Victorian based Fitness First members have been offered The Age newspaper home delivered for 12 months on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday for $49.00. The usual price is $348.00.
While I agree it’s reasonable for Fairfax to tap into organisations like Fitness First with a mutually beneficial offer, I wish that they would provide an offer I can pitch to my retail customers. I have Age customers who are more loyal to The Age than new customers attracted through the Fitness First offer yet they have to pay full price. The loyalty of these customers goes unrewarded.
I’d like Fairfax to offer newsagents a subscription like deal for loyal home delivery customers. This would be demonstrate the importance of these retailers in Fairfax achieving its sales goals. As it stands today, the message for consumers is – don’t pay retail.
The downside of the home delivery offer is that Fairfax and News will continue to cut costs from the home delivery service – meaning that newsagents will make less and less per paper delivered. Newsagents carry a cost of deals like the Fitness First offer even though they have no control over the terms.
You hit the nail on the head. Why not offer newsagents the same kind of subscription deals as the telemarketers offer our customers and also other groups ie universities, fitness centres. I have loyal customers of some 20 odd yearss ending our relationship in favour of direct subscriptions and I have no way of matching the offers. If fairfax and nationwide was fair dinkum about building sales then before they invade newsagent terriories with cheap deals then they should let us offer the same deal to our existing customers. This allows us to keep our customers that come in and shop with us as well as offering them deals. Once we lose a customer to subscription they rearly come back at full price.
Hi, Mark.
Fairfax do have some kind of reward program for retail customer. In NSW, they has a Subway program which customers exchange a SMH (Monday to Saturday) with a pre-paid voucher. That will give customer 15% to 25% off retail price. Newsagents in NSW and ACT can collect them and obtain credit from Fairfax.
I tried to promote it in my shop 1 year ago. Many customers found it may not be convenient to keep the voucher (it may lost, or expire) while some customers do love it.
I always dream of a non-contact smart card giving customers automatic discount in the busy morning for retail -type subscription. Maybe BillExpress and Fairfax can work on it.
Cheers,
Sunny