If you could customize the cover of your favorite publication, what would it say?
Personalized content is an essential tool when capturing consumers’ attention. Using this precision marketing approach, marketers also need to determine whether or not the personalized content incorporated into their campaigns was of interest to their audience using precise measurement and analytics tools.
While marketers are aware of the importance of targeted messaging, this is a relatively new concept for the subscription magazine industry. To bring this exciting technique to a new sector, InfoPrint worked with leading trade title, Graphic Arts Monthly (GAM), to develop a precision marketing campaign using its January edition to help the publication reengage with new readers and retain existing subscribers.
To find out what consumers wanted on their GAM cover, a survey was conducted to provide readers with an issue specifically targeted toward their personal preferences. The publication recognized the importance of connecting one-on-one with its readers and worked with InfoPrint to determine how their publication could be as relevant as possible to its audience.
As a result of this outreach, 70,000 unique covers were created for readers of GAM. To customize the project further, InfoPrint and GAM included the reader’s name in personalized URLs on the cover advertisements. InfoPrint transformed the customer insight from the surveys into relevant content that the publisher could then direct toward GAM subscribers.
This exclusive opportunity allowed subscribers to be involved from start to finish, incorporating their input as to how relevant the magazine was for them.
What did this campaign uncover?
Of the participants, 70 percent found the cover they selected most relevant to their interest, while 62 percent said they would recommend the personalized GAM issue to a friend. Some 53 percent were more likely to read the featured article included on the cover, and 46 percent thought that the relevant, personalized issue improved the GAM brand overall.
The results of this campaign reveal that it is not only important to acknowledge what consumers are looking for, but that the entire lifecycle of a document needs to be considered and results tracked along the way.
By taking the time to ask GAM readers what content they were looking for, the topics they wanted to be included – and more, then incorporating this into a customized magazine, GAM was able to reengage their subscribers and start fresh with a new face to their magazine for the decade.
This campaign also goes to show that, contrary to some reports, print is not dead; rather content has been suffocated by poorly targeted messaging. Instead of filling magazines with irrelevant information, the January issue of GAM stepped out of the boundaries and connected with subscribers to find out what they were looking for.
Would you be more likely to stay loyal to some of your top print publications if you were able to have more control over the content included? We’d love to know why or why not, please share your thoughts!
Best,
Carrie Murphy
Market Development Manager – Americas Group
Brian Moroney
Print-on-Demand Strategy and Market Development
