Nothing draws attention like personalization, and today’s advanced technology allows you and your advertisers to speak with readers 1to1, beginning with the cover. In fact, mass customization is now possible with today’s technology. One of the magazine industry’s most notable examples involves Xerox. To help promote its iGen3 110 technology, Xerox collaborated with Wired magazine and invited readers of the April 2007 issue to upload their photographs to Wired.com. The first 5,000 respondents then received the July issue with their personal picture printed on the cover.

Applications abound

Similar mass customization strategies are now more easily accessible and possible for you and your advertisers than ever before. To illustrate, here are just a few ways advanced cover personalization can benefit your publication’s key stakeholders:

• Editorial. Increase readership and involvement by directing readers to editorial you know is at the top of their priority list. There’s no need to limit your creativity to just text. Change the entire cover for each recipient if you like.
  
  
• Advertising. Personalize and customize ads to whatever degree your advertiser wants. Create a unique cover ad for a region or step up to higher levels of customization based on reader database information. For example, a concert venue advertising in a city magazine could offer different shows based on demographics like age—Rod Stewart for baby boomers and Hannah Montana for families with pre-teens.
  
  
• Circulation. Making unique renewal offers on the cover is a snap, so is tying a personal message to an equally personalized offer inside the magazine. And you can use the same digital technology to create customized direct-mail renewal packages.

Good Times gets personal

• 
  Good Times, Canada’s magazine for successful retirement, wanted to boost subscription renewal rates. Nearly 99% of Good Times readers were paid subscribers, so retention of the subscription base was a priority to both the publisher and its advertisers. The Good Times circulation department developed a new strategy aimed at significantly boosting renewals.
  
  
• Seeking new solutions
  As any magazine subscriptions neared expiration, subscribers normally received a renewal letter polybagged with their magazine, which of course included a price promotion for the subscription. Instead, the strategic team decided to utilize 4-color, variable data printing to test two renewal offers that would be printed on the inside cover page of the test run as well as being personalized to the subscribers’ names directly on the cover!

Spectacular results

The personalized cover offers achieved up to 625% renewal rate increases compared to the publication’s control for the test segments. The full-color, personalized cover was the main factor for this amazing increase as opposed to price promotions since all types of price promotions are used in renewal membership campaigns.

• “The test really raised our awareness of the high response potential
  personalization offers. In this case, it allowed us to address our subscribers
  at a different level of familiarity while providing an easy and effective means
  of varying the offers. I think we have definitely seen the wave of the future.”
  
  Martine Aubin
  Group Marketing Director
  Good Times
  

Learn more about MatchUp! technology and where to start.

Contact your Transcontinental representative to learn how personalization strategies can help your magazine success.