Stupid Circulation Tricks #.... Ah, I've Lost Count

I've likened circulation management to shoveling coal on a passenger ship. The people on the fancy decks go to black tie parties, sit in the front rows of fashion shows, travel in black cars, and spend huge sums on famous writers and photographers. But they need those of us keeping the screws turning with the minutia of shoveling the coal and manning the boilers.

Running a profitable media business requires both types of activity to be done well. Some of us--like me--like being down in the engine room. It's fun to experiment and see if we can't create more profit to fund the whole enterprise.

Plus, I don't look good in tuxedoes and find fancy events boring anyway.

But lately it seems as if circulation and subscription management has been left to the interns or ignored entirely.

Let's look at the acknowledgement debacle from Future Plc.

I give my brothers and nephews subscriptions to both Guitar Player and Guitar World magazines for Christmas. Subscriptions make wonderful holiday gifts. They're not too expensive and you get a little reminder of the gift-giver 10-12 times per year.

Normally, the gift giver gets an acknowledgement ("ack") that the gift subscription has been processed and sometimes a card to send to the recipient. It's done because, as the giver, I don't get the product and this lets me know the recipient will. And we'd like to ensure next year's gift. We're talking high LTV here.

So let's do this right.

Uh, maybe not.

I recently got a gift ack from Future Plc. mailed to me from Switzerland--I live in the U.S. and so did my gift recipient. Alarm bells went off. What went wrong here?

1. Future spent ~$2.80 mailing it to me. This is nuts.
2. It took 66 days after I mailed my check to arrive here. Carrier pigeons could have done better.
3. The letter was horrific. See the link below to read the atrocity.
4. Maybe worst of all, at least to their CFO, was that they sat on my uncashed check for about 25 days.

You can see the problems in the presentation linked below. I can guarantee Future that I could fix this and generate at least double my fee in 2024 in savings. And I don't work cheap.

Are you looking at your gift acknowledgements and everything else your circulation team is doing? If not, why? My advice is to head down to the boiler room and generate some extra profit. And win.

Link to presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l65fRegJ3vJY-v3IocughvM-cVeX2j_J0eLEkPpgxGU/edit#slide=id.p

Future Glenn Eisen Keith Manning John Lane Denise Simpson Colleen Sugarman