If you’re going to be an online subscription marketer, there are three things you’re going to need, in no particular order:
- A content management system (CMS). Not only should it be dynamic and responsive, it needs to be conditional and respond differently to a known and unknown user. It should know who you have a relationship with, and who you don’t—who is a subscriber, and who is not.
- An email management system (EMS). And not just a Tier 1 system with great delivery rates, it needs to be able to perform marketing automation with targeted list segments. When you want to promote an all-access library, for example, you wouldn’t promote to people who already have it. You’d send something different and your system should know the difference.
- A subscription management system (SMS). Otherwise known as a fulfillment system. Some basic requirements include continuity billing with different frequencies and terms, quarterly and annual subscriptions, and the ability to handle step-up pricing on a programmatic basis so that a subscriber can come in at a low-price offer and renew at a higher price later.
Our company, Mequoda Systems, has gone through several phases. We started as a consulting company, where we were documenting the best practices of our clients and advising. Then we saw a need to build technology to support the strategies we taught, because there wasn’t any software out there capable. We invested more than $10 million to build our Haven CMS and a suite of tools to go with it.
The EMS and SMS we have chosen to outsource exclusively, while building robust interfaces between the SMS, CMS and EMS… which makes up a complete Customer Experience Management System (CXMS) for publishers.
Now we are seeing a need for marketing services to implement the strategies we teach. And we are just beginning to take on clients who aren’t using our proprietary tools so that we can truly help any legacy publisher implement the Mequoda System and our Six Sigma marketing strategies on any technology. We are now a central marketing services agency for more than 21 Systems, 16 organizations, and over 200 premium subscription products and can be more flexible accepting new clients. Below is a chart showing the CMS, EMS and SMS in place for our partners:
If you would like to learn more about how we can help you grow your audience, revenue, and profits—schedule a call with us to see all the ways we can work together.
