Bauer, Future & Immediate Media Innovate To Drive Subscriber Growth
Leading UK Magazine Publishers Drive Subscriber Growth from Referrals.
After a difficult decade for the global magazine industry, beset by competition from abundant free content online and peer to peer sharing of copyrighted information, 2015 was predicted to be the year that digital revenue gains finally outweighed falling print revenue
. So it is encouraging to see the UK, with its long and illustrious history of printed magazines and pamphlets, leading the way in adopting innovative solutions to drive subscriptions growth across print and digital, as seen in the recent PPA ABC Consumer Magazines Report in August 2015.
An example of how the UK’s leading magazine publishers are embracing the opportunities offered by digital to drive subscriber growth was our announcement on the occasion of the Professional Publishers’ Association’s ‘Customer Direct Conference’ at the Jumeriah Carlton Tower Hotel in London, on 18th November 2015 that each of Bauer Media, Future Plc and Immediate Media will integrate the Buyapowa software into their magazines’ websites.
Thanks to our easy to use sharing tools, each of these publishers will enable and empower existing loyal magazine subscribers to recommend, straight from the magazines’ websites or from newsletters, that friends, family and colleagues try out their favourite titles. By referring and sharing across email, social networks, SMS and instant messaging apps like Whatsapp, subscribers will be able to earn rewards for each friend or colleague who takes out a new subscription.
Engaging And Empowering Loyal Readers To Become Your Marketing Channel
The magazine industry because it attracts a passionate and loyal readership is ideal for word of mouth marketing, and with the right incentives and tools, magazine publishers can drive subscription growth by empowering and enabling those readers to recommend and refer their friends.
Gideon Lask, Founder and CEO of Buyapowa, said:
‘Given the UK’s long heritage in magazine publishing, it’s encouraging to see three of UK’s foremost magazine publishers take the lead in adopting innovative new marketing techniques. In fact, by realising that their audience of existing subscribers contains many potential loyal advocates they simply are returning to one of the oldest marketing techniques in ‘Word of Mouth’ but supercharging it by adding the latest referral marketing software to enable, incentivise and track sharing.
Magazines attract loyal readers who typically know others who share their hobbies and interests. By using the Buyapowa social referral platform, these publishers are turning the goodwill among their loyal readership and using that to create a whole new marketing channel.’
Here is what these three leading UK publishers had to say:
Joanna Adams, Head of Subscriptions at Bauer Media said:
’We are very excited about exploring the prospect of harnessing word of mouth media for our engaged readers through the Buyapowa platform. Their technology will enable us to empower our readers to become brand advocates for publications such as Empire Magazine and drive subscriptions sales through advocacy and reward.’
Elaine Sosna, Head of Direct Marketing at Future Publishing said:
‘Because our publications typically attract a very loyal and passionate readership, we believe that with the right incentives, for example extensions to current subscriptions and money can’t buy editorial prizes, we can use word of mouth to drive subscriptions growth with the Buyapowa platform.’
Jacky Perales-Morris, Subscriptions Director of Immediate Media said:
‘We have chosen to start with Cycling Plus as this is a publication with a very loyal core fan base that we believe will be able to refer many more subscribers. Cycling is an interest area that lends itself well to word of mouth whether among hobby cyclists to dedicated cycling pros. It is for this reason we decided to launch our first referral marketing initiative with Buyapowa with this title.’
Supercharging Subscription Growth for your Business
Whether you are in the Magazine publishing business or any other publishing or subscription business, then you should be looking at empowering the people who already love your products and services to encourage their friends and family to give them a try.
If you want to want to talk to the experts in referral marketing and see how we can help you make word or mouth a whole new customer or subscriber acquisition channel, then drop us a line.
Original Article
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