Losing subscribers without gaining new ones is a universal fear for any subscription-based organization, and rightly so. When a decrease in active subscribers leads to an overall decline in revenue, publishers may find themselves facing uncertainty about the staying power of their product, or worse: the future of their business.
But what if we told you that you don’t need to be crippled by a fear of decrease? What if we said there is a method that can substantially increase your growth?
And what if we were there to guide you to success?
While Six Sigma direct marketing has been around for a long time, the complexity of the discipline was simply too much for most independent publishers. After several years of intense testing and research, we’ve adapted the Six Sigma methodology to the process of online subscription marketing such that it can be used effectively by organizations of almost any size. After piloting several programs with our clients in 2017 where subscription revenue increased from 70% to more than 100%, we are now making this program available to both current clients and other subscription-based publishers looking for an outsourced solution to grow their audience, revenue and profits.
Our Six Sigma program has three components: offer testing, creative testing and audience development. The audience development component combines our blockbuster management, email capture optimization and database append and import programs. Offer testing and creative testing change the way your products are presented in cycles, garnering response rate lift and weeding out marketing failures from successes.
Subscription marketing is a complex business process that requires many specialized skills and a disciplined business framework. A well optimized program can generate revenue and orders that are many times higher than the output of programs run by most independent publishers.
Our method revolves around 3 major components that are proven to drive subscription revenue:
Content horsepower: The Internet is a voracious content marketing platform. Our most effective six Sigma subscription marketing programs often include 16 unique email marketing efforts deployed during a four-week creative testing cycle. Then each new cycle is top graded to include the eight winners from the previous cycle and eight new creative efforts. Because our team includes multiple veteran copywriters and a library of frameworks and formats that have been used successfully over the years, we can produce this level of creative output in a fraction of the time that would typically be required by another organization. Without this level of new creative and top grading, subscription marketing programs are constrained by reusing the same creative over and over, which dramatically limits both order volume and revenue. This compounds over the years as lower new order revenue, then limits the size of renewal orders and renewal revenue.
Offer testing: Finding the right offers in the right prices for an Internet-based subscription marketing program can be elusive. The multiplicity of sources that should lead to your order flows can create an updating nightmare, preventing you from finding the “offer sweet spot.” Our Six Sigma program brings the simplicity of a four-week testing cycle with the same offer across all online sources to create statistically valid results over a series of four-week test cycles. The program is both rigorous and methodical and relies heavily on the offer and price testing done across other client organizations and products. Our methodology also relies heavily on contrast pricing, the principles of economic behaviorism and the options available only to credit card continuous service driven offers.
Audience development: Every subscription marketing program is limited by the size of the database which drives it. Our organization has a long history of using organic and paid media programs to build online databases that are both responsive and vast. Our blockbuster content marketing strategy is the industry standard for harnessing search, social and referral traffic. Our 3C zone conversion architecture and all its creative elements generate visitor conversion rates that are 10 to 20 times the industry average enabling rapid database growth. Our Six Sigma testing programs keep conversion architecture fresh and relevant. And finally, our database specialists know how to harness your postal subscriber files, expire files and other available databases to mine relevant consumers who are ready to respond to your subscription marketing offers.
Mequoda clients are extremely diverse in the markets they serve and the content they publish, but they all share a common bond. By using the Mequoda Method, each client has found great measures of success that has generated more growth than they ever thought possible. Our six Sigma, blockbuster management and email capture programs have been carefully crafted and coordinated to provide your publication with a simple, yet effective way to boost revenue and generate new subscribers.
If you’re ready to supercharge your subscription marketing efforts, let’s start with a 30-minute discussion about your publishing business to discover how we can grow your audience, revenue and profits in 2018 and beyond.
