How to leverage a subscription marketing network to build your email list and grow your business
If you’ve ever joined a club, purchased a membership, or even became part of a team, you understand the benefits of mutual collaboration and teamwork. This year, our goal at Mequoda was to help our Gold Members run and grow their subscription marketing and publishing businesses even more effectively by creating a publishing network of like-minded publishers.
One strategy we tried was to leverage the network to introduce free content to each other’s subscribers through a community circulation-builder program.
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The concept is pretty simple. Every month, each publisher in the network mails something that looks like an old-fashioned stamp sheet to their active email subscribers. Each tile on the stamp sheet represents a free book, report or guide that is available from a different publisher in the network.
Of course, to participate in our community circulation builder program you must have free guides, reports or other content that can be easily represented in the tile.
Below is an example from Yankee’s New England Today newsletter:
This email from Yankee offers up nine downloads, including:
- Best New England Vacations from New England Network
- Ten Top Biblical Archaeology Discoveries from Biblical Archaeology Society
- Bible Food Recipes from Recipe Lion
- How to Invest in Stocks from Cabot Wealth Network
- How to Start a Vegetable Garden from Old Farmer’s Almanac
- Easter Celebration: 35 Excellent Easter Recipes from Mr. Food
- Popular New England Recipes from New England Network
- Complete Nutrition from University Health News
- 12 Easy Weeknight Dinners from Cookstr
We’ve been doing this for years with clients who own multiple websites or who can barter the program with one or two other publishers. As our network of subscription websites has grown and the circulation has grown even faster, we realized we could make the program bigger and more successful by streamlining the business processes that govern the network.
The Mequoda Subscription Marketing Network includes 60 independent subscription marketing websites which offer consumers 180 magazine, newsletter, membership and club subscription products.
Each individual publisher benefits by accessing a very large audience of Internet savvy consumers who buy information products. Consumers self-select into one or more of the 60 subscription marketing systems based on their level of interest in different types of content.
Members of this network include:
- Biblical Archaeology Society
- Cabot Wealth Network
- Catster
- Ceramic Arts Network
- Countryside Network
- Dark Intelligence Group
- Dogster
- Forester Network
- I Like Crochet
- I Like Knitting
- Indian Country Media Network
- Investing News Network
- LPM Media Group
- Mequoda
- NAPA Net
- New England Network
- Old Farmer’s Almanac
- Prime Craft Network
- Prime Food Network
- Program on Negotiation
- TSI Wealth Network
- University Health News
- Vida y Salud
- Your AAA Network
From cooking and crochet to health and investing, each of these websites provides high quality content designed to make each subscribers’ life better. The network includes an abundance of free content that is highly optimized for search and social media. Our unique methodology is designed to help consumers use the Internet to find accurate free information about topics of interest and then lead them to premium subscription products.
New England Network was built for Yankee Publishing to promote their venerable and popular regional magazine named Yankee, and covers everything from food, to lodging, to seasonal road trips and events in New England.
Cabot Wealth Network is one of the oldest and most respected independently-owned financial advisory services in the U.S. Cabot sells several premium advisory services, including specialized investment newsletters and memberships, and registrations for an annual Wealth Summit.
The international Ceramic Arts Network is a well executed example of a membership system that includes magazine content, video courses, a reference encyclopedia, member galleries and a myriad of discounts relevant for ceramic artists.
“Taken individually, each of our publishers is relatively small,” says Kim Mateus, the Executive Vice President for Mequoda Systems, who manages the program. “Taken in aggregate, our 60 systems represent almost eight million daily email newsletter subscribers, and a monthly web audience of more than 41 million.”
“The Mequoda Method is based on creating Internet systems that make it easy for consumers to find free content that leads to paid content on the subjects that they care about,” says Mateus. “We see this new content network as an extension of that core mission.”
If you’re a legacy publisher who sells premium content and would like to learn more about the different ways you can join our network, schedule a FREE call with a member of our consulting team.
