Drive sales with the right offer

There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle of creating a successful newspaper sales campaign. Offers that work in direct mail or a kiosk situation will not always work in an email blast or over the phone. Today I would like to talk about creating offers to drive sales to meet your specific goals by phone.

My name is Slade Brown. I am the Senior Vice President of Impact Marketing. We operate a telemarketing firm that works with newspapers across the country to develop programs that reach the desired goals of our clients.

Whenever I am creating a new campaign I first try to isolate what my client really wants accomplished. Here are four main considerations:

1. What is the desired frequency? At first thought you may think that everyone wants as many seven day orders as possible. That was how I used to think too. More and more I am being asked to drive Sunday only and Sunday & Wednesday subscriptions. Those preprint centric frequencies bring in the most revenue for the least cost. We are seeing trends across the industry where newspapers and even newspaper groups are dropping days to achieve this same goal.
2. What is the desired order type? Let's be frank, print costs are up, advertising revenue is down, so subscription prices have been rising quite a bit the last few years. Very few customers are going to want to make a $200-$300 transaction over the phone for a 12 month subscription. So let's focus our attention on EZ Pay. EZ Pay provides the lowest cost entry point for sales. Their retention numbers are much higher because the customer has to make a conscious decision to stop it instead of making a conscious decision to keep it every three months. Finally, EZ Pay offers the newspaper a way to keep their subscription revenue up without isolating customers on a fixed income.
3. What kind of pressure and offers have been used? Working with a wide variety of newspapers has shown me that this is one of the most important questions to ask. What have you been doing? What have been the biggest challenges with your current program? Are you offering huge discounts? Are you requiring activation fees? Do you have premium days? If you do have premium days how do those affect EZ Pay customers?
4. What is the desired price point? How much discounting are you willing to do to get a customer on EZ Pay? How aggressively are you going to move these customers up the various rate tiers?

Now that we have an idea of what our clients needs and expectations are we can begin formulating the offers. Let's start with a client who answered 1-Seven day. 2-EZ Pay. 3-Low pressure/Ramping up/No activation. 4-Regular rate is $18/4wk EZ Pay $12/4wk gradual increase. I would suggest an offer like this.

Let's take a look at the offers above and why they should be effective. First of all we are offering discounts only to those customers that prepay. We do not want to offer too big of a discount because there hasn't been a lot of pressure on the market so churn isn't big problem at this point. We are offering 33% off for EZ Pay and the suggestion would be to keep the customers at that rate for the next 6 months. I would expect 60-70% EZ Pay in a past customer campaign with the information provided above.

Here is an example of recommended offers for a customer who answered the questions like this. 1-Seven day. 2-EZ Pay. 3-High pressure/Some discounting/No Activation fees. 4-Regular rate is $22.99 EZ Pay will be aggressively brought to regular rate.

Notice how we are only discounting for EZ Pay. We are doing that because this is a high pressure market and discounting on term offers creates a lot of churn in this type of market. In addition we are moving the customer up to full price after only two months with this model. The biggest benefit to moving the customer up so quickly is that you will not have to send a price change letter out every few months that can result in stops. The introductory offer is pitched as 50% off!

Here is an example of recommended offers for a customer who answered the questions like this. 1-Wednesday & Sunday. 2-EZ Pay 3-High pressure/Big discounting/ Activation fees. 4-Regular rate is $13/4wks aggressively brought to regular rate.

This customer has said that they have a high pressure market so we only want to discount EZ Pay like we did in the second example. Because we are focusing on a preprint revenue frequency discounting is going to be more aggressive for the initial term and then go to full price.

This next example highlights the most common mistake I see in crafting effective offers. Here is the scenario 1-Seven day. 2-EZ Pay. 3-Low pressure/General discounting/Activation fees. 4-Regular rate is $18/4wk EZ Pay $12/4wk gradual increase.

The offers above are the same as the first example with the addition of an activation fee. Please note the "Total $/wk" of the highlighted offer. Telemarketing is a much different form of sales than face to face or direct mail. We do not have the ability to have fine print at the bottom of the page. Everything must be disclosed and disclosed as clearly as possible. Whenever we pitch prices we include all fees in the quoted price to avoid confusion and misrepresentation. Since we are adding a $5 activation fee the ethical way to present the offer is by adding that into the price quoted. By spreading that $5 over a 4 week period instead of a 12 week period it makes the discount we are offering for EZ Pay almost go away entirely. I always recommend waiving activation fees on EZ Pay orders that are month to month.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article and I hope that I was able to give you an idea or two on how to structure your offers for the results you need. If you would like any additional information on these types of campaigns, have ideas or suggestions that you have used in the past or would like us to perform a no-obligation test in your market please contact me directly by phone at (530)591-3313 or by email at Slade@NewspaperTelemarketing.com.

By Slade Brown, SVP Impact Marketing