Subscription marketing advice and copy for web, Internet, home page, email and direct mail promotions
Subscription marketing is at the heart of most commercial websites you are likely to look at. The best sites employ effective marketing copy and design with four aims:
- The capture of visitors names and personal details
- Conversion of visitors to paying subscribers and members
- Upgrading, up selling and cross-selling products
- Renewing and maximising life-time values
The majority of websites, however, appear unable even to reach the first stage of subscription marketing: capturing visitors’ names and personal details. The few sites that employ our ‘marketing best practice’ methods capture five fields without affecting response, while most others struggle to sign-up the person's name and email address. Clearly, the more you discover about your website visitors the better you can sell subscriptions and other products to them.
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If subscription marketing is at the heart of a profitable website, then good copywriting is at the heart of marketing. Good copy drives all other components, from email address capture through to long-term renewal revenue.
But there are two kinds of copy. The most common is journalistic copy. This is the kind of copy you will find in the Financial Times or any business magazine. Journalistic copy explains and describes, using facts and examples to enlighten and inform. This kind of copy costs around £200 a thousand words and there are many thousands of business writers who can supply copy for any website.
Then there is marketing copy. Marketing copy is special and good copywriters are rare. Subscription marketing copy is a specialist area with only a few practitioners. Many small businesses feel they cannot afford a specialist copywriter because a general direct marketing agency fees are too high (and they are usually right.) Luckily, the right kind of website subscription marketing copywriter can do everything an agency can do and much more.
A subscription marketing copywriter will use words to create a response – to influence, promote and sell. His words are measured on how many of his client’s leads respond to his message and how much subscription and other revenue he brings in to your website or through the mail.
Click here to test-drive the Marketing Best Practice website today
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How effective copy drives revenue to your website: because marketing copy drives revenue to your website or landing page, the copy (and the copywriter) is integral to your business success, which is why most of the successful businesses we know employ professional direct marketing copy writers to maximise response. This is widely accepted among medium and larger companies (think of all those direct response advertisements in newspapers on on the Internet) because it is good business sense to build long time growth. But it is even more true for smaller enterprises because they have slimmer margins and must make every penny count. Home-crafted or second rate copy will rarely help maximise revenue.
A good piece of direct marketing copy costs more than journalistic copy, but can be used repeatedly to convert website visitors and leads into customers, subscribers and members - to cross-sell, upgrade and renew subscribers and ensure they stay with you for as long as possible.
Other items in the marketing mix: effective website marketing copy is used in conjunction with other components such as Search Engine Optimisation, Adword campaigns, email capture boxes, email promotions, landing page design and special promotional offers to maximise each of the four stages of business success: capture, conversion, up-selling and renewing.
The most important ingredient of all - the thread that runs through all the above - is the copy that convinces the visitor to take the next step - to convert to become a long-term customer.
Because effective marketing copy is directly linked to your website’s revenue stream, good copy must be paid for at higher rates than journalistic copy. The better the copy, the more money flows into your website. It naturally follows from this argument that no website publisher or owner should design a website without first asking:
‘What response do I need for success, and what copy do I need to bring it in?’
The Marketing Best Practice website
Marketing Best Practice advises website owners on how other websites have found success in that elusive search for an effective business model.
To join is inexpensive - you have a 7-day free trial to the Marketing Best Practice website. The many case studies show how successful website owners have overcome common mistakes and pitfalls on the long and difficult road to profitability. The Marketing Best Pratice site is also packed with practical advice for you and your team on how to sell subscriptions, memberships and maximise the revenue you receive from your list of email and postal addresses. Most of the case studies are illustrated, and we are continually testing the techniques on our own and our clients’ websites to ensure that the lessons learned are universal.
Ask for a quotation for marketing copy
Contact us for a quote for creating subscription marketing copy for your website, email promotions, email capture boxes, subscriptions, converting free to paid, membership offerings, paid-for content, renewals, landing pages and direct mail.
We have been creating copy for clients in all kinds of markets for many years and our marketing and copywriting newsletter Subscriptions Strategy is the leading source of advice in the field, published since 1993.
Marketing Best Practice free trial: for immediate access to case studies and effective website business models
Join Marketing Best Practice today for your 7-day free trial. Get immediate access to international case studies of the very best marketing practice for Internet, online, subscriptions, website copy, membership promotions, magazine, newsletter and book publishers. 
You'll find eye-opening reports and examples of how successful publishers save money and increase revenue using subscription marketing and up-sell techniques. We have investigated hundreds of publishing models and subscription promotions to identify those few that have valuable strategies you can apply directly to your business, including:
* An email marketing program that is currently building thousands of new subscriptions worldwide, using a simple technique you can copy.
* A website that is attracting hundreds of new registrations per week, while competing businesses struggle and fold.
* A clever idea for a low-cost direct marketing mail pack. (Research has proven that direct mail prospects are 10 times more likely to respond than email prospects.)
* A magazine insert card that pulls in three times more response than other leaflets and can be dropped into almost any media.
* A new headline that has transformed the profitability of a previously poorly performing advertisement.
* A Google adword promotion that pulls in 10 times more response than its competitors.
* Our unique copywriting section takes you through the 12 steps to creating an effective sales letter. Use this workbook to create your subscription marketing and sales letters and train your team to create theirs.
Join our members today
Trial members gain immediate access to:
How-to marketing section
Here, for example, is the content from our Marketing Best Practice 'workshop' section on email marketing:
Are you a marketing-led organisation? A self-audit… ; Maximising subscriber revenue: it’s not just about subscriptions; How to be a top Internet marketer; Website registration techniques best practice; Effective autoresponder follow-up messages; Which font is best for email promotions? When to transmit emails; Making your thank-you page sell; Should you rent cold lists? Measuring email marketing success; Using image buttons as links: the effect on response; Financial rules of thumb; Long email promotions in B2B markets; Copywriting your email promotion: 11 vital points; A five-point guide to great subject lines; Why you don’t need to test these techniques yourself
Subscriptions Strategy is the leading newsletter in its field since 1993. These reports are now available here on the Marketing Best Practice website, now a leading international source of marketing information for publishers.
All the big players in publishing - BBC, Conde Nast, IPC, Haymarket, Centaur, Emap and more - subscribe to Subscriptions Strategy, and hundreds of smaller ones, too. This is what Marketing magazine’s Drayton Bird says:
"Whatever your business I recommend Subscriptions Strategy. My criterion for a newsletter is simple: does what you learn repay the cost? This one qualifies easily. Every issue carries at least one article of value to most businesses."
You won’t find this kind of hard-won publishers’ marketing information anywhere else. Each piece of advice has been tried and tested and is guaranteed to work.
Click here to test-drive the Marketing Best Practice website today
with our 7-day risk-free trial >>>
How do we get this information?
Well, it's not easy! There is a lot of very poor subscription marketing around, especially on the Internet – or the World Wide Wastebin - and as most publishers don't know much about subscription marketing, or any other kind of marketing, very little of what you see is effective. So copying a promotion that ‘looks good’ (which is what many publishers do) can be a costly mistake because looks can be deceptive.
What publishers and subscription marketers need is hard evidence that a particular device or technique can actually increase response and profits. This kind of marketing know-how is absolutely essential now when budgets are being cut back.
The information we search for, validate and then provide to clients is not readily accessible. Successful profit-boosting techniques are uncommon and not easily uncovered - it's like discovering a seam of gold in a wasteland.
There is a key to understanding the few publishing and Internet businesses that are truly successful and can withstand recession, competition and other market upheavals; but you will never uncover the logic of that success until you know their secret starting point. That's what we provide to our members: we spot that clever technique then test it out on our websites and publications. If it works we post it in our members’ section and publish it in the Subscriptions Strategy newsletter.
We offer various levels of memberships, from individual to a multi-user company licence. Take our subscription and publishers Marketing Best Practice 7-day trial and look at some of those business building techniques - don't waste your budget on test-marketing something we have already reported on.
Why publishers are not marketers
A publisher's primary concerns are producing and delivering editorial, selling advertisements and keeping costs below income.
Juggling all those different functions takes day-to-day concentration. Marketing does not, somehow, fit into that mix. Even the biggest publishing companies have tiny marketing departments that work across all titles – not at all like the average FMCG company that puts marketing first on the agenda. For small and medium publishers, marketing is not treated as a separate function: someone does some 'marketing' when they can fit it in, but rarely is any training or experience evident. This means that however great the effort, the results are likely to be largely ineffective.
Test-drive the Marketing Best Practice website and try some of our guaranteed money-saving, profit-boosting techniques plus training guidelines for you and your team: learn more about our website case studies >>>
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