Doubling
Internet subscription sales; Price
testing: how a split-test doubled revenue;
Ancillary
sales: how to turn a loss-maker into an Internet winner; Specialist
marketing advice: what’s it worth? Case
studies: Money Week; Economist; Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool
Dear
Colleague
It’s not
whether you get knocked down – it’s whether you get up afterwards.
This
philosophy runs through marketing and almost every other challenging
occupation; you’ll do your best work under punishment and at great personal
cost.
Before
you nod and agree, I’d like to point out this approach is rarely taken up in
practice. When presented with the concept, it just floats over most people’s
heads and disappears.
A boxer,
for example, becomes an expert by losing. And losing, of course, is
embarrassing. Muhammad Ali , during one of Michael Parkinson’s worst ever
interviews, was asked about a recent lost fight: “He was an awkward fighter,”
Ali explained. Both the audience and Parkinson laughed rather than
investigating further. The idea just floated over their heads.
But for
Ali, that lost fight carried important lessons he was to profit from later in
the most famous fight of his career. Parkinson didn’t asked Ali about those
lessons, so we remain ignorant.
Ali is
widely regarded as the most successful boxer of all time. The secret to his
success was learning from failure. Attitude played a big part too, but his
success was because of his attitude to learning, not winning.
So what
has boxing to do with subscriptions marketing? Most useful experience comes
from the same kind of adversity; continually trying different moves and
learning the hard way why some don’t work. Taking those knocks can propel us
into the right channel.
How
success stores up disaster
If all
you know is success, then you are in danger of disaster when entering a new or
changing arena. That’s the lesson Ali
gave George Forman, who was world champion when they fought for the title in
Kinshasa in ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’.
Unlike
Ali, Forman had never lost a professional fight. But Ali beat him to become the
new world champion for the (unprecedented) third time. Afterwards, Forman
retired from boxing, unable to understand what had happened, unable to learn,
unable to develop his skills.
Good
subscriptions marketers don’t ‘fail’, they learn and grow. It’s the vital
combination for achieving long-term success.
With the
advent of Internet marketing, we are all entering into a new and exciting
arena. Money Week’s experiments, shown in this issue, are examples of how top
practitioners are paving the way. Money Week is beating its rivals because the
publishers recognize that ours is a ‘What?’ business – they have learned what
works and what doesn’t by going out bravely into the marketplace and spending
money on test marketing.
Peter
Hobday
Members-only section Subscriptions Strategy issue 60 >>>