Twelve proven newsletter renewal techniques. (Renewals).

There are twelve proven techniques that will boost response to your renewal series, but not all newsletter publishers are using them. I'll tell you exactly what they are and how we know they work.

At the Washington, D.C., NEPA conference in June 2000, Joanne Fiore, Tom Jervis, and Bruce Polsky presented a series of winning renewal strategies. They identified these strategies based on a survey of NEPA members' renewal practices. But here's the important part--Joanne, Tom, and Bruce then correlated these practices with actual renewal results.

The bottom line: These strategies are based on results. They work.

Let me elaborate and expand on them. And I'll correlate these proven strategies with the experience of magazine publishers.

"Magazine publishers?" you might ask. "Have you gone daft, David?"

Hold on. Hear me out. There's a reason why I'm citing testing experience for magazine renewals here in a newsletter for newsletter publishers and marketers. Many of you have small circulations, and renewal testing can't be done easily because the numbers are too small to create valid tests. So why not tap the vast wealth of test data magazine publishers have at their fingertips--when it's relevantt?

Of course, you can't assume that someone else's test data will apply to your situation. But this information from magazine publishers can point you in the right direction and help you develop new creative approaches that work in your marketplace.

The first proven strategy for newsletters is to add more efforts to your series--until you hit break-even. If you have six efforts, and the sixth effort is making money, add a seventh. If that makes money, add an eighth. Keep going until your last effort is just breaking even--and then drop that last one. If you don't do that, you're leaving money on the table.

As you extend your efforts, keep in mind that there are four stages in a renewal series. Sean O'Connell, vice president of consumer marketing at Disney, refers to the "great deal," "danger," and "what happened?" stages in a renewal series.

I would add another, which comes first: "skimming the cream."

In the first effort or two, you target subscribers who will renew easily, so you keep the package very simple and the copy very short. These may be renewals at birth, or very early in the cycle.

Using renewals at birth is the second proven renewals success strategy identified by Joanne, Tom, and Bruce.

The third proven strategy is to send blanket renewal offers to all of your subscribers once--or even twice--a year.

Since your readers are not expecting renewals to arrive at these points in the game, you need to give them reasons to part with their money now. That's why the most effective advance and blanket renewals are offer-driven, with tempting discounts, extra issues, or premiums.

Next in the "skimming the cream" stage is the plain and simple renewal. This should look like an invoice, although you can't call it that for legal reasons. It has almost no copy at all. And while you may include an offer, you might want to test without one. This effort targets the "billpaying" types, who don't want the bother of repeated renewal notices.

After that, you move into the "great deal" phase. While the offers should not be as rich as those in early renewals, they're still generous. And the copy romances them. But the focus changes slightly in this stage. You start re-selling your publication now.

Why do you have to re-sell, when subscribers have read your publication for months on end? Shouldn't that exempt you from that old direct mail adage that the most effective renewal makes the same kind of pitch as the original promotion that got them in as subscribers in the first place?

Well, no, for several reasons, the first of which is a shocker.

On the NEPA marketing listserv recently, Anne Holland pointed out that a significant number of buyers of electronically delivered reports do not ever open them. By extension, we can assume that a significant number of subscribers to print newsletters do not ever read them.

They probably buy to have the information available on an as-needed basis. But the bottom line is that you probably have a significant number--15 percent by some estimates--of subscribers who aren't actually reading your newsletter.

If we can assume that a percentage of subscribers never actually read the publication, it makes sense to re-sell the pub in the renewal series. As copywriter Roberta Weiner says, "That's why I continue to test very strong letters in the renewal series. Many, many people need to be re-sold, particularly if they're not reading the pub, or not reading it regularly."

And as copywriter Mark Johnson says, "As much as you wish that every subscriber views your publication as a 'must-read,' this simply is not the case. Therefore, renewals must re-sell the benefits. You should re-sell the original benefits that brought the subscriber on file initially, and you should sell all the 'new and improved' content of your publication.

"Let subscribers know that you are keeping up with changing times and with their changing needs. A renewal notice that does not push benefits runs the risk of being viewed as a marginal expense that can be easily eliminated through simple inaction. That's a risk no publisher can afford to take in this or any other economy," says Johnson.

The fourth proven strategy is to integrate phone, fax, and e-mail efforts into your current renewal series. Why? Because some folks respond better to one method than another. The marketing mix for renewals should include all of these:

* Direct mail

* Cover wraps

* Bind-ins or blow-ins

* Telemarketing 

* Fax

* E-mail

One of the most frequent questions at the Renewals Roundtable I've done at NEPA meetings for the last several years is, "At what point should I add telemarketing into the renewal mix?"

Conventional wisdom says that you should hold telemarketing efforts until later in the series because they are more expensive than direct mail. But Phil Whitney, consumer marketing vice president at Money magazine, "has experimented with telemarketing at various stages in the renewal series, and is now convinced that it can be an effective tool early in the renewal effort," according to Folio:.

But using telemarketing early in the series may depend on economies of scale. Money has 1.9 million subscribers. For smaller circulation newsletters, you should run the numbers first before you bring on the telemarketing big guns early in the series.

The safest approach is to use telemarketing later in the series, and for subscribers from typically low-conversion sources, like email, online ads, and e-letters. In this case, a telemarketing call may create a stronger bond, which results in a higher lifetime value.

Keep in mind that using a mix of marketing channels for renewals is synergistic. Especially with e-mail and fax renewals, you can't judge the full impact of each effort solely by the response to that effort. Alec Casey, Sports Illustrated's executive marketing director, says, "Though e-mail renewal efforts have low response rates, they do boost response for direct mail renewal campaigns that follow them," according to Folio: magazine.

That brings us to the fifth proven strategy: Use issue wraps as renewal notices as your subscribers approach expiration. That's a proven strategy for newsletter publishers. But since wraps work at the front end of the series for Ziff-Davis magazines, you might want to try them early in the series, too. After all, they are inexpensive, because there's no added postage cost.

Heather Kay, director of controlled circulation for Ziff-Davis, quoted in Folio:, says, "We found that the combination of e-mail and a wrap for our first effort lifted response 30 percent."

The sixth proven success strategy is to let subscribers renew on your website. But be very careful here. Your website must be set up to sell. Danny Levinas, president of Georgetown Publishing, shared an illuminating story very early in the internet game. Sending recipients of a DM promotion to a website that was not optimized for marketing depressed response.

If you're referring subscribers to a website in your mailed or faxed renewals, you should consider segregating the landing page, so it does not have links to other parts of your site--or any other sites.

This keeps subscribers focused on the task at hand: renewing. On the other hand, if you have links on the renewals page, they may wander off and forget all about renewing.

David R. Yale, Direct Marketer is a freelance creative consultant and copywriter based in Bayside, New York. He has served as a senior copywriter at Publishers Clearing House and as vice president of marketing at Marketing & Publishing Associates, a financial newsletter publisher. His clients include Forbes, Clement Communications, and Hideaway Report. You can see his portfolio at www.controlbeaters.com or reach him at [e-mail].

Next issue: six more proven newsletter renewal techniques