Some background on me – about 8 months ago my wife and I had a beautiful baby boy. A few months into our pregnancy we found a magazine called FitPregnancy and ordered it. My wife enjoyed several months of reading FitPregnancy’s articles geared toward women who are going through those 9 months of wonderful growth. Fast forward a couple of months, we get our last issue of our subscription period and it has this wrapper on it:
Fit Pregnancy's renewal cover
Now I realize that with almost every other magazine out there, that this wrapper is pretty typical marketing tactic to spur renewals… But think about it for a minute. Your reader was pregnant 12 months ago. That’s why she ordered your magazine – but at this point it’s highly unlikely she’s still pregnant. I know that my wife is not currently pregnant – and if FitPregnancy knows before I do … well, I will need to start a whole other rant – and probably not on this blog 
From a marketing perspective, it would make better sense to put this in some context. I researched FitPregnancy’s owner – American Media, Inc. and it seems that they own a wide variety of magazines, including 3 other magazine titles aimed toward health-consicous women, including Shape and Muscle & Fitness Hers. So why couldn’t FitPregnancy cross promote those titles in addition to this renewal call-to-action?
If you stop and back up a moment, this is relevant both from a direct marketing perspective for those with magazines they’re steering but also for the rest of us who aren’t in the magazine game. How unique is your product that perhaps the typical ways of marketing oneself needs to change depending on who you are? Or a better question – what is the end experience that your prospect / customer receives? Do you have the tracking (qualitative and quantitative) that would tell you the moments that your audience has disconnects with your marketing message? Have you invested in people on your marketing team that are “listening” to what your audience is saying?
Companies that are both tuned into what their customers are thinking and saying AND have that feedback loop that enable them to translate those things into tweaks to future marketing touches will mean greater customer engagement and loyalty long term. If you aren’t willing to go the “listening” route, then you better be really good at knowing the moment your customers start “expecting” again…
Comments
According to the old US Census data, the average number of children per household is closer to two than it is to one. That said, perhaps your lack of desire to renew is not a valid assumption for the larger population. I think a simple ROI analysis of the renewal offer (which has only the overhead of printing and being included in a magazine already mailing) is sufficient “listening” for the publisher. That is, I can’t imagine continuing this practice for this particular magazine if an insufficient number of renewals are received.
The lower the cost of the marketing effort, the lower percentage of conversions you need to make it successful. Marketers continually run the risk of offending someone. If you upset someone, they probably weren’t going to spend more money with you, anyway. For instance, whenever I get invites to bridal events (I’ve been married for 3 years) I just call the company and let them know they can save some money and trees by removing me from their list. I don’t get mad at them for assuming I’ve gotten a divorce — I just figure that they bought a bad list, from another company that marketed the list as “up to date”.