Getting Noticed: ProQuest eNewsletters

A big part of my job at ProQuest is to create, transmit, and evaluate the effectiveness of our email newsletters. (Archives are here.)

We have a large set of titles that require a huge amount of effort to pull off, from authoring by our product managers and creating customized student activities (thanks Carl!) to redesigning their look and feel (thanks Bethany!) and much, much more.

MarketingSherpa is an excellent site for online marketers -- and they took notice of our hard work and have us an excellent, concise, and hands-on write-up on our activities. Enjoy.

6 Subscription Strategies to Increase Renewal Rates

SUMMARY

Subscription marketers often face a double challenge: convincing customers, who may not be the end users, to sign up for products, and then convincing the end users to use the publications so customers renew.

An educational marketer transformed their subscriber newsletters into publications that became teaching tools as well as product promotions. The change is working. Renewal rates, opt-ins, clickthroughs and Web traffic have increased as much as 40%.

CHALLENGE

Tim McLain, Marketing Manager, ProQuest, was finding plenty of customers for the company’s online research and education databases for K-12 educators. What he really wanted was to convince librarians and teachers to use the subscriptions purchased for them so renewal rates would increase.

To encourage use of those resources, McLain and his team developed email newsletters that focused on product features, updates and other support services. But the strategy was missing the mark.

“Our list was growing nicely, but we kept hearing from customers, ‘Product updates are all well and good, but I’m a middle school teacher who teaches Social Studies. Can you give me lesson plans so I can use [these tools] with my kids?’ ”

McLain’s team realized they needed a different newsletter strategy: one that would persuade librarians and teachers to actually use their products in their classrooms and libraries to encourage subscription renewals.

Open access for the next 7 days.