I felt special to receive this Fortune Privilege Card – until I realised the card itself gave me nothing. It is a bit of froth to make me feel special enough to sign up for 68% off the cover price of purchasing Fortune at a newsagency.
The first publisher to engage commercially with newsagents and offer attractive deals for long term newsagent putaway commitment will realise the value of locking in loyal retail customers. While some will argue that the retail supply chain has a higher cost than the direct subscription model, I suspect that the cost is far lower than the 68% the publisher claims to give away with this Fortune offer.
Smart newsagents offer a professionally managed putaway service which includes SMS alerts to customers when their titles arrive, care for the titles so they are in mint condition when collected, barcode tracking of each customer’s copy when collected and up sell offers driven by the technology to help increase customer spend.
Newsagents are smarter and more capable in the magazine putaway area than these expensive and almost random mailings from publishers such as Fortune.
My message for publishers – work direct with me so, together, we can sell more magazines.
Hi Mark
We suffer from publisher subscription as well, they can be invitations as part of the magazine or as loose adverts or as in your case by mail. Clearly not every customer deserts us for the cheap offers, but enough do.
There have been unsuccessful attempts by our National Federation of Retail Newsagents to interest publishers in shop based subscription schemes but none have been brought into life.
I guess the best effort in publisher/retailer co-operation has been Homelink which promotes and markets newspaper home delivery services around the UK. It is reported as being reasonably successful.
Keep up the great work, its an inspiration!