How Email Marketing Can Help Magazines

Advertising used to be pretty easy for magazines. Remember those omnipresent subscription cards inserted in magazines—and how often they did the trick? Thumb through a magazine in a store, like what you read, take out the subscription card, fill it out, mail it in and voila—six weeks later your first copy arrived in the mailbox!

Now, of course, it’s not nearly so easy for magazines to lure new subscribers. Print readership is down drastically and many magazines have not been able to survive the move to a digital age. Those that are still standing have a potentially insurmountable foe in the bookstores that offer upbeat cafes and copious amounts of coffee and pastries, all of which makes it just too easy for people to read a magazine every month without actually subscribing to it.

The news is not all bad though, and the challenging landscape for all print publications has allowed email marketing for magazines to flourish. Indeed, the relationship between magazines and email marketing is not only an essential one, but one that can help publicize the magazine on all of its platforms.

Whether those that publish the magazine and those that write for it like it or not, a magazine’s website is more important and essential these days than the actual print product itself. With email marketing for magazines, campaigns can work hand-in-hand in terms of promotion of all the content, both in print and online.

While a website allows a magazine to post breaking news on a daily—or hourly—basis and provides readers the opportunity to read the stories from the weekly, bi-weekly or monthly print edition before it lands in their mailbox, it will also serve as the starting point for email marketing for magazines. On a prominent part of the home page, supply a prompt to readers asking them to provide their email addresses. Make it clear that email is the best way to learn about the magazine’s latest content and all the news in the industry that the magazine covers.

Having email addresses on file also makes it far easier to implement an email marketing campaign for magazines. Pitching new subscribers via email is a much less expensive and much more effective means of boosting circulation than traditional—and costly—methods such as newspaper ads, television ads or bulk mailings. A magazine’s email marketing campaign will accomplish marketing objectives while allowing the magazine to save money.

Plus, people are much more likely to read, absorb and react to emails, especially given that email marketing software provides plenty of personalization options as well as the ability of the recipient to either save the messages or forward them on to other friends who might be interested in the magazine.

Email marketing for magazines is the best way for these publications to attempt to reverse the tide of eroding circulation and remain alive and relevant in a dot-com world. The old ways won’t work anymore: if you operate a magazine, check out what email marketing can do for magazines today!