Effective insert advertising;  17 ways to maximise response; Is your marketing INTRUSIVE? Create irresistible offers and discounts; Case studies: Computer Active; Shape; Forbes; Harvard Business Review; USA Today; The Artist’s magazine

13 lessons on insert advertising

In this issue, you’ll learn how to:

1. Get a subscriber to ‘opt in’ with an email address
2. Up-sell your subscriber at conception
3. Use ‘Pretty Pricing’ to present your subscription rate
4. Learn how many cards to insert in a single issue
5. Make your insert cards look different
6. Counter resistance to credit card payments
7. Use continuous credit card (CCC) orders
8. Deal with credit card payment failures
9. Use direct debit payments
10. Create a deadline to increase response
11. Explain the benefits in a small space
12. Know when response will be highest
13. Maximise effectiveness with larger inserts

 Dear Colleague,

 To be successful, marketing must be intrusive.

 That may sound surprising. Intrusion is a violation of your reader’s peace and quiet. It’s annoying. But the fact is – unless you push your message into enough faces you won’t gain market share.

 There is a limit to how far you can push, of course, but most publishers don’t go anywhere near it. Fear and a lack of knowledge hold them back. But although it is unwise for your promotion to get up someone’s nose, it needs to be pushed firmly beneath it.

 Intrusion is what consumers usually respond to best. But many marketers don’t use any kind of intrusive promotion. They see too much of them and they don’t like them. That is where the mistake is made – our personal attitudes have little relevance to professional marketing.

 At the last big publishers’ conference I attended, a key speaker spoke out against pop-up email capture boxes on websites. (An email capture box is simply a digitalised loose insert). His rationale was:

 “Pop-up boxes are intrusive. They are annoying. So don’t use them.”

 The first two points I agreed with: those boxes can be intrusive and annoying. But how he made the jump to ‘So don’t use them’ mystified me and a number of other delegates who use them. This issue of Subscriptions Strategy explains how to make a seemingly innocuous common-place card measuring 6x4 inches into an intrusive and effective builder of market share.

Peter Hobday

Editor