Breathing life into the mature newsletter title--can it really be done?

Talking with publishers, I've noticed a consistent refrain these days. It seems to be that "renewals are holding up all right, but it's more and more difficult to sell new subs."

This could be a classic definition of a "mature newsletter." So, what to do, what to do? Here's a baker's half-dozen of strategies you could consider.

1. Check the orientation of your marketing materials. It may be time for a reader survey and/or an editorial audit to see what comes out as the five hottest subject areas--and then to ensure that these topics are featured both in the marketing materials and in the newsletter.

2. Take another look at your website. (You do have one, of course.) Are you giving away too much for free? Are you making the most attractive offer for new subscription orders? Is the site easy for the prospect to navigate?

3. Test changing your marketing package to a different format. Envelope packages, forced free trials, wraps, sample issues, double postcards. Something different might work. By all means, look into the possibilities of blast e-mail marketing.

4. Work harder on list acquisition. Conventional wisdom would probably say, "Fall back and concentrate on mailing only to your best lists," but this isn't the time you need to shrink your universe. Revisit list owners who may have turned you down before. Work harder to cobble together smaller lists of seminar attendees, book buyers, etc.

It is a fact that new orders acquired in these ways may renew at a lower rate than is "normal" for your title. You might consider creating a separate renewal series for them. "If your overall renewal rate is 'too high,'" Al Goodloe used to say, "you aren't fully doing the marketing job by bringing in softer orders from marginal lists."

5. Increase your cross-sales efforts. You do have a core of loyal subscribers who love you. Test selling other products you have to these subs. Past materials can be successfully repackaged as special reports. Counter-intuitively, newsletters with small circulations can sometimes hold successful conferences. People who don't subscribe will pay more than the sub price to attend a seminar.

6. Look into rearranging the furniture of your offer. Strengthen your guarantee. The Golden Guarantee--"100 percent of your money back at any time, no hassles"--has worked well.

Add premiums for cash-with orders. Cash-with orders are superior to bill-me's in three ways.

* Money now is always better than money later.

* Subscribers who have paid are less likely to cancel than bill-me orders are to simply never pay.

* Paid orders renew at a higher percentage than bill-me's, even those bill-me's who eventually do pay.

7. Revisit your expire mailing program. Don't just dump them back into the prospect file. Have a targeted mailing designed for expires. And keep this in mind: If results from expires are "too good," there may be something amiss with the renewal series. Review and revise the series, add an effort or two. This almost always pays off.

Do these efforts pay off?

"How successful are these sorts of efforts?" I once asked Tom Thompson when he was running Phillips Business Information. He replied, "Successful in terms of improving performance from where you are? 100 percent of the time. Successful in returning a fading title to its glory days? Usually not. There are normally reasons why a newsletter has reached a decline phase."

Sometimes the handwriting is on the wall. I was marketing consultant (and editor for a couple years) for a newsletter titled Career Pathways Report that covered "school to work" and what is now called "career and technical education." It was successful from the get-go in 1994. Marketing campaigns routinely returned $1.60 or better and renewals were good even in the face of competition from several larger publishers.

What happened? For six years the Clinton Administration supported federal funding for innovative programs in this area. Then it ended.

We did our best. We revamped the promotional package and reworked the renewal series (see above). I did some good enterprise reporting covering school systems that had developed innovative programs.

Taken as a whole, the subscribers (and prospects) apparently didn't care. They had come aboard to get information about availability of new federal money and when that dried up .... the newsletter, too, went dry.

There are some times when changes in marketing and a revised renewal series just can't make up for what's happening in the real world.