In case you missed the note in my last newsletter (hint, hint -- you should sign-up!), Magazines Canada and Centennial College are putting together a "Web Weekend" on Saturday, November 24 and Sunday, November 25 at Centennial College in downtown Toronto.

From the brochure: "Web Weekend is an intensive learning event created specifically for magazine publishers. Through seminars and lab work, the Web Weekend faculty will deliver practical advice, tools and templates to help make your publishing business more successful." This first event will be followed by repeat events across Canada.

Along with a bunch of talented people, I was invited to be part of the "faculty" for this inagural event. In addition to delivering a workshop, I'll be facilitating what's probably the first-ever "speed geek" at a Magazines Canada event.

The session I'm leading will be a fast-and-furious exploration of the options for publications that want to increase online revenue. Whether it’s as simple as collecting payments for subscriptions online or as critical as lowering the cost of acquiring new subscribers, I'm shooting for participants to leave with tangible next steps that you can apply right away. Specifically, I aim to cover:

• E-commerce and taking payments online: From simple secure forms to online stores
• E-mail marketing and e-newsletters: keeping the conversation going between issues
• Microsites & other traffic-generating strategies
• Paid search engine marketing & landing pages

I'll also mix in some real-world examples and case studies to illustrate how to attract new visitors, focus their visit on a few simple goals (ka-ching!), and measure the outcomes. I'll also go over how to keep costs low by mixing traditional letter-mail campaigns with inexpensive e-mail initiatives and viral online campaigns.

This should be a great session for publishers, circulators, and advertising sales managers. Please spread the word. :-)

(UPDATE: Just a quick clarification that the example below was sent to expired subscribers. So these folks had already received -- and not responded to -- a renewal series. That's why I put the response in the 1 - 3% range, vs. what one might expect as part of an actual renewal series.)

Print-based magazines are constantly managing subscriber churn. Every year one group of people lets their subscription lapse, while others either renew or subscribe for the first time. Similar to almost any type of revenue-generating enterprise, the magic is keeping attrition rates low and managing the cost of acquiring new customers or keeping existing ones. E-mail marketing is one way to approach a lapsed campaign at a lower cost than a typical direct mail.

For example:

• If your publication decided to send a simple direct mail package to 2000 lapsed subscribers, you could easily invest $1000 or more on the printing, lettershop services, and postage costs.
• If that campaign delivered what I understand to be the industry average of 1%, you'd be lucky to get 20 returning subscribers.
• In this scenario, each returning subscriber came at a cost of $50.

To me, that seems like a pretty high price to pay. Though the lifetime value of that customer may work in your publication's favour in the long run, it would certainly be nice to be able to invest less in encouraging that subscriber to come back.

Now, let's say that your direct mail outperforms the 1% rule and gets up to 2% or 3%, reducing the cost per returned subscriber to just $25 or $16. Well now we're talking, right? Wrong: what if you could achieve the same results for $25? Not $25 per returned subscriber -- but just $25 for the whole campaign! Interested? Keep reading...

So, the key ingredients in our example e-mail-based lapsed-subscriber campaign are:

• A really simple HTML e-mail: just a nice, easy-to-read font, some careful underlining / highlighting, and only two links in the message. (Basically, following the form of a typical direct mail, or e-mail campaign.)
• Link #1: The "subscribe now for just $36" link.
• Link #2: If you can't subscribe now, please forward this offer to a friend.
• A lapsed subscriber list (in this example, we just needed their e-mail address, as we didn't personalize the message).
• A secure special offer Web page that subscribers visit to fill in their info.

With e-mail marketing, the results typically come in quickly -- days, not weeks -- so the trend was obvious immediately. However, after just one week, this is how our lapsed subscriber e-mail campaign did:

• 1,801 recipients
• 385 people opened the e-mail (31% of of all recipients)
• 89 people clicked one of the two links (23% of those who opened the message)
• 10 of the recipients have unsubscribed
• 557 emails bounced back (that's 30.93% of all recipients)
• 14 forwards (where subscribers forwarded the e-mail to another person)

And -- last but not least -- 23 subscriptions. That's a decent 1.2% response rate on the campaign, with a total campaign cost of just $25. At just $1.09 per subscriber, we could even do a follow-up!

Do you have results from a similar campaign that you're able to share? If so, post 'em in the comments below.

Probably not, no. However, if it's incredibly candid and "self-absorbed yet socially aware" it can get written about in a national newspaper. And, what's even more interesting -- "unique" even? -- about this campaign: the unusually high response rate after only two weeks (10,000 pieces started landing in people's mailboxes on the 19th of October).

What was the secret in my opinion: pushing the envelope (literally) with "being yourself." I've been working with the editor of Taddle Creek for over five years now and, if anything, he's certainly comfortable with being himself. Lisa Whittington-Hill -- a circulation specialist and the Publisher of This Magazine -- was also involved in developing this campaign; she's another one that's pretty comfortable with being "real." It's like all those other folks doing DM campaigns -- or as Conan likes to say "junk mail campaigns" -- were so busy reading The Cluetrain Manifesto that they forgot about trying to figure out who they really were.

Enough of all that: just go and and get yourself a subscription to "Canada's most unlikely literary journal."