FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

Talking to your customers is always a good thing, and at the moment telemarketing seems to work very well for many publishers—but be careful as you can overstay your welcome.
 
Avoid the temptation to ask your customers everything in one go. This will confuse some, annoy others and may result in an order not being completed. This is true for both paid and controlled publications, but for different reasons. If someone is receiving a magazine free of charge it is reasonable to elicit some information from him or her; this is the reason they are getting the magazine free, after all.
 
However, if you ask too many questions it may result in a firm but call-ending hang up. Ask the subscriber if you can sen More...

Whenever you do a promotion, it is always worthwhile building in a test—you can learn so much from testing and there are so many different things you can try.

While $60.00 can sound like quite a lot of money, expressed as 60 cents per 100 issues can somehow seems far cheaper. How do I know this? I recently got this offer from The Economist and I subscribed straight away. In fact, my eyes were so focused on the “60 cents” when I got to the check out page and saw the amount of $60.00, I had a moment of panic—but I subscribed all the same.

If you cannot test a price, test a term—$60.00 for one year or $35.00 for six months. A test of this type will tell you lots about your readers and if the test More...

I got quite a few phone calls this past week from fellow circulators concerning the article that was posted on Audience Development's website last week on action code response rates exceeding direct mail rates.

I am not going to say who called me in this article, let them get their own fame, but the best call was from someone who simply said: “What the hell is an action response code?” Actually she used another word instead of “hell,” but I don’t want to be censored in my first month on this web site.

Some of the figure More...