Newsagents often complain about browsers who spend too long reading magazines and newspapers and leave without making a purchase. We are about to experiment with a browsers bonus using a coupon which will hand to browsers and peak times in an effort to bounce them to another category and a purchase.
Our first offer is around greeting cards. Given that most magazine browsers in our newsagency to not buy a card we figures any sale is a bonus. We will test the coupon on Thursday and Friday evenings as well as on Saturday – our peak magazine browsing times.
What a great idea! My partner spends too much time browsing before making the single purchase. I often tell her she can buy and read them at home as I consider it rude to read and leave behind. I think if someone came up to her and gave her a bonus coupon she would probably think she had been caught out browsing too much and feel guilty enough to buy a card. Serve her right too! Then again, depending on her mood she might also think she had scored a “freebie” of some sort and want to use it as quickly as possible, just to know she got something for nothing. Hope you get some great positive results for your clever marketing idea.
Bagging mags discourages sales.
We have seen a massive increase in the amount of magazines that are sealed in plastic, that does not allow people to browse and as a result our sales are falling. Unless you are a hard core reader of a magazine most of our customers scan the various publications before settling on one. T%his is impossible if the magazine is sealled. We are for ever finding ripped open mags with the ” FREE” offer inside either missing or broken. If magazine publishers want to recycle older titles or push subscriptions why don’t they increase the volume of the mags instead of adding inserts. Again short sighted thinking
Luke . . . Better still, if magazine publishers want to recycle older titles, why don’t they advertise them in their magazine as “past issues” and store them on their own premises instead of sealing them in bags with giveaways. Why use up newsagents real estate doing this when they don’t have to. This would make the news agent happy as he/she has more space and the buyer happy because he/she is buying a current publication and not an oldie. As for the sealed magazine being opened, I guess people are just stealing the FREE stuff inside. I’ll never understand what possesses people to damage or steal from shops. As for those pesky inserts, I have often seen them drop out of magazines as people flip through them and they don’t pick them up because they know they are just advertisements or cut-out forms for subscriptions. Oh and finally, I look forward to reading how those coupons went. My niece loves a certain discount jewellery store which has a little basket it takes round to its shoppers and inside the basket are hundreds of sealed disount offers for purchases that day. Like miniature scratch tickets. Its always nice to think you are getting a discount off something you were going to buy anyway. Those coupons should work the same way.