Crowded fairway

Outside the men’s weekly and celebrity markets there are currently few more competitive sectors in magazine publishing than golf. Until recently there were three main players, emap with Today’s Golfer and Golf World and IPC’s Golf Monthly. But over the last nine months two new titles have entered the fray: KYN’s Golf Punk and Total Golf from IPC, which intended to go head to head with Today’s Golfer.

So if ever there was a good time for a golf title to run a successful reader promotion, then the summer of 2004 was it. The "Cut Your Score in 04" (CYS04) promotion is running over a five month period in Today’s Golfer and Sue Holt, emap’s brand manager, is convinced that it will help maintain the title’s number one position in the market. Whilst the campaign was conceived last November, and planning was well under progress when news of the rival publications filtered through, the launches helped focus the team and stiffen the sinews.

CYS04 is a promotional campaign covering the high season golfing months of May to October. The promotion was essentially a golf instruction course designed to help readers improve their game.

The marketing team, headed by Sue, was new to golf, having transferred over from emap’s equestrian titles. When they met up with the editor at a local golf club (where else?) for a brain storming session last November there was a lot of enthusiasm and a desire to try something new.

Related worlds

Sue’s main focus was on reader retention. She wanted to increase frequency of purchase, be it via the newsstand or by subscription. A secondary aim was to expand the purchasing pool by promoting the scheme outside its regular readership. Any campaign would have to firstly grab the reader’s attention and secondly hold their interest for the duration. They used the "related worlds" brainstorming technique with its emphasis on finding solutions from other industries. The process forced them to look at industries where securing buy-in and maintaining interest were also a challenge.

They came up with the diet industry. Marketers of dietary programmes too had to arouse and then hold interest through the length of a course. A friend of one of the teams had just successfully completed one such programme to great effect. She said that what had got her interest was a clear promise ("lose 3 stone in 3 months") and that what had maintained her interest was a well structured course which provided a full programme of diet, nutrition advice and exercise.

In trying to find the golfing equivalent of "3 stone in 3 months" they came up with the "Cut Your Score in 04" campaign – a five month programme that promised to reduce a reader’s golf shots over the summer.

The programme

CYS04 ran over five issues. In each issue a key area of the game (chipping & pitching, driving, putting, irons, bunkers) was featured, with eight dedicated pages of instruction. A key element of the programme was the logbook and this was only available to readers who registered via a website. Testing was the cornerstone of the editorial content. The log book mirrored the editorial and gave the reader a chance to record their scores (and hence their progress). Each section in the logbook would start with a space to record their base score (ie their ability at the start of the programme), scores for each of the tests, and their end score which would show their improvement.

In terms of presentation, the marketing team were careful to avoid two things. Firstly, in the knowledge that there would be a proportion of the readership who would not want to take part in the course, they had to make the programme non-exclusive. The instruction pages in each issue, therefore, were constructed so they worked in their own right (although to get maximum benefit, registration was needed). Secondly they were careful not to over-promise. No claims were made that each and every participant would be turned into a pro golfer in five months. It was billed as a "handicap slashing programme" and progress was relative to each reader’s ability.

Marketing activity

Readers were encouraged to register online to take part in the programme. What they received back was a welcome pack containing the all-important course logbook and various goodies. With one eye on the need to sidestep any spoiler activity by the competition the registration campaign did not start in earnest until four weeks prior to the June issue. Print runs of all issues in the programme were increased, so as to service people registering after the programme had started or people becoming aware at the end of the course and wanting full sets of back issues.

The main plank of the marketing activity was an email broadcast to 300,000 people. The email list was built from fifteen different sources divided into two broad categories; core and lifestyle. The core names were sourced via contra arrangements with major golfing retailers and other trade sources whilst the lifestyle ones came from the reader databases of other emap titles such as FHM and Car Magazine. Target consumers were selected on age, gender and responsiveness criteria. Each of the fifteen segments had a tailored message and a unique URL to respond to so as to facilitate campaign analysis. The online marketing activities were coordinated by emap’s CRM manager Andy Letting. In addition to taking their registration (and starting them on the CYS04 programme) they cleverly included two further questions on the registration form, which opened up exciting marketing opportunities.

The golden question

Form design is one of the least glamorous areas of publishing and not nearly as much fun as hobnobbing at a launch party. But whatever the nature of your publication it always pays to put real thought into planning your forms (be they on page or online). In addition to your primary purpose (in this case "registration") it can be advantageous to find a secondary and even tertiary purpose. Sue and Andy saw the opportunity to use the registration campaign to boost the circulation list of their email newsletter and also to find out key marketing information about the respondents which would facilitate successful follow up marketing. The first question was "Tick here to receive the Today’s Golfer email newsletters, featuring extra CUT YOUR SCORE instruction" and the second (the golden question) "How many issues of Today’s Golfer do you purchase each year?"

About 10,000 of the registrants ticked the newsletter box thereby boosting the email list of the newsletter to approx 40,000. The newsletter is a free service emailed to reader prospects shortly after the issue goes on sale to alert them to what is in the issue and drive them to purchase.

The frequency of purchase question worked on two levels. Firstly it enabled Sue and her team to gain a much greater understanding of the readership and thereby helped shape future marketing assumptions and activity. Secondly it provided her with some mouth-watering segments for her subscriptions marketing team to work on. For instance all those who indicated a purchase frequency of 8 – 12 were prime subscriptions targets. Having this information would allow them to create highly personalised promotions.

Results

Approximately 15,000 people registered for CYS04 (a 5% response). As far as they could tell about half of them were new to Today’s Golfer (in so far as there was no record of them on their existing customer database). Perhaps unsurprisingly the "core" segments performed better than the "lifestyle" ones. 95% of responders responded online (as opposed to filling in the tear out slip printed in the magazine). Sue Holt was pleasantly surprised since the normal online: paper ratio on competition responders is 50:50. She finds that on-line applications result in higher quality data and lower fulfilment costs.

Has it worked?

Judging the success of a promotion like this is difficult – a bit like to trying to assess what impact a particular cover mount had on overall circulation. Given the all embracing nature of the campaign, ABC figures are probably the best guide and the July – Dec 2004 figures will make very interesting reading. The recently released Jan – June 2004 figures only catch the start of the campaign so it is difficult to read too much into them. However they do show that Today’s Golfer has maintained its top slot in the market increasing its average net circulation by just under 2% to 101,795, it’s highest ABC ever.

Judging by the enthusiasm of the team, it is clear that they felt they were onto a winner. What were the ingredients of this successful promotion?

1. Thorough planning and meticulous attention to detail.

Instruction editor Duncan Lennard and his editorial team spent a long time devising the instruction course and testing regime. They applied the "will this work" criteria to every single thing they did – right down to calculating the right number of shots to include in the base tests (which incidentally was twelve; enough to be worthwhile, but not too many to be a chore). There are two things to stress; firstly this kind of expertise can only come from the editorial team and secondly it takes time!

2. Intelligent design of registration form.

Here’s a tip for a publishing director: ask your marketing manager how long it took them to design the form, how many people were involved in the process and what additional information is being collected. If the answer is not long, just me and none, then send him back to try again. Ask him – where’s the golden question?

3. Close liaison between editorial and marketing.

Whatever the area of publishing, the best campaigns come out of a good relationship between the two departments. It is clear that Duncan and Sue trusted each other and worked well together. If you are a publishing director presiding over feuding teams then my advice would be to knock heads together. Your title will never achieve fully integrated marketing promotions until, at the very least, your editor sits in on the marketing planning meetings.

4. Clever marshalling of resources.

In most areas of magazine publishing big marketing budgets are a rarity. This of course means that marketing teams have to be at their most skilful to optimise their limited resources. CYS04 is an excellent example of how a good looking, successful campaign can be put together "on the cheap". Looked at from one angle the campaign can be seen as a clever repackaging of content that might well have been run anyway. Today’s Golfer runs multiple pages of instruction every issue and, given the nature of the golfing sector, they would have run the cover mounts anyway. Duncan put together the editorial – but then that’s his job! The list sources all came from either the in-house marketing database or from contra deals so were in effect free. With the exception of the welcome packs all communication was by email and the whole CRM campaign was put together by their own in-house CRM manager – Andy. Indeed the biggest campaign costs were printing the log book and mailing out the welcome packs.

Lessons learned

Would they do anything differently next time? Sue now thinks that the fear of spoiler activity was overstated. The fact is that a quality campaign of this nature takes months of planning and it is very unlikely that a rival could effectively counter at short notice. Indeed a poorly thought through spoiler campaign could be seen as advantageous – doing them more harm than good. So she would start both the planning and publicity about a month earlier. The brainstorming session for 2005 has already taken place. Sue also plans more frequent mailings of mailer packs. In an effort to maximise mailsort disounts welcome packs were mailed out in three weekly bulk mailings. This meant that some people had to wait up to four weeks to receive theirs. With today’s "want it now" culture and with the increased expectations created by online ordering she plans to do more frequent mailings in the future. From Duncan’s point of view he would put more effort into tightening the link between cover gifts and the campaign and possibly invest more to achieve a meatier welcome pack.

It will be very interesting to see the next set of ABC figures and to then make a final judgement on the success of the CYS04 campaign. By that time Sue and her team will be well on their way to applying their experiences to the other titles in the emap Active portfolio.