What is conjoint analysis?
Wikipedia defines conjoint analysis as: //“a statistical technique used in market research to determine how people value different features that make up an individual product or service.
The objective of conjoint analysis is to determine what combination of a limited number of attributes is most influential on respondent choice or decision making. A controlled set of potential products or services is shown to respondents and by analyzing how they make preferences between these products, the implicit valuation of the individual elements making up the product or service can be determined. These implicit valuations (utilities or part-worths) can be used to create market models that estimate market share, revenue and even profitability of new designs.”//

What does conjoint analysis help you to achieve?

In its simplest form, conjoint analysis is a tool which lets your customers decide which product attributes they value most. Using sophisticated tools, you can then use this information to develop an understanding of what customers will be prepared to pay for your goods. It also helps you understand value features in your goods which may be missing but which the customer is prepared to pay for.

For example, you may produce a newsletter which features:
• Weekly digests of key news
• A daily alert to readers in-boxes
• An online archive of news stories
• A directory of suppliers
• A directory of senior board executives
• Daily statistical changes affecting the industry (e.g. KPIs)

You might find that a competitor has moved in on your territory and you are trying to find out what your readers value, what they are prepared to pay for and what they don’t really want.

The value of such analysis is that it can let you:
• Tailor your product to customer needs
• Price efficiently
• Remove underperforming areas of your product which have limited value
• Reduce costs
• Target sales and marketing staff more efficiently to help conversion of new customers and retention of old customers

Is there an alternative to conjoint analysis?

The beauty of conjoint analysis is that it is objective, and helps you avoid opinions by focusing on facts. Sales people are often keen to emphasise the need for reducing prices for example because lower prices helps them achieve targets. Conjoint analysis allows a calm-headed look at a product, its environment and pricing.

However, conjoint analysis is expensive. An alternative is to have expert panels within your company comprising sales, marketing, production plus to have the input of key account heads. This “expert” group will at least let you get a feel for what can be changed and what can be improved or dropped in the pursuit of efficient pricing.

The danger of internal experts is that they can carry internal baggage on pricing, production, delivery etc which could obstruct objective thinking and result in inappropriate pricing positions.

Can I find out more about conjoint analysis?

A simple, and very helpful, introduction to Conjoint Analysis can be found at Sawtooth Software by following this link.

Please note, we have no affiliation with Sawtooth but we point to these pages because of their practical utitlity.

There is also an excellent book called Getting Started with Conjoint Analysis although this is now getting hard to find.

Here is a very good video lecture about Conjoint Analysis from Video Lectures. This item provides a case study and how conjoint analysis was used to resolve a problem.

This article was written by Michael Smith, Director, Red Page Ltd.

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1. Always promote your website clearly and include a special bonus for ordering online (special price, special incentive).

2. Promote your website on your products – listing special benefits of buying online in future. Remember – don’t just list the web address, but tell them why they need to go there and what they will get.

3. Include a “bucksheet” or small flyer with every order you despatch telling the customer about some great deals online.

4. Include a small flyer with every product, alerting customers to a free download or other benefit.

5. Develop a strapline to accompany your web address on point of sale/exhibition display materials. Don’t just rely on people seeing the web address and going there – give them a reason to visit.

6. Encourage online competitions at exhibitions where people can sign up.

7. Promote a web-only offer in all your PR. In many cases, magazines will often mention a product but not how to get it. By including an offer in the press release there is a chance the magazine will also refer to the offer and generate web traffic to your site.

8. Position your logo next to your web address – today, time is short so any visual cue with a linked association will help people make the leap into the “intangible space” of the web.

9. Promote your website and core benefit even on your envelopes. Eventually, you want people to associate a core value (“how to save £50 on your heating bills”) with your logo and your website. Even if the envelope isn’t opened, the message still gets across.

10. Remember the power of the PS in your sales letters. Refer to your website there and the core offer of the letter. After the initial salutation, the PS is read before the body of your letter so use it to get the message to sink in.

We have also produced a special guide to capturing more customers and data from your website, including a range of ideas for special offers and promotions. This is available FREE at the Red Page downloads page (Resource RP0009). Click here to view.

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In cases like this, e-marketing has to be stepped up. It is said that 80% of sales don't come from sales or marketing outbound initiatives but come from prospects finding you.

So, as in the old days of direct mail, it is important to establish a dialogue with customers so that your value is understood and the move towards the sale is more likely. Content, contectualised content, is therefore of paramount importance.

Here are 10 tips for maximising your internet marketing message:

1: Review your database of existing customers. Work out how the database segments so you can classify your marketing initiatives.

2: Talking with these customers, understand what they do and how they use your product to achieve that. This will be a time consuming process and relies on the fundamental support of senior management (who may be inclined to view short term targets for the marketing team as of more importance than contextualised content).

3: Write case studies showing how your solution has worked for these clients. Given that you will be introducing these case studies to new prospects, structure the case studies so that they can be delivered in chunks acording to where your prospect is in the sales cycle. Don't forget all the people in the buying process - you need to be reflect their needs too.

4: Ensure that your case study structure is built into your website to enable your sales people to use it, your customers to find it, and your blogs etc to link to it.

5: Talk with your sales people about the typical sales cycle for the different kinds of customers you are approaching. Define your case study approach on a segment by segment basis (e.g. large corporations may take months to decide; smaller companies may take less time). Develop a communication model for each customer category.

6: Develop a social presence on the web (blogs; twitter; contributions to forums etc) so that people come across you and begin to trust you. Keep your presence/message consistent to increase credibility. Again, it is crucial to gain management support for such initiatives and not allow them to be wasted. For example, try to avoid the temptation simply to use blogs/twitter etc as a way of selling products. In any case, such techniques are frowned upon in communities.

7: Understand your value to the position of the customer. Develop stories/articles which add value to the prospect so that trust is built and value understood. On the web, the story is findability and consistency of thought. Remember the golden rule: if value is demonstrable then price becomes irrelevant. Value definition is therefore crucial to the successful complex product sale.

8: The rules defined by <a href="http://www.sv-institut.de/english.php">Siegfried Vogele </a>in his dialogue method are as relevant to the web as they were to direct mail. With your case studies, web pages etc, key value is demonstrated by headlines first, then images, then captions, then paragraphs.

You know from earlier stages what you want to say, now you must structure the information so you can say it so it sinks in. In email communications, for example, keep the most important part of the message at the top (so people can read it in their in-box); use bullet points (but keep them relevant and focused on value); limit the number of calls to action etc to avoid going for sales overkill...

9: Much of the communication strategy described above relates to customer interaction through search. Yet outbound is equally important because even with low conversion rates the message needs to get out to encourage discussion, debate, and of course lead generations and sales.

Therefore, never forget when conducting outbound marketing activity that the prospects you use are sales ready. Remembering what we said earlier about 80% of customers finding you, it is very important that the effort you make on the remaining 20% is targeted to those you know will be most receptive.

10: Finally, if in difficulty with developing communications, use this handy fall-back to help you structure what you want to say: What problems is the customer encountering?; why should they choose you?; why should they believe you?; can you define a measureable financial benefit that the customer can expect from using you (ask your sales team to help you)?

This is a simple guide and is by no means comprehensive. But I hope some of it is of use.

Sincerely,

Mike Smith
Red Page Marketing
Blog: A Brand Day Out

Tip 1: The Mailing List – know who you are writing to

The most important part of any marketing campaign is the list. Knowing who you are writing to, what their “hot buttons are” and why they need your service or product is absolutely critical.

In a survey undertaken by the IDM a few years ago, it was found that the list affected response four times more than any other element of the campaign (offer, price, design etc).

So, before you start, know who you are writing to and be sure you can get the right lists of those people.

Tip 2: Know what you are writing to them about

Sounds silly doesn’t it? But you’d be surprised just how many brochures fail because the marketer had no idea what they were trying to sell or why the customer would buy it. That’s just not good enough.

When preparing your brochures think:
What am I selling?
What does it do?
Why is it better than other companies’ offerings?
What is the affect on the customer of owning the product?
How much does it cost?
Are there any terms and conditions associated with buying it?

A useful tip for anyone writing a brochure is to start with the order form first – that way you will work out what needs to be said and how it needs to be constructed.

Tip 3: The USP

What is your unique selling point? It is very easy to be lazy about unique selling points – “up to date”, “comprehensive”, “unique” etc. Frankly, any customer will see through bland claims and will remain unconvinced. So, work out a special reason why the customer should buy the product and then work out a unique pitch which is designed to run through the brochure.

The key to a USP – or even key selling points – is that they must fulfil an actual need. How does your product help the customer in his or her day-to-day life?

Tip 4: Think “FAB”

A simple rule for writing copy is this: Feature, Advantage, Benefit. Think of a feature. Think why the customer would find an advantage in that feature. Then think of the benefit of the advantage. For example:

F – the new Lecufreeze fridge has self-adusting feet
A – which means you don’t have to waste hours setting the level of the fridge with a spirit level when you install it
B – this means that in future the fridge will perform as the manufacturer intended and will not suffer from unwanted coolant leaks. Giving you fresh food all of the time.

Tip 5: Think positive

Your product is good. So don’t undersell it with bland statements. Make your words positive and active – encourage excitement:

“Users love the way the new Brasso-Buffer reduces cleaning time by 80% AND gives a more lustrous finish.”

It is very important that your brochure shows real excitement in the product. In a face-to-face sales environment, clients are rarely impressed by an underwhelming pitch. In a brochure-reading environment, the chances of success if the writing is uninspired are minimal.

Tip 6: Think proof

Why should anyone believe anything that you say? That’s why every good brochure should have testimonials from REAL customers. Don’t bother with generic reviews which frankly could apply to any product if you changed the name.

Instead, only use testimonials which are strong and really make the case for buying the product.

Tip 7: Use headlines - and keep sentences short

Every brochure worth its salt should use headlines to break up the message. Vogele states that someone looking at a brochure will typically scan it in 2 seconds and may pick up on 10 key items in the process to help them judge the brochure’s relevance. So, failure to get your message across in headlines is a key error.

Going back to Tip 3, your USP is crucial to what you write in your headlines. Make sure your headlines either overtly or indirectly refer to the USP so that just by scanning the headlines a customer can make an informed choice.

A related tip concerns short sentences below your headlines. Any sentence over 16 words will result in loss of concentration. So keep sentences short, sharp and relevant.

Tip 8: Use pictures

Pictures, product images, graphs and diagrams are as important as headlines because the break up the brochure and they give the eye something else to look at and digest. BUT remember to make the pictures relevant and to support the key USP – remember the customer is scanning your brochure in seconds so you must get your message across quickly.

An additional trick is to give each picture a caption which also relates to the USP or key selling points. If the eye looks at a picture, it will also look automatically at a caption. So make the captions work hard for you too.

Tip 9: Clear design

A brochure, to be successful, needs to be clear. So don’t put text over images. Worse, we’ve all seen those brochures where text has been reversed out over an image – result: unreadable.

Also, think of typography – don’t set your text to cover the width of the page but design in readable columns. Use sans serif text (e.g. Helvetica/Arial) for headlines, serif text (e.g. Times) for the body text. This will empower your headlines to work and will also make your body text more readable

Tip 10: The pack

If you do nothing else, always remember to enclose a sales letter with your brochure. The letter sells, the brochure tells. Tips on writing the perfect sales letter can be found here. But if you have the budget, there are other elements you can use too: a Business Reply Paid Card to encourage the order; a lift device or “buck slip” summarising key elements of the main brochure.

And finally, when writing your letter, don’t forget the PS: over 90% of readers read the PS before the rest of the letter so, going back to Tip 3, get your USP in here as well!

Conclusion

This is a relatively simplistic guide to putting together a brochure. There are many, many more tips I can provide but these are salient measures which I have found always work for me. Some people have told me that the use of Vogele’s dialogue method is now somewhat dated. I have to tell you that in my experience, this method of writing a brochure, a sales letter, and even an email, has yet to be surpassed. To sell more, to sell well, to lift response – know your product, know what it does, and know why people will want it. Get that right and you’ll be looking at a fuller order book.

Of course, if all else fails, bring in a professional! We at Red Page (www.redpagemarketing.co.uk) will be only too willing to help! Also, don’t forget to read our practical blog (http://redpagemarketing.blogspot.com) for daily nuggets of marketing wisdom to help grow your sales.

Sincerely,

Mike Smith
Red Page Marketing

To avoid the commercial nightmare of low prices and high trade discounts, you need to get back to basics – deal direct with your customers, learn what they want, and provide it – at a mutually agreeable price.

You need to build a database of customers so you can regain some control of your business before it disintegrates into a business focused on cost-cutting rather than revenue building.

What is a marketing database?

A database can comprise two key groups: Prospects (people who have not bought from you) and Customers (people who have and are either current or lapsed/cancelled).

From this basic standpoint you can then look at subgroups: prospects broken down into different interest areas; past buyers who need to renew; lapsed/cancelled customers who you want to get back; buyers of products who might buy other products; people you can upsell to, etc.

You can also use a database to show you who is buying your products so you can search for lists of similar individuals in similar organisations.

The starting point in building a database is a good prospect list, who then convert to customers – building into a substantial list over time

Some simple guidelines for publishers looking to build a database

Assuming you are starting from scratch, here are some tried and tested ways to build and maintain you database:

Insert cards into all your products and/or your email messages, directing them to other products they can order. The building of an in-house list of book buyers will be your hottest list for future growth – out performing any other list.

List rental/swapping. Talk with your peers at other publishers about list rental or swapping. Do NOT fear that you are giving away “your” customers, you’re not. Mutual trust between publishers leads to greater commerce over time. Swapping is cheaper than rental but many publishers retail their lists through brokers.

Targeted mailings to the demographics you are seeking. You are publishing a directory world wines and want to reach wealthy ABs? As well as going to wine magazines you can also make assumptions about the demographic and do targeted mailings to other people in your area such as lawyers, managing directors etc. Think laterally!

Wherever possible, however, aim to rent lists of people known to order via direct mail. This means they are “DM responsive” so that your pack is likely to succeed as well (provided of course it is well-written and designed).

Affiliate marketing offers additional ways to grow data: inserts into relevant mailings of related organisations; special deals with organisations so members can get products cheaper; offer targeted individuals certain products at lower prices

When you need to rent lists from brokers, ask the broker for lists which have buyers who appear on other lists. These merge/purge lists offer even greater promise given the higher potential fail rate of a prospect list.

A final option is to build your own list – research using the web, directories etc. The problem with this approach is that you are relying on data which is potentially obsolescent (if not obsolete) and you have no knowledge of whether they have bought something.

Some simple ways for publishers to manage their database

Many publishers report to me that they have a database but it “could be better”. In truth, most databases “could be better”. But half the battle is having top level support for the database from the MD downwards. If there is a belief in the data at the top, then the quality of the database will be questioned more frequently.

Some guidelines for managing a database include:

Managing “gone-aways”. In the old days, you could say that 10% of your database would change in a year. These days, in recessionary times, this change figure could be double or even treble that figure. It is important therefore for your envelopes, order forms and websites to give the capability for people to add their change of address.

Managing data fields. Are all your fields filled in? Job title? First name, second name, post code etc? Produce regular reports (monthly) showing deficiencies in the database so that corrections can be made/plans agreed for correction

Competitions/Freebies/Premia mailings to encourage response so that records can be corrected.

Ensuring codes are captured showing the source of the order – not just from a particular campaign but also whether the customer originated from a prospect list or your in-house buyer list

Why publishers should care about databases

If you don’t know your readers, you cannot create for your readers and your future lies in the cloudy mist of ignorance and hearsay/received wisdom from the sales force and the trade. These groups are not forecasters, they are only commentators.

If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you’ve always got. So data is important so you can see who is buying your books and so you can contact them about similar products/conduct customer surveys.

Publishers who do not care about data, or who are lax in its management, will ultimately end up on the treadmill of endless creation of random titles, hoping desperately that one will hit the big time and produce some money from somewhere.

Having a good database also means you can sell your products direct to the end reader at the value/price ratio you prefer – rather than a random price charged by retailers fighting their own high street battles.

Conclusions

Data, therefore, is the key to selling well, gathering information, and responding with knowledge to customers future demands. While it is true that many publishers survive without databases, it is equally true that those who manage data correctly are stronger and more financially robust. Today, for brands to survive, the link between end user and product provider has never been more relevant. Data is the key to long term, profitable customer relationships.

Very best,

Michael Smith
Red Page Marketing

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There is no doubt that response rates have dived in the last ten years. But think about it – banks haven’t given up mailings for credit cards even when the market is now the toughest it has ever been. Women’s clothing catalogues are still as popular as ever, as are home improvement mailings.

The purpose of direct mail for publishers

Direct mail has a real purpose. For publishers, it is critical. Why? Because the publishing industry is in grave danger of being subsumed by online retailers who have no concerns about how a publisher survives, only about how they can sell their books.

Put your business in the hands of retailers and you say good bye to strategic direction and value-based profitability.

For publishers, direct mail is a crucial part of the mix because it gives a tangible link between publisher and reader. It develops and sustains brand. It acts as a data generator to enable discourse. It is also a driver of channels – even if the order goes elsewhere than directly back to you, the producer.

The key to using direct mail is to understand your aims, know what you are measuring, and grasping the cost/revenue facts that lie behind its successful use.

The financial returns of direct mail in publishing

Of course, the financials are very important – and the pressures are higher than ever. 10 years ago a 2% response would have been excellent for a newsletter and today marketers are talking about 0.1% - or lower.

Not so long ago I was achieving response rates of 10% for an annual legal publication; my colleague Janson Woodall was getting the same for a transport annual – how times have changed!

If we combine this with an average mailing cost of say £500 per thousand and a targeted mailing to 4000 prospects, you would need to recover £2000 to achieve breakeven. At a response rate of 0.1%, this means a requirement of 4 orders at a value of £500 each.

For newsletter publishers, publishing a newsletter in the £500 bracket, this is acceptable because renewal rates should grow that investment significantly in future years.

But for publishers of books or management reports, the prospect is less attractive. A management report, requiring an ROI of say 400%, would have to be priced at the £2000 per copy bracket!

For book publishers, publishing titles at prices as low as £5.00 and as high as, say, £30, the task is enormous. At the higher price, our book publisher would need to sell 66 units to break even or 270 to achieve an ROI of 400%.

That equates to a (difficult these days) response rate of 1.65% to break even or a frankly incredible response of 6.9% to achieve target ROI.

Why publishers should still invest in direct marketing

So is direct mail still worth doing? Clearly, publishers of high value management reports and subscription-based magazines and newsletters can continue to benefit from direct mail.

Direct mail for high value B2B publishers permits: sophisticated packs to describe value; the ability to override objections via demonstration; contextual marketing to push customer “hot buttons” and to give “ownership rehearsal” prior to ordering. Because these publishers charge high prices, DM is critical to make price irrelevant.

Direct mail for conventional book publishers is more problematic. These publishers should instead take a more holistic view of what they are trying to achieve. For these publishers, DM can achieve direct sales and must achieve reasonable volume but the tool also drives other activity: sales through online, trade, your own website, libraries and others.

For all publishers, direct mail hangs around longer in the customer’s premises – many pieces are hoarded for future reference. These direct mail pieces are critical to building your brand and for maintaining customer awareness of you and your unique selling points.

Measuring the effectiveness of direct marketing in publishing

For subscription-based products, it is still reasonably reliable to track response via orders into your business via business reply envelopes, white mail, phone and web orders. From here you can measure financial performance and calculate ROI.

In my experience of direct marketing cheaper books (i.e. books below £50), the task is more complicated because the consumer can go elsewhere following a prompt from you.

As well as the response channels which apply for subscription products, book buyers have other channels which might already command their brand loyalty: online sites (Play; Amazon etc); bookshops (high street and their websites); libraries etc

For these publishers, a pure assessment of campaign ROI will make for highly depressing reading. You need instead to look at the trading background in a period before your campaign (say 3 months) when no marketing was done and also check sales through other channels (book trade, overseas, library sales etc).

Then measure results through these channels in a six month period after your marketing has gone out. There are two caveats to this approach: firstly, make sure that you watch out for seasonal uplifts which may be nothing to do with your activity; secondly, remember that uplift through the trade carries the additional cost of the discounts taken off so account for revenue net of discount.

For book publishers though, the real benefit of direct mail is keeping in touch with your end readers. Fail to do this and your customers will look elsewhere and soon forget you.

Conclusion

Direct mail is expensive and relies on good lists to make it truly effective. For publishers of subscription-based products it offers a sophisticated way to sell complex, high-value services and reduce price objections.

For book publishers, it offers a tangible way for publishers to maintain contact with their customers and preserve their brand recognition. Measurement for all publishers should be based on an ROI assessment but for book publishers it is critical to keep track of sales uplift through other channels – remembering, of course, to net off the trade discount to arrive at a true ROI assessment.

The devil, as always, is in the detail!

Very best,

Michael Smith
Red Page Marketing

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Henry V fought at Agincourt knowing his strengths, the landscape, his enemy’s strategic plans, and tactical competencies of each of his battle groups.

He adopted an early form of “benchmarking”: well-trained men-at-arms on the international chivalric model; disciplined missile troops far beyond mercenary competency; a small, manageable command structure compared to the individualistic model used by the French.

Publishers need to benchmark in the same way. England punched above its weight and now you can do the same!

Effective benchmarking for publishers

Which of your competitors do you admire? Put another way, which of your competitors is/are getting up your nose? If you’re a big player, it’s probably a small operation taking out core niches of your business. If you’re a small player, you’re probably looking at the models of more established publishing brands.

The point is, to benchmark do not obsess yourself with people you think are your competitors, but look at best practice and develop yours to similar standards – or better.

What to benchmark? Brands don’t develop on product alone. Look at Amazon – they’ll sell anything to anyone but their brand is based on one aspect: customer service. So, if you have a website, benchmark delivery against Amazon. If you want to know how to run newsletters and B2B subscription services profitably, look at Informa. If you want to know about branded books for the trade, study Wiley’s Dummies series.

How to gather benchmarking data for your publishing business

But don’t just look and copy. Get objective data where possible:

• Management reports on your segment
• Industry association surveys (e.g. PA, PPA or SIPA)
• Surveys by suppliers to the industry (e.g. Vista/Publishing Technology)
• Networking among your peers at PPA, SIPA, PA and other events; be open with others and they will be open with you (within reason, of course)

Of course, a key source of data though is your customer database. If you are a trade-based publisher, this is problematic because your customers (the bookshops) can only tell you what sells. They can’t tell you why they sell, why things don’t sell etc. Yes, the trade can tell you how your service compares to other trade publishers but ultimately you need to talk to your customers. They are unlikely to want to help you with substantive market research.

With a customer database publishers can:

• Validate data by recency, frequency, purchasing trends and financial value
• Contact by mail via mail surveys (still one of the most valid methods, even today)
• Contact via email with simple questions or links to online survey systems
• Contact via Phone
• Contact face to face
• Organise focus/discussion groups via a third party

Using the data you can question customers on key variables you wish to discuss: customer service; pricing; order delivery times and more.

Today, online forums and networking sites are also a great way to track customer feedback. Use sites such as LinkedIn to post questions; set up Twitter pages, blogs, etc. Or just do it the old fashioned way – cards in the backs of books so you can gather names and addresses.

Using benchmark data to change the way your publishing company works

Once you have gathered the data you need to benchmark your publishing business against the best, what do you do with it? There are four outcomes from your findings:

1. You are working below industry par and you need to act
2. You are already operating at best practice levels
3. You are operating above best practice
4. You are in a new industry with limited benchmarking

Excluding example 4, you now need to compare competitors against your findings and then seek to resolve so that you are either on a par or better than your benchmarked companies.

Outside the remit of this article is then the management of change within your company to deliver brand-leading solutions for your publishing business. These tasks will fall within standard project management considerations.

Some considerations before deciding to change your publishing business following a benchmarking programme.
As with all things, never take what you see or hear at face value:

• when assessing your findings consider alternatives and be prepared to measure and test against variables for objective analysis
• anticipate that your benchmarked competitors may change and think how they might do that
• understand why your competitors might operate like they do (this could conceal things you have not thought about
• uncover how your competitors work internally on issues such as marketing, sales, pricing, product delivery, financing npd, not forgetting how businesses are being managed

The management of competitive intelligence in publishing companies

Finally, in an environment where you are gathering competitor data for benchmarking purposes, consider where your findings should be held or retained. In many publishing companies, marketing is seen simply as a department for distributing brochures and catalogues.

In truth, competitor activity should be monitored and delivered by product managers within a strategic marketing department or, in larger organisations, by a specific competitor intelligence team.

Competitor data is too important to be the preserve of individual publishers, sales directors, or a managing director. Competitor data is a function of strategic marketing and should reside under the marketing function of a business, being openly distributed for the development and delivery of strategic (as opposed to product specific) goals.

This article was written by Michael Smith, Director, Red Page Ltd.
Read more about strategic marketing for publishers
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Before a publisher decides what its brand is, it is important it decides upon its core business model. According to classical marketing training, there are three types of core business model: focused, differentiated, and price-based.

The focused publishing business

A focused business is one which deals with a specific market. Good examples of these are Lexis Nexis (Butterworth/Tolley) – law/tax publishing; BMJ – medical; William Reed – grocery/retail

The differentiated publishing business

A differentiated business is one which positions itself on a particular element. Good examples include Dorling Kindersley - illustrated educational books; the Economist - high value politico-economic content; Penguin - logo-defined branding differentiation

The Price-based business
A price, or cost-based, business is one which positions itself on offering low priced products. Good examples in this segment include Wordsworth - cheap classics; Kogan Page - low priced business books; Metro – free newspaper

A problem for publishers, especially those with a broad list, is that their business crosses the boundaries of these three business types. It is important for senior management in such a business to determine its model and to focus strategy on that model. A failure to arrive at a business position will create brand confusion for customers and stakeholders.

The definition of a brand
Commentators confuse the meaning of brands – some focus on logos, some on the interplay between a company and its customers.

The American Marketing Assciation defines a brand as “a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. It is used for the firm as a whole. The preferred term is trade name”.

It is crucial to recognise that by referring to a brand as symbol/logo, a customer has a perception of a business. It is the duty of a brand, therefore, to convey emotional values to the customer.

A brand needs to be the physical manifestation of a business’s competence in core areas including: customer service; delivery; product quality; product delivery and more.

Preparation for delivering a publisher branding strategy

If we have defined the business position, and have an understanding of what a brand is, we now need to ask crucial questions prior to creating a brand strategy:

• What is your business position – focus, differentiation, price?
• Do your customers have a perception of your brand?
• What are your customers’ perceptions of your brand?
• Why should customers care about your brand?
• Is there a disconnect between your perception of your brand and that of your customers?

It is important not to underplay these questions. It is crucial not to rely on received wisdom inside your firm about what your brand is. It is vital for your business to shout down any comments on your board that investing in “brand” is an irrelevant marketing issue.

Brand strategy will determine your ability to thrive in your chosen business model. A failure to grasp this will result in an unfocused business, lacking in direction and unable to leverage financial advantage.

Customer perceptions of publisher brand

Brand perception is crucial to financial performance within your business position. Could Dummies guides from Wiley position themselves among black letter e-products from Lexis Nexis? Would the Economist apply its brand to romantic novels from Mills & Boon?

The answer to these questions is obvious. This is because brands hold perceptions in the minds of customers and because companies have spent years positioning their brands.

Looking at a range of publishers, the following customer perceptions could be applied:

• Penguin – classic fiction, good quality, fun
• Economist – reliable, objective, trustworthy
• Mills & Boon – pulp fiction, romantic, throw away, fun
• Cambridge University Press – academic, high quality, intellectual, authoritative

Publishing boards may believe that they know what their brand is yet analysis and discussion with customers is crucial to understand their perceptions. If customer brand perception is negative, the publishing company must act on its findings to correct the position.

Some publishers sell mainly through the book trade and believe that the trade’s perception of their brand is all the matters. This is a false belief. The trade’s view will be based on their financial relationship with the publisher and how quickly they can clear stock. The end user perception of brand is therefore more important. Customers, of course, are those who cause the stock to shift.

The most significant task facing publishers in an increasingly competitive world is to define the relevance of their brand to their customers and to maintain its relevance in their mind’s eye.

A publisher must avoid complacency in branding. A person who says “I know my customers” is a person who is not prepared to accept change or competitive pressures. The truth about marketing and customers is that we only have an idea of what is going on – the customers are those who decide.

Regular sanity-checking research among your customers and target customers is important to define your brand’s performance in the competitive arena.

So we return to critical branding questions for publishers:

• What do your customers think about your brand – what emotional values do they attach to it?
• What do you want customers to think about your brand?
• What is the variance?
• What are you going to do about it?

Developing a brand strategy for publishing companies

For publishing companies, particularly those with history, another significant issue comes into play: the development of products as brands in themselves.

In law publishing, text books hold more brand relevance than the companies who publish them. Penguin books is part of Pearson, who manage other key brands such as the Financial Times. Informa owns many publishing brands which themselves contain product brands (e.g. Lloyds List is part of Informa Maritime).

The board of the publishing company needs to understand its core business position and to define a level of service it wishes to offer through its products and services. It then needs to decide on brand strategies which match the positioning of the core business. In the words of Kotler: Principles of Marketing (FT/Prentice Hall 2002):

“ a company must define its overall branding strategy, which affects all of its products. This strategy will also guide the branding of new products. A company has four choices when it comes to brand strategy. It can introduce line extensions (existing brand names extended to new forms, sizes and flavours of an existing product category), brand extensions (existing brand names extended to new product categories), multibrands (new brand names introduced in the same product category) or new brands (new brand names in new product categories)."

Line extensions for publishers

Line extension allows for higher revenues from chosen customer demographics; while it may open up new markets, its purpose is to deliver greater capital return within existing markets.

Line extensions are easier in FMCG markets (e.g. different variants of Coke or Vimto). For publishers, examples include the Lexis Nexis suite of solutions for lawyers: Lexis Library; Lexis Learning; Lexis PSL; Lexis Applications. Here, a commonality of user experience, functionality and reliability is rolled out across a central platform.

In a book form, the Dummies Guides show a user-focused brand extension which has moved beyond computer topics into areas such as the military, writing essays and opera.

Brand extensions fro publishers

The purpose of brand extension is to reach broader audiences, achieve greater advertising efficiency and to increase brand recognition and credibility in its chosen demographics..

Brand extension is achieved by extending the success of one part of your brand into another area of business. Basic level brand extensions include the production of directories from magazines, for example The Grocer (William Reed) produces a range of directories such as The Grocer Directory of Manufacturers and Suppliers. A more adventurous - and logical - example is that of Kerrang! Magazine extending into radio.

A key to successful brand extension is that the product can carry relevance to the target market. Failure occurs when brand owners fail to understand their brand and what it means to target customers.

Publisher multibrand strategy

The purpose of a multibrand strategy is to allow a company to market to smaller segments of the market and to do so lucratively from an individual brand position (thereby not damaging the main brand).

Multibrands also allow for a central, almost hidden, corporate brand to leverage revenues via sub-brands which are powerful in themselves. Larger publishing corporations manage multi-brand strategies: Pearson (Penguiin; Prentice Hall; Financial Times etc); Informa (Lloyds of London Press; Routledge; Taylor & Francis etc). A review of the Informa website reveals in excess of 40 main brands, not including Informa-branded sub-brands.

However, multibrands demand energy and resources. Publishing ompanies following a multibrand strategy without committing resources to each will see those brands underperform or even fail. Similarly, the market segments may themselves be too small to mine, causing the brands to be unprofitable.

New brands for publishers

A new brand is a brand designed to enable a company to exploit a new market without carrying forward the baggage of its existing branding. New brands are also common among multibrand publishers who may either develop new brands or acquire them as a result of an aggressive acquisitions policy.

In the legal sector a few years ago, new brands entered the market in terms of LexisNexis and Westlaw (online packages from traditional publishers Butterworths and Sweet and Maxwell). Today, these brands have grown stronger although they still rely on subtle brand connections with their print heritage in order to give them substantive credibility.

Problems associated with a new brand strategy are similar to those affecting multibrand strategies. For publishers, it may be simpler to acquire another business and develop that business's brand rather than to invest heavily in creation of a brand ethos and emotional connection.

Enacting the publisher brand strategy

Your company has defined its core values and developed a branding strategy using the branding strategy outlines above. Yet a branding strategy is in many ways the easiest part. The roll out from the strategic decision is a range of tactical considerations to ensure contiguous brand experience.

In future articles at www.redpagemarketing.co.uk we will cover key tactical milestones in the delivery of a consistent and contiguous brand experience, including:

Packaging and presentation for publishers
Customer service and e-integration for publishers
Product line and product mix decisions
The marketing of brands in the publishing industry –communication consistency for effective recall and loyalty

If you only remember one thing about brands, remember this: a brand rests in the mind of those who experience it. Emotional context relates to positive interaction and this must be delivered by the product and by the company as well as by the advertising. Branding is a 360 degree issue which is ignored at your peril.

Read more about branding for publishers
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How to plan an email campaign

Just mail it and forget it, it’s so cheap! Right? Wrong! As in all marketing, planning is key, and no more so than in email marketing. Here are some helpful tips to set you on your way…

1. Never forget that an email needs a response – whether it is selling a product, creating a lead or getting people to view your site, have your objective thought through before you write. Exactly the same as in direct mail!
2. Knowing your objective, make the objective clear in the opening line (David Smallwick’s new History of Candles is published 25th October and if you re-purchase before 15th October you can buy it for £15.95 instead of £24.99, pre-order now..).
3. Depending on what you want the customer to do, make it OBVIOUS how they do it. If you are writing an HTML email, have an obvious “Buy Now” or “Call me” button.
4. Remember that emails are highly personal – they are opt in services – so make sure your emails are personalised, using the recipient’s name and signing off with your name. Generic communications – just as with brochures mailed without a sales letter – dramatically underperform against objective. Review your data regularly to ensure that name fields are complete. A recent review at a company I was working with highlighted a number of the usual suspects in the list: Mickey Mouse, David Smells, and Randy Sodde! Some fields were blank and others used initials instead of names – so good discipline is to review your data regularly.
5. Don’t forget that the email is only half the story. Make your ordering process easy once on your website. You have got the customer’s juices flowing in getting them to your site – don’t mess things up by having a bureaucratic ordering system. Remember that experience is all in the online world and a bad online experience will send customers elsewhere.

How to write a successful marketing email

Emails are not too different to sales letters. However, there are some subtle techniques to consider and a few of these are provided below:

1. Thinking of your objective, your subject line needs to reflect the promise. Smallwick’s new History of Candles – have you ordered? Alternatively, link a promotion to a special event outside your world – for example, Celebrate National Candle Week with a copy of Smallwick’s History of Candles.
2. Don’t forget Seigfired Vogele! Yes, although he was writing for direct mailers in the 1980s, his theories still hold true. If you have an html email, make the “dialogue” complete: message, images, headlines, order link – all must be distinctive, eye catching and obvious. Don’t subsume your email design in otiose branding and complex corporate methodology.
3. If using “call me” as an option, have a space on your website where customers can leave a number – or use an automated system – so that the customer can “find and forget” and leave you to call. Call me results in higher conversion against your target goals with some users reporting a 100% uplift on click through.
4. Never forget the Spam Filter! Use a recognised supplier of email newsletter delivery services but also remember to avoid using spurious or exaggerated claims in your subject lines : “Fabulous Free Offer Guaranteed”. Avoid offensive words too – even words that might not appear offensive. A recent invitation to a friend for sausage and chips at his local café disappeared into his spam filters! Of course, the spam filters also look in the body of emails too so avoid repetition – you might want to experiment with emails of different lengths on your client lists to assess performance.
5. Make the email easy to read. Most people who write sales letters for a living swear by courier. In the email world, arial is believed to engender the biggest response (in html emails). Remember though to keep your sentences/paragraphs short because sans serif is tiring on the eyes and large blocks of sans serif – just as in print – will not be read.

How to measure email marketing performance
Transparency in marketing is everything. Although email marketing is cheap, that does not mean it shouldn’t be measured – not least because doing it still takes time and time = staff = money! So, some simple measurement ideas for you…

1. Measurement – what are you trying to measure? Remember your objectives at the beginning. Measurement of emails is not about click through rates and bounces (although these are ways of showing you where you are going wrong and what you need to do to make them more effective). You are after sales or after leads, so you need to agree measures at the beginning and address your performance to growing these figures. In essence, no different to direct mail: ROI is king!
2. Sales are easy to measure – but don’t forget to include the various components in your ROI which make for an accurate assessment: data costs; cost of sending email; cost of designing email versus revenue in. Remember if you offer free postage you must remember to net off the postage value from the revenue to arrive at the real revenue figure in the ROI calculation
3. Leads are harder to measure. If leads are new customers, you can gain a reasonable assessment of client value by following through the lead generation process over say a 3-6 month period to see what the revenue conversion is. Then you can apply an assessment of ROI. Don’t forget that sales teams are not free and an allocation of their costs needs to go against the conversion exercise too to ensure a truer ROI.

Growing your email marketing list

Gathering data via email is significantly simpler than via direct mail – you just need to remember to promote your subscription! So…

1. Always make sure that your newsletters/emails are of interest to your subscribers. Remember that email allows for greater personalisation so ask at the subscription process what areas your readers are interested in – this avoids creating generic newsletters of limited interest.
2. Highlight your “subscribe now” box everywhere you can – on your website, on your emails, on your DM (pointing to your website), on your e-products
3. Make subscribing easy – just ask them for their email address and basic details – they can give you more later, once they order a product from you. If you are sending different subject emails, make your choice process simple and easy to use and understand
Convey benefits in subscribing. OK, it’s not quite the AA but you can include a regular “saving” via your website or access to free services
Provide referral buttons within the newsletter so customers can forward it to friends. Alternatively, promote via the social web with links to Twitter, Digg or Delicious for example
Don’t forget to archive your news stories on your website (note, this also has excellent SEO potential, working hard for you long after the newsletter has been written; on my site (www.redpagemarketing.co.uk) I get visitors from all over the world coming in from my newsletter articles.

I hope this is useful. For marketing help in your publishing business please contact me.

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I have worked in a number of marketing operations over the last 25 years and a number of themes repeat themselves time and again: poor copywriting; insufficient understanding of the product; low commercial performance; uninspired staff; poor orders; bad relationships between marketing and sales/editorial/other departments.

The problem is that often marketing is seen not so much as a strategic part of the business but as a functional one. Sure, publishers pay lip-service to “strategy” and “meeting the customer need” but when the crunch comes, many business owners see the duty of marketing to produce leaflets and catalogues rather than providing a strategic drive and a context for business performance. Somehow publishers can see the marketing department as “the problem” rather than the business environment and management as a whole.

As a consultant, I have been asked by many publishers to help instil marketing “change” and yet often what causes the central problem of ensuring change is not just the performance of the marketing department it is also the whole business management structure itself. There is a failure to understand that business cannot exist in a vacuum, nor indeed can a functional department. Business vision, strategy and focus are the key elements to effective performance.

If you are involved in trying to enact change in marketing within your company, here are seven factors which you should try to overcome if you are to be successful.

1. Tackling complacency in a marketing team – especially when it isn’t obvious

Complacency is the enemy of progress. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The trouble is, who says it “ain’t broke”. Often, someone who is happy the way things are. Yet complacency can hide even in the most robust system. For example, it could be argued that “even though direct orders are down we have seen our trade orders go up”.

But you should be asking if it is acceptable to get more orders through the trade AND be investing in marketing in order to achieve that. If you do, then the trade discount PLUS the marketing cost should be computed as a total cost of gaining trade orders.

A number of factors can generate complacency in a marketing department of a publishing company: long term job holders happy with the status quo (e.g. print buying costs never being reviewed); profits holding steady; low performance standards that are rarely checked via an objective performance matrix; an unwillingness to tackle “difficult” people; the lack of a 360 degree review system so that the department exists in a black hole of its own.

Before implementing a change system, listen to what you are being told by everyone and then go away and reflect on what you have been told and whether things really stack up. Do not be afraid of tackling “received wisdom”. Be very careful to avoid being sucked into group think.

2. Building the right team to effect change in your marketing department

OK, so marketing needs changing. But don’t accept that you are the only one who is responsible for changing it. What about the MD? What about the Chairman? What about the FD? All these people will want to see marketing changed but will they back you? And what about your key staff?

It is crucial that you are not “dumped” with the problem of “sorting marketing out” and left to get on with it. If people want things changed, involve them in the process in order to avoid inertia. What are the reasons for change? Who wants those things changed? How will they be measured? Asking these questions at the beginning and involving the people who ask them throughout will enable you to deliver a more efficient change result at the end.

3. Identifying focus when re-aligning your marketing department

In the old days, people used to talk about “mission statements”. Well constructed, these statements can provide a guiding light for businesses in transition. However, in most cases, such statements are vague and platitudinous. So the importance of vision is crucial.

Where is the company going? What does it want to achieve? By when will it achieve it? What needs to be done to achieve it ? Then, down from this, what does the Marketing Department need to achieve? By when? What are the measurables etc?

Measurables in marketing comprise the complete spectrum: ROI; response; revenues; units sold; renewal rates; advertising recall; click throughs etc. However, detail obscures vision and direction and must be seen as the way to achieve a goal rather than being the goal itself. Instead, a vision might state that you are expecting to achieve x new customers and y renewals at a cost of z and a departmental profit of p within a time frame of t and at an average revenue per sale of r.

The most important thing to recognise is that a sense of direction – and a vision of that direction – needs to be concise, crisp and clear. It needs to be communicated simply and quickly. If it cannot, you are unlikely to achieve change in your operation.

4. Making sure the whole publishing company knows what you are doing in the marketing department and why you are making changes

Communication in change management is one of the hardest things to do. If you make your message to complex it will fail to be understood. If the key stakeholders fail to own the vision, you will also fail to make your message. A failure to show commitment or belief or a failure to talk about the project openly will result in a lack of commitment to the project lower down.

If your marketers were impressed by the vision you have for the department but then failed to see you or the project team believe in the project then the project will be doomed.

Communication relates to the original vision and how you are making progress. All the way through, communicate your goals, your milestones and your deliverables. Show how new subscriptions are being achieved at a higher ROI. Report on increased renewal rates. Report failures and what you are doing about them. But make sure your reporting is clear and succinct so marketers, and others in the business, know exactly how you are performing.

5. Typical obstacles to change in a marketing department

Obstacles to change come in all forms. Most typically in a marketing department, this can take the form of either systems issues or personnel problems.

Systems issues include getting data from your system on topics such as renewal rates, ROI, new subscription numbers, lapsed and cancelled data etc. Just because the system cannot produce the data does not mean you should accept this. This is why getting buy in at the beginning is so important – if the MD or FD is aware that you cannot grow profits because you cannot get objective data due to the system, then there is more likelihood of the system being changed.

People issues are more complex. The most difficult are “passive aggressive” types who say “yes” but do “no”. Beware the staff member who has been at the company for years and who might agree to help you but ends up protecting territory (or his own ignorance) by putting up smoke screens. Strangely, these types can either be staff members reluctant to change or senior managers above you who do not wish for their own comfort zones to be challenged.

The key in managing people obstacles is to develop objective reporting structures and to keep all discussions focused on outcomes, avoiding smokes and mirrors. Again, the importance of building an overall project team with stakeholders outside the department is crucial to managing staff problems.

6. Marketing is seen as an expense – so get quick wins in your change management programme

It’s an oft-repeated statement that when sales are good, the sales and editorial teams are doing well but when things go wrong it’s marketing’s fault! There’s no denying that marketing the world over is seen as an “expense” rather than a revenue generator. This goes back into the mists of time as highlighted by that other oft-quoted phrase: “I know half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half”.

So the key is to get quick wins. Build data of your work. Highlight targets for success early on and work to deliver them while building the structure behind you to measure and analyse the rest of your marketing operation.

So… when you get 400% ROIs on book sales, shout about it. When your renewal rates exceed previous years’ rates, parade the data. When response rates increase, show the world. And then, in the background, work out why you got these results and spread the learning to other parts of the marketing mix.

Remember, big changes take time. No-one wants to know that your renewal database now has an 85% accuracy rate on the first line of the address. They don’t want to know that list A outperformed list B by 50%. Truth be told, why should they care?

But these things ARE crucial to marketing success. So, while your change programme is really focused on the database or on list performance, keep the public eye on what that work delivers – RESULTS.

7. Making sure that your changes stick so that marketing gets better in the future

There’s no doubt that delivering change in a marketing department is hard work – not least because of the endless pressures on time. But when you deliver change, do you stop there? No!

So you’ve managed to improve database accuracy by 30%. You have increased new acquisition revenues by 10% and you have halved your lapsed and cancelled subscriptions rates. Well that’s OK – right? Wrong!

Now you’ve got to make sure that the things you did to effect change are maintained. You need regular feedback and control mechanisms to ensure that what you have fought for is consistently delivered. You need to be sensitive to internal culture and work with it to ensure your revolution continues.

One of the biggest lessons I ever learned was seeing my MD going through each and every subscriber record to check for accuracy because she knew that accurate communications with the customer is what delivers financial results at the end.

So to make your changes stick – get people involved, keep them involved and congratulate them on what they have achieved as part of the programme. Make them feel good, make them understand what they have done and make them understand the value of it for the future good of the company.

Conclusion

Implementing change in a marketing department is riven with problems – from poor systems to disruptive staff and group think. To effect change, get wide support from within the business, communicate what you are doing, make your messages clear and simple, and don’t let obstacles hold you back. Any marketing department lives or dies by its results – a focused marketing department never ceases to investigate and analyse systems in order to improve response, increase ROIs and grow repeat buyers.

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There has been much debate recently concerning the move of publisher content into the online arena. A crucial area of debate is that of branding. Indeed, it is still argued by many in the industry that the leading “brands” are the authors themselves.

If this is the case then movement of books and information online exposes publishers financially in a way never predicted. If the author is the brand and the electronic format the delivery platform, where does the publisher come into it?

Managing the publisher’s brand therefore becomes a significant issue and one which must be managed to ensure that the publisher still has a commercial role to play. In the online environment it is a matter of crucial importance that publishers invest in their brands now before it is too late.

Some publishers feel they must join the online rush because “that is the way the market is going”. Others feel they must move online because they are afraid for their future unless they keep up with the competition. Others still feel brow-beaten into adopting third party e-book platforms without necessarily thinking about the long term future of their brand equity or even their finances.

The most savvy publishers are those who understand the opportunity offered by online but want to keep a keen watch on the bottom line and their links with the customer. The most savvy publishers therefore seek to manage their brand online in order to maintain strong links with their customer base – the end user. The reader.

How can publishers think about their brand strategy in an online environment? Here is a simple structure around which publishers should build their online presence:

1. Marketing communications strategy

PR Smith, author of Marketing Communications (published by Kogan Page and available from the Red Page Marketing bookshop), advocates a simple approach to marcoms which I have used many times: SOSTAC. Your marketing department should have, if it doesn’t already, a strategic business function (or at least a person) which is freed from the rigours of day-to-day marketing “doing”. That function should manage a SOSTAC system in your company. PR Smith outlines SOSTAC broadly as:

S – Situational Analysis (where are we now?)
O – Objectives (where do we want to go?)
S – Strategy (how do we get there?)
T – Tactics (the details of strategy)
A – Action (or implementation – putting plans to work)
C – Control (measurement, monitoring, reviewing and modifying)

So publishers need to establish a SOSTAC management system to engender, grow, manage and monetise a loyal buying public.

2. Customer Dialogue

Customer dialogue in a web environment is crucial. As a publisher, you must understand dialogue and employ the best web architects and copywriters that you can. No brand is ever established from a single viewing of a website, web product, e-book etc. Brand is about a set of emotional interactions substantiated by demonstrable performance criteria. So communication and product value demonstration are crucial to loyalty and success.

The big players in the online retailing environment at the moment (play.com; amazon) know that service is all. Now Amazon has gone beyond service by providing a reading platform too, the Kindle.

This is a major threat to book publishers seeking to manage their own brand and to remain in contact with their readers as such devices take the relationship with the customer away from the publisher and in the hands of the service provider. Publishers need to understand that their web presence, their e-products, their customer services, their pricing, speak the same language to engender customer loyalty.

Who do you want to manage the interface with your customers? What is the real price you are paying? There is a great convenience of letting third party providers manage the interface but what about the future? Some publishers will argue that it is best to leave sales in the hands of those who do it best: the trade; web retailers etc.

But who then owns the dialogue, the relationship? Crucially – if someone else owns the dialogue and relationship, how will you as the publisher ever know what your customers think? A reliance on dialogue and brand management by third parties is to surrender your brand values, market research potential and future prosperity.

3. Metric management

The most depressing feature of the modern age is publishers developing websites at great expense, only for the customer to visit and then leave, once convinced, to buy the product at an online retailer.

Remember, every book or product should be sold on the basis of a minimum 400% promotional return to guarantee profitability. If you are paying an online retailer 50% of product value, not gaining customer data, and are driving customers to those retail sites via your own expensive marketing, you can see that this is an unprofitable and ludicrous way of driving profit, even if it does drive revenues (of a sort). We have seen that consumer dialogue is crucial for your future; it also enables you to develop detailed metrics for analysis and strategic vision.

Here are some critical metrics you should consider with your web marketing

• Site ROI
• Click-through rates and drop off points
• Newsletter conversions and ROI
• Analysis of offer performance
• Analysis of new versus repeat buyers/visitors
• 360 degree analysis of sales peaks elsewhere

The most important factor is that you are able, via your website, to keep in touch with your customers, what they are buying and what they are doing. Then you can at the very least develop products for them, keeping your brand fresh in their minds.

4. Trust

In a web environment, trust is all. Publishers, through their range of books and services should already have built an element of trust through physical production and delivery of the goods. In the modern world, where the physical product may end up being delivered through a third party e-book delivery tool, it is even more crucial to ensure the customer understands that the final product is more than just a collection of words from a given author delivered through an e-reader.

So brand becomes crucial – and ensuring your brand values are stretched across your entire portfolio (both subtly and obviously) is a core task of your marketing on the web. Ways to build trust include:

• Prodigious use of your logo plus a relevant strapline
• Efficient touchpoints (e-response; customer service; delivery times; copywriting)
• Colour choices and engagement
• Design consistency
• Clarity of information
• Easy to find and use help points

Trust is built through performance. Deliver well and your customers come back. Deliver badly and you will be forgotten.

5. Engagement

How do your customers currently engage with your brand? How will they in the future? How are you going to manage their engagement? These are crucial issues affecting publishers in an increasingly uncertain world.

Professional publishers are way ahead in this game. They have sales teams, key account managers, extensive customer databases and teams of marketing professionals who are respected for the information they provide back to the business and not just the sales they might produce.

Smaller publishers, perhaps heavily reliant on the book trade, know of no other life than relying on third party sales to keep them afloat. To permit this to continue into the new e-world is to write a suicide note of grotesque proportions.

Publishers must find ways to engage their customers with their business and not just with their authors. Routes must be found to interact with customers so that publishers can produce for the future rather than be held to ransom.

Conclusion

A publishing online strategy for the future puts your end user at its heart. Know your readers. Monitor what they do. Get them coming back. Get them to know you as well as your authors. Be careful with who owns your brand. Survival in the online world is about being in control and understanding what you do. Surrender control of your brand and your customer relationships at your peril.

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For smaller publishers, where product performance is crucial, often there will already be an understanding of what the publication does and why the customer needs it (although examples continue to crop up where this is not always the case). What is clear, however, is that the larger a publishing business becomes, the more it loses touch with its customer base. As boardrooms cease to focus on products and more on profit lines, so business decisions are taken which are increasingly alien to the readership.

Publisher complacency affects profitability

I recently had the opportunity to meet with law librarians in practices across the south of England. Although many of them accepted that the books, subscriptions and online services they purchased were useful to their firms, they also had a number of complaints which can be summarised as follows:

1. The price of the services
2. The complacency of publishers
3. The proliferation of product updates
4. That there is no choice but to accept what is on offer

From a value perspective, the most significant of these issues is the second one. Complacency ultimately creates customers who start to look elsewhere. The other three elements are inextricably linked to complacency – or a publisher taking its eye off the ball.

The need for a value-based company focus to make publshing more profitable

Of course, this is not an issue exclusively confined to legal publishing. Increasingly, the larger a publishing company becomes, the more that key performance metrics matter –advertising revenues, subscriber numbers, renewal rates etc. This focus has then led to business decisions which can damage the customer/supplier relationship - focusing less on value delivery to the customer and more on revenue delivery to the publisher. Finance-based decisions (though of course crucial) betray a lack of understanding of the relationship between value, loyalty and revenue.

Examples include:
• Publishers in the late 1990s who launched online services offering no improved functionality over the print version.
• ‘Redesigned’ or ‘relaunched’ print publications, tied in with a price rise and extra pages, but with little or no content change.
• A B2C title relaunched as B2B without consulting or researching the consumer base – result: subscriber haemorrhage; extra marketing cost to acquire new subs.
• A relaunched electronic service using a new platform that was significantly less flexible than the old causing the customers to question its value.

We know that subscription management is crucial to business success. We also need to reflect that for subscription management to be successful, value provision must be self evident to customers – not just at the point of sale but throughout the customer’s subscription life. In other words the product must deliver - consistently.

How to arrive at value

Of course, as businesses grow it is more and more difficult to keep a finger on the pulse of markets they serve. To help you, here is a brief, six point structure for ensuring lifetime product value provision.

1. Market Definition: Segmentation is crucial to your business. Analyse your target subscriber base and look at those segments which are large enough to be both actionable and profitable. Ignore the temptation to produce a catch-all product – you’ll end up with average customers.

2. Target Subscriber Analysis: This helps you position your product. Ask of the customer ‘what business issue keeps you awake at night’? Knowing the answer to this question will assist both the product definition and, crucially, that most essential of marketing staff – the copywriter.

3. Market hot button analysis: Do you understand the financial stresses of your customers? Undertake research to understand the market’s performance norms. This could involve anything from profitability ratios to output standards. Your product needs to focus on improving those metrics for the customer.

4. Customer Phase Analysis: This is a difficult one to call but where a customer’s business is in terms of the product life cycle will affect also the type of product and service they are looking for.

• Are they starting up? They may want products which will make them more effective in getting to their target markets.
• Are they in the growth phase? Is your product positioned so the reader can see how it will help their growth?
• Are they in maturity? In which case the product should be positioned as one which will help them maintain their advantage in their chosen markets.
• If your customers are in a declining market they may be looking to diversify their business – so be prepared for a demand change.

5. Product Definition: At the outset, define what the product is there to achieve and stick to it. Loosely, this is called ‘knowing your market’ but your focus should be on helping your customers do their jobs better. Maybe the ‘wow’ factor is impossible but focused editorial creates its own loyalty.

6. Publisher Differentiation: Know your own company’s market differentiation. This is crucial not just for generating reassurance at time of initial purchase but also essential during the subscriber’s life with you. Remember, we’re talking about actual customer experiences: customer service; complaint handling; speed of delivery; additional services; ease of access – all the customer ‘touch points’ which are essential to long term business success. These points are crucial to your brand’s perception and are a subtle tool in your battle to avoid customers switching their supplier.

The importance of pricing for publishers

Of course, the provision of customer value also means getting the price right. It is the aim of every producer, whether publisher or otherwise, to deliver a product in such a way that customers will not query the price. Yet at some stage the issue of price usually rears its ugly head.

Most often, the issues of price and budget rise above the surface only among that catch-all group of non-renewal excuses generated by lapsed subscriber research. So here’s a tip: never include price on any market research survey – it only serves to divert the attention of the publisher away from what really matters: the product, and what it does for the customers. So, when it comes to cancellation research, focus instead on why the product is no longer needed.

Of course, price also occurs at that other most critical point – the point of sale. Here, evidential value is critical – particularly the more expensive the product is. Yet customers make price/value assumptions whatever the price band – including cheap novels (would you buy the latest Jeffrey Archer if it came with a loose-leaf subscription, electronic archive and updating service?). So, when making pricing decisions, consider these seven psychological factors affecting your prospective customers:

1. Be aware that most markets have a market leader – the price and value points of the market leader will be those against which all entrants are judged (for example, think dictionary and you’re probably already thinking of the OED).

2. If your product has no competitors or has a real (i.e. provable) unique differential advantage – price high. Customers with no experience of the product’s value are relying on you to define what the value is.

3. Discounting for discounting’s sake is a fool’s strategy. Customers are more likely to believe a discount story if they can tie it to a given event (e.g. year end or a new market entry strategy). If customers can see that the discount is tied to an event, they are more likely to accept your “real” prices when the event is over.

4. Some customers prefer their existing suppliers no matter what you do. Remember, that by promoting the unseen elements of the product (customer service, tangibility, guarantees) you’re in a better position to help people consider the switch – i.e. get them to think beyond just the price.

5. People believe marketing – but only if the marketing is believable. Don’t let a single marketing pack out of your building unless you know that its value-laden sales message is compelling. If you see words and phrases such as comprehensive or up-to-date used without back-up provided by substantive fact, scrap it and start again. Vague promises do not buy loyalty.

6. Nobody likes a price which is unfair. If a customer buys a bulk purchase, they expect discounts. The difference between what you think is fair and what they think is fair is a hard one to call. However, by maintaining a robust pricing matrix with product attributes which can be tailored to customers and priced accordingly, everyone will grasp the transparency of your pricing and accept the fairness of it.

7. In the unhappy (and unimaginative) event that your product is similar to others on the market, price to the market level – its pricing will otherwise not be credible. If in doubt, avoid publishing products similar to your competitors.

Understanding and promoting value within and without the publishing portfolio is the key to maintaining happy customers beyond a single year – as is a pricing policy linked to value delivery. With subscribers who are satisfied that the value offered by the publication is higher than the economic sacrifice they needed to make in order to obtain it, a publication will survive. Price will cease to be an issue, subscription numbers will hold or grow, and there will be an additional bonus of satisfied advertisers.

This article by Michael Smith originally appeared in In Publishing Magazine in 2006. Michael Smith is Director of Red Page Ltd., a marketing consultancy specialising in pricing, positioning and marketing message. In Publishing Magazine is a specialist magazine for magazine, newspaper and online subscription publishers worldwide. To receive more articles like this, sign up for the Red Page Marketing e-newsletter. Subscribe here.

1. Always think “what is my main message”? By defining your main message at the start this can be used in your top level “dialogue”: headlines, buttons, images etc. The copywriting can then be built around this.

2. Never forget at the earliest stage – what do I want the customer to do? Build your site around the achievement of goals and make your copywriting deliver these goals alongside design.

3. Ensure your design is consistent so that visitors understand the “site grammar”. The site grammar is a way of behaving within a site. Of course there are common protocols such as text changing colour on click through. But you can create your own grammar through design. Think of it like the signage in a museum or art gallery – consistency creates understanding.

4. Thinking these days advises the use of white as the main background colour. By using white and minimising clutter, the eye is then drawn to other features of your site, features you want to promote. It’s all about contrast, and making contrast work. A visit to any modern gallery uses this technique, even to the extent of framing pictures in white as well so the eye is drawn to the art.

5. Use sans-serif fonts (the ones without the curly bits). The reason for this is that sans serif fonts look clearer on screen because they require fewer pixels to create and are formed from blocks of pixels. Serif faces, such as Times Roman, are too ornate and need individual pixels to make them whole. This causes granulation on the screen; sites with serif faces often look cheap and unreadable.

6. Human interest never fails to engage. Using photographs of people or of customers engaging with your product or service will help create a compelling “truth” behind your offering. Images which allow readers to “rehearse” ownership will encourage them to read the text of your site and go further.

7. Be wary of colour blur, caused by complementary colours on the spectrum trying to merge with each other. Your designer can advise on complimentary colours and steer you away from their excesses.

8. Avoid laying colours over colours or text over images unless there is sufficient contrast. If in doubt, use text over colours where only a solid colour is used as the background. Keep text over colour short, if you want it to be read.

9. Make ordering simple. In our experience, it is better to gain the sale first and attempt to gain the extra marketing add-ons later (so, for example, make it easy to order and then ask for newsletter subscription materials)

10. Never forget your company or product USPs (unique selling points). These should be drawn out of your site to make the dialogue work – both in your copy and in your design. If your USPs are truly unique, you will create a compelling reason to purchase and break through the website barrier of trust and uncertainty. If you are not unique, your attempts at conversion will be reduced in effectiveness.

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“The brochure tells, the letter sells”– as the saying goes. A brochure on its own works well but if it is not accompanied by a sales letter, it is doomed to failure. Why? Because readers always turn to a letter first – it’s more personal, is freer in style and… it gets read. So here 16 practical tips to writing a great sales letter that will work wonders:

1. Always have a Johnson Box. “A Johnson what!!?” The Johnson box goes at the top of your letter giving a quick link into why the letter has been written. E.g. “New cost saving vacuum cleaner. Save £50 if you order by Thursday”. Straight away you know why the letter has been written and what you need to do. Some letters have this sentence in a box, others simply a centred, underlined text. Either way works well.

2. Always have a personal salutation. Why? Which would you read – a letter saying “dear sir/madam” or a letter saying “dear Mr Dehemerband etc”. A “Dear Sir” letter usually carries with it the implication of some sort of large payment. A name / surname approach implies warm personal contact – that the sender already has a connection with you, the customer. So spot the mistake in the example shown in the image...

3. Before we go into the main letter, here are some layout pointers to help you. Always remember to keep your sentences short – say 16 words. And have maybe two sentences per paragraph.

4. If your letter goes onto another page, make sure that the paragraph doesn’t end on the current page but continues to the next page – you’ll find that the reader turns the page automatically. Remember to break up your paragraphs with short, pithy headlines so the reader can scan read and, again to help reading, start each paragraph with an indent.

5. Back to the substance of your letter now. Begin the first sentence of your first paragraph with a line saying why you are writing to the customer. Don’t leave this till later – that’s when it’s too late. So, for example: “I am writing to tell you that Vacukleen has just introduced the Vacukleen 2000 and that, as a previous customer, you can save £100 right now”

6. End your first paragraph with the great line “But first, let me tell you a little more…” This is a line I learned from Drayton Bird in his great books “Commonsense Direct Marketing” and “How to Write Sales Letters that Sell” (both published by Kogan Page and available from the Red Page Bookshop saving you 10% on the published price by the way).

7. Have your second paragraph explain the context of the letter. For example, “As a previous customer of Vacukleen, you will already be aware of Vacukleen’s unrivalled super-suction, anti-allergy British-made motor system which is now the world’s best selling vacuum cleaner. Now we have gone even better and, since your existing cleaner is now getting close to 5 years of service, we thought we’d give you the opportunity to upgrade to the Vacukleen 2000 and save £100”

8. When writing your letters, always think of the problems a customer might be facing and tie in your letter to the problem. Remember, we’re not in business to sell products, we’re in business to provide solutions (which can be a product, a service, or whatever – the point is whatever you make or do is there to fill somebody’s needs).

9. Remember in your letter to explain the new product/service in greater detail and then work towards the main offer paragraph which outlines what they need to do, when they need to do it, and what they will get in return. Don’t forget to include contact phone numbers, websites – any part of your distribution network which allows the customer to buy the product. It is very important to spell out your offer – “if you do this, we will give you this, but you must act within the next five days to qualify. Act now!”

10. Use questions and then answer them. But always ask open questions rather than questions that can be answered “yes” or “no”. For example, “when was your floor last so clean that you would be happy to have the Queen to tea? With the new Vacukleen 2000, every time you vacuum your carpet you get that ‘new carpet’ feel – the same freshness and comfort you get when you lay a brand new carpet”.

11. Use quotes (testimonials) – avoid the generic “Mrs M of Newcastle Under Lyme” and instead get real people, with real jobs who have said something really great about the new product. It all adds to customer reassurance.

12. Speaking of reassurance, if you have a guarantee then flag it in your letter as well “remember, if you’re not completely happy with with your Vacukleen 2000 you can …and if you don’t think it has cleaned your carpet better within 10 days than your old cleaner then we will give you your money back” . Naturally, make sure that your guarantee is reasonable – you don’t want to be open to abuse!

13. Here’s a controversial one but one which I swear by: do NOT knock your competition. I believe that mentioning competitors puts competitors in the minds of your customers which, these days, causes your reader to go straight to the web to do comparison shopping. But also I’ve found time and again that knocking copy only causes people to doubt the truth in your copy. So avoid knocking copy!

14. The clinching close. By now, you’ve probably written quite a compelling letter which addresses the customer’s problems, tells them why your product answers those problems, and shows the customer how to get the product. Your final paragraph should somehow sum up all the sizzle to sell the steak. Here’s an example: “Remember, when you order your new Vacukleen 2000 in the next five days you get the market –leading cleaner at a price you won’t find anywhere else and, because you’re an existing customer, you also benefit from our no-quibble money-back guarantee. But hurry – this offer cannot be held open indefinitely -you must act now. Your floor, your home and your family will thank you”

15. Signature. Always have a signed letter and make it from someone who matters in the business. Why not have the Managing Director? There’s nothing worse than having a scrawled illegible signature with a person’s name and “marketing department” next to it. Your letter is personal – not a process. So make it read like someone really cares about the reader.

16. The killer P.S. If you do nothing else, remember ALWAYS to have a PS. If people are in a hurry they will always go to the PS first because a PS implies that the writer has forgotten something really important. So, in our fictitious example: “P.S. Don’t forget that as a previous purchaser of a Vacukleen cleaner, you can order your new Vacukleen 2000 and save £100 if you call 0845 386 4930 before 31st July. I don’t want you to miss out so please hurry!”

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1: AIDA – always remember this simple acronym and what it stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

2: Headlines – make sure they convey a benefit, or offer a reward, or make some other ATTENTION-grabbing point (such as creating uncertainty)

3: Picture or Image – make it relevant to your headline. This creates instant dialogue with the reader and invites them to read on. Creating INTEREST.

4: Opening sentence – make sure it relates to the headline and the picture so that you are keeping people engaged. Extra tip – when you have written your copy, leave for a day, come back and remove the first paragraph (you should find that your second paragraph becomes the paragraph you should always have written in the first place…)

5: Layout – there are many different ways of laying out an ad but the one proven to work above all others is Picture at the top, headline, and then body copy.

6: Product Value – never forget that people buy only what they want to buy. To create DESIRE, focus on what the product does for the reader, and build your story so that each advantage or benefit becomes even bigger with every paragraph.

7: Trust – no-one believes the incredible (logically enough). A key skill of the true copywriter is the ability to make the ad generate a relationship. At the end of the day, the advertisement is there to achieve a task – whether it is more sales, or to generate sales leads or to grow brand.

8: Call to Action – never write an advertisement that doesn’t compel the reader to do something. This ACTION can be to fill in a coupon, to ring a hotline or whatever. But make sure there is an action. Only through customer response can business grow!

9: Typography – avoid loads of text that reverses out. If you must reverse out, do so on short headlines which can have maximum impact. Now, let’s think, oh yes – here’s one: “In space, nobody can hear you scream…”

10: Location – if you can, try to get the ad on the right hand page of a magazine as it’s more likely to be read. However, you can play clever tricks. If an ad comprised three short lines and a phone number to call – e.g. “How to Fly to Spain for less than £10 all in - Call 888 888 8888 now”, then you could reverse out the ad and place it in the middle of a load of other ads and it would stand out for miles.

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Confused about your pricing? Worried that pricing might involve hiring an expensive consultant? Before you drive yourself mad with conceptual theories and investing in conjoint analysis software, here are eight practical ways you can help give your pricing a little more focus:

1. Collect competitor information on pricing BUT don’t be bound by the price neighbourhood. Remember, their prices are not prices designed to help your business. A price neighbourhood policy does nothing to help price to value and can commoditise your brand.

2. Design a pricing matrix which rewards volume. The more people order, the cheaper it gets. This is not altruism, this is a fact of nature and cannot be overcome by meanness. I heard of one company recently which offered 1 free product for every 12 ordered. If a customer bought 144 units, they got 12 free. In other words, beyond 12, there is no scale of discounting or saving.

3. Make sure any offer you provide is conditional on a response by the customer. Never simply cut costs to get sales – you only encourage customers to think you will always be flexible. This applies to offers via your sales team, on any sales letter or brochure, or online on your website.

4. Your cost base is of no interest to your customer – avoid cost-plus pricing as it is artificial and does not respect the real value of your product to the customer.

5. Never launch a new product cheaply. It is always easier to come down in price later than start putting prices up. The world-famous mini car made no profits in its first years because the company failed to understand the real value of a tiny car – economy, funkiness, space, utility – and failed to price for that value in its marketing.

6. Make sure your sales and marketing people know WHY your product is valuable and give them a pricing structure based on the company’s needs and not on the needs of the sales team to close a deal. Employing a good copywriter who understands value-based copywriting techniques is a recommended way to create a real understanding of your brand.

7. Remember to include pricing promotions in your budget at the beginning of the year. It is crucial you anticipate revenue based on prices charged rather than a multiple of full price x units sold

8. Understand the 80:20 rule and avoid pricing gimmicks designed to attract unprofitable customers.

If you only remember one thing, remember that low prices serve to cripple businesses by piling pressure on internal overheads. Price to value and communicate your value to ensure consistent and profitable pricing.

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The world of advertising and marketing is full of free goods, discounts, BOGOF and more. A classic in today’s retail world is TM Lewin, the shirt retailers, who never seem to have a day go by when there isn’t an offer at their shop or on their website. This is not desperation, however. This is strategy.

Reuben Swartz in his pricing blog argued (I paraphrase) “free is not a pricing strategy. It’s an advertising strategy, a promotional strategy, a testing strategy”. He’s right. The purpose of providing free offers, discounts, premia etc, is nothing to do with altruism or largesse. It’s to do with testing the tipping point for customers and, when found, to continue to engender a relationship with that customer.

At the end of the day, offers exist to encourage a financial response - sales. Google, a great online brand with a marketing reputation as a great altruist, appears to offer a range of phenomenal free products and services. Yet it does this for a reason: to give people a reason to come to their website, creating traffic – in order to sell advertising online.

Not many businesses are as successful as Google but all businesses can learn one sales and marketing lesson from the application of “free”. It is this: offer nothing free that does not generate a financial response somewhere which is greater than the cost to you of the free product or offer. And never let a customer think they got something for nothing – you will only encourage price buyers, cheapskates and profit drainers.

If you offer something at a discount, or for free, or with a premium, make sure the customer knows that this is because you want them to do something in return (e.g. order within 7 days). Strangely, even buy one, get one free (BOGOF) does something really odd: it preserves the FULL price of the product in the mind of the customer.

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Customers perceptions of your products are the key to delivering profitable sales says Michael Smith, Director, Red Page Ltd.

The problem of defaulting to cheap prices arises in a recession because companies suddenly forget what makes their product ranges good. Instead they run like headless chickens into the “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” solutions offered by online retailers such as Amazon and Play.com. Result? Customers don’t see your company, your brand, your value proposition; they instead see the branding, pricing and value proposition of the supplier. Oh dear…

And then it gets worse. Companies who decide to rely on third parties to convey their brand values suddenly realise that they are losing control of their customers and their customers’ perceptions. Do companies like Amazon pass onto the supplier the data on the people who are ordering their products? No. Are they altruistic in the discounts they offer to the supplier? No. So your brand perception is hijacked, along with your pricing, net revenue and, more importantly, your customer data. That’s right, you lose access to your real end-user customers – the very people who you should be contacting to grow your own business.

Even if your business is fundamentally reliant on third parties for sales, make sure at all costs that you invest in your brand assets to keep people coming back to you. A brand is not a logo, it is an inherent set of properties which distinguish you from your competitors. These inherent properties are otherwise known as your value proposition and you abandon them at your peril.

What are your brand assets that you can exploit in your marketing and use to retain customers and grow profitable sales? If the answer is low prices and cutting your costs to stay profitable then you’re in the wrong business. Focus on your customers and their needs for sure, but never lose sight of why you got into business – to make money for your company. This can only be achieved by engaging new customers, earning their trust, and converting them to brand advocates who keep coming back for more.

If you only remember one thing, remember that aiming for low prices and relying on third parties to safeguard your business ends up divorcing you from your real customers. Try to understand your brand and communicate it to your real end-user, before it is too late.

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In partnership with Red Page

Pricing to value, not cost-plus

Every pricing decision you make should be geared towards your customer, your market and your competitive environment, not your profit target and certainly not your cost base.