is this. Two for one, offer your own subscription and give a free gift. And that's a powerful offer.

Oh, that Is good. Yeah.

So if a subscription costs $20, and you say, hey, Pete, you know, renew your subscription and you can give a free gift to anybody you want, and we're. No extra charge, you'll be like, yeah, well, okay, my subscription isn't up yet, but I'll do it, you know, because I can give a free gift. And that makes sense. And then the next year, of course, then the psychology comes into play, and I say, pete, you know, you gave Greg a gift subscription to that boating magazine last year, and he loves it.

Yeah.

It's 15 bucks. If you want to renew it, no freebies.

Right, right, right, right, right.

So it's powerful and it. And it produces, you know, over two or three years, a good profit. It can. It can produce a good, profitable circulation for a publisher. You're investing in the first year. There's not a lot of profit, of course, because two for one, right?

So what's amazing to me is that number 20%, and that tells me if anybody's listening, and they don't have 20%, you know, gift subscriptions, if it makes sense for their publication, of course, but if they haven't hit that number, then that's.

And, you know, we shouldn't overstate that. I mean, that would be for a magazine that's a very good gift magazine. Yeah. Some magazines, you know, as you. As you say, you know, like Weight Watchers doesn't really have a lot of gift subscriptions.

Here's the Weight Watcher subscription.

Pete, I got you a subscription to Weight Watchers. You know, just saying you, you know, hope there's some good advice in there for you.

What are you telling me, Craig?

So, you know, but. But absolutely. If you think, you know, that your magazine lends itself to gift giving, and a lot of magazines do, certainly. And a lot of people who have a certain interest have friends that have that same interest. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, if it's a guitar magazine and I'm friends with people that play guitar, that would be a perfect gift, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's fantastic. All right, so let's. My last bullet point here is moving subscriptions from digital to print or maybe from free registrations to digital. And I know last time we talked a little bit about it, I can't remember exactly what came out of it. So I wanted to revisit that bit where I think you were saying that if a print publisher has a digital subscription, they're a good candidate to move. I mean, a digital subscription, they're a good candidate to move to A print subscription. Is that, am I, am I remembering correctly?

Yeah, possibly. I think both ways. And it really depends again on the publication and, you know, and the goals. But you know, I've seen scenarios where publishers are, have print subscribers and obviously delivering that publication in digital can save a lot of money. And so especially if it's a more mission based publication, they can use that angle to say, hey, you can save us money, you know, for the mission that we all believe in here. And we'll just send your subscription digitally, but we'll still, you know, we'll charge the same amount, but we'll send it to you digitally. So that I've seen that work. Certainly. I think if somebody's getting digital access, there is an opportunity for some people to upsell them to get print for an additional charge. Yeah, I think that that can work. You know, there's so many different factors that have to be considered, you know, in every scenario is a little bit different. But yes, you know, absolutely. I would certainly think about both of those concepts and whether either of them or both of them make sense for your market.

Yeah. It seems to me that there's a challenge that no one has the, really the answer for and that's how to figure out what somebody who is a digital subscriber, you know, looking at their behavior, maybe they're a candidate for print and really vice. And like you said, and I didn't even think about it, but we were print subscribers to our local newspaper here. We literally had litter in our driveway, you know, because, well, we had two small kids and, and, and we just couldn't get out to the driveway to pick up the newspapers. So we, we ended up moving to a digital subscription. But I, I bet if, if the publisher had sort of preempted that early on, we, yeah, we wouldn't have been, we wouldn't have costed them the one year of, of print litter that they created, essentially. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yes, absolutely. So, so there, I think there are definitely scenarios like that where if somebody, if you offer them that they could switch to digital and that there would be some segment, not a huge percentage, but some segment that was interested in doing that. And even, you know, sometimes it makes sense to give them a cut in cost because if it's costing you $10 a year to deliver the print publication.

Right.

All right, I'll give you, you know, a couple bucks off. Right, right. So instead of, you know, 20 for the print magazine, I'll charge you, you know, 18. But as you said, the reverse Is also often true. And that goes back to my statement that every. You have to look at, you know, the entire publishing model and every model is different. The. Those print subscribers could be very, very valuable to you in terms of the advertising that you're selling. And you want to do everything you can to hang on to them. In fact, I, you know, you could see a scenario where they would go back to you, Pete, and say, hey, we really want you to continue to get the print edition of our paper and we're going to incentivize you to get that.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, and you have your example about, like a fashion magazine. Right. Where the.

Yeah.

The experience is driven by advertising. You know, that I didn't make that connection, but now it makes total sense that, yeah, of course, if I were into fashion, I would want to, you.

Know, and I don't know if you read, you know, Popular Science or Popular Mechanics magazines when you were a kid like I did, but you love those ads for all those gadgets and gizmos and motorbikes and all sorts of fun stuff. Right. Gyrocopters or whatever they were advertising and that.

And that's why I probably ended up on the Spencer catalog and the Harrington catalog and all those gadgety catalogs.

That's right. Yeah. So, you know, the ads. The ads are great in magazines.

That's funny. All right, cool. So I'm going to sort of. The bullet points are over. I want to go to the wacky questions part of this conversation. Maybe not so wacky, and I don't know if you can answer this, but you've had a lot of experience with print and digital now and have you. I wanted to ask if you've seen a publisher really do something wrong with the new changing market digital marketplace and then turn things around and come back from it. And, you know, the thing, the thing that I jumped, maybe somebody. Somebody go aggressive early on, which I know a lot of publishers didn't do and are starting to do now. But it could also just be, you know, print related or. Or maybe somebody who started with print only and didn't offer digital. I don't know. I'm just, you know, you have a lot of experience in this. Always interesting to hear stories about ultimately successes from failures. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. You know, I don't. I'm not sure anything's coming to mind on that scenario at the moment, Pete, unfortunately.

And I know we're. Well, that's all right, because I. We're. I know that Today, you know, with the conversations we're having with our publishers is, you know, a lot of the veteran publishers still haven't really jumped into Digital. You know, 100%. You know, they sort of tiptoe their way in, but they haven't gone far enough to be able to actually turn on a paywall, which is obviously what we do, and start taking those subscriptions. And in order to actually turn on a paywall, you gotta kind of have your stuff together to do that.

Yeah, so that's definitely true. That getting to the point of the paywall and charging for the website content is definitely still in early stages. So I think, you know, we've seen a lot of success with the publishers that we've worked with, that I've worked with, that have done that, and you have as well. So, you know, it's definitely something that's a good strategy. I mean, one thing does come to mind actually to your prior question is publishers made, you know, some of the publishers made a very, very strong leap into digital with tablet publishing and the Apple Newsstand in the early days, and they invested a lot in enhanced versions of their publications to be produced as an app in the Apple Newsstand with additional features, with video, with additional photos, with all sorts of stuff. And they, and they spent quite a lot of money on staff and an additional, you know, team at their, at their offices to put those enhanced digital versions together. And those failed sort of across the board. And it was sort of a flash in the pan. People were excited about reading things on iPads when the ipod first came out and there was a little bit of a spike, but it sort of fizzled. And most people decided now that wasn't the best experience and that they weren't that interested in doing that. And so those publishers then sort of retreated and went to very simple replica edition digital editions of their magazines. Didn't spend extra money on it. And, you know, there was a small, we talked about that the market for the sort of a replica replica of a print magazine is small. And so they did, they did back off of that. And where they found success was moving into the web content, delivering their content on their website and then ultimately getting involved with. With paywalls, charging for it. Right. So yeah, that was a misstep that they sort of backed off of. Right.

Well, Apple, they canceled the newsstand. I mean, they just stopped whatever years ago or whenever it was, I can't remember. So that put them all on a lurch. And I remember at the time there were a lot of iPad App platforms, iPad only, magazine platforms. I still subscribe to one today. I think it's a mountain biking magazine or something like that.

Yeah.

And it still drives me nuts because they send me the email saying that the magazine has been published and I have to go app to Read magazine and I never do. It drives me nuts. It's like, no, just send me to the article. Well, I just want to say thank you for your time. I mean, we've spent over an hour talking, so this is, this has been great and it's been helpful for me and hopefully it's been helpful to publishers listening to this. But let's, let's catch up. Greg, where can people get in touch with you if they want to reach out?

The website for my business is four string media, all spelled out.com and that has all my contact information and everything. The email is. You can email me@greg gregstringmedia.com all right, awesome.

Well, thanks again, Greg. I'll let you go and talk again in the future.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. You can find us@paywallpodcast.com Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player of choice and we'll see you next episode.