Subscription Marketing Online

SUMMARY: You really can’t beat customer referrals, but measuring the impact of this type of word-of-mouth marketing is notoriously difficult. A subscription-based discount club for college students solved this problem by turning its customers into affiliates through compensated referrals.

Students then promote the service to their friends through email messages and widgets on their social networking profile pages. Thousands of customers have signed up to produce a 12% conversion rate. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: Users of Web 2.0 channels, especially social media sites, are tempting targets for subscription marketers. But you need to select channels that best fit your brand and develop a strategy keyed to those online communities.

We asked a subscription marketer who has tackled that challenge to share some insights on social media marketing. Strategies include:
o Setting goals and expectations
o Finding sites to target
o Creating a monetization metric read the complete article

SUMMARY: Like other publishers with a vast content archive, Marvel Comics saw an opportunity to make thousands of Spider-Man, X Men and other comic books available online.

But the marketing team didn’t want to cannibalize their print copy sales, and they needed to attract hard-core comics fans as well as new readers. We got an inside look at how they launched their digital archive. Includes three landing page copy tests. read the complete interview

SUMMARY: If you’re in charge of email campaigns for subscription sites on the Web, download this Special Report immediately. MarketingSherpa has new data on how 50 subscription sites use email to welcome and convert new members.

Includes competitive data charts and load of creative samples from The Wall Street Journal Online, TheStreet.com, AccuWeather and others. Plus, the biggest shocker of all: did anyone even bother to confirm that our trial got canceled? read the complete article

By Anne Holland, President

In November 1999, I woke up abruptly at about 3 a.m. in a hotel room outside Phoenix where I was attending a marketing conference.

I'd had this strangely intense dream. The vision was so overwhelming that I fumbled in my bag next to the bed for a pen and paper and started furiously scribbling.

The result: a blueprint outlining every aspect of what would become MarketingSherpa -- an encyclopedic resource with practical research... read the complete blog post