Paul,
I’m telling you that our Subscribers’ Club IS our incentive. It’s a discount club that goes further than just the products in our shop. Plus 10% is a pretty large cut into our own margins.
Purchasing gifts to send to thousands of existing subscribers, as lovely and generous as that would be, is simply not a viable way of doing business. The huge cost of doing that would come no where breaking even and would be a financial disaster! We just sent a letter to all of our Direct Debit subscribers. It was a plain letter in a small envelope that was posted second class. We have 2300 subscribers on Direct Debit. Just send a plain old letter cost us £800. I quote that example purely as a way to put the costs into perspective. Imagine the cost of sending a gift to all those subscribers and how much the final bill would be. If we managed to somehow obtain 5000 widgets for free the fact they would bump the postage up to small packet rates would multiply that cost by at least 4 or 5. So we are talking a cost of say £4k to send a FREE gift (free to us somehow) to just half of our total subscribers. So approximately £8k to send out a gift that we managed to source for free to all of our subscribers.
Our subs cost between £27 and £30 depending on how you pay for it. Just how on earth are we going to see a payback at all from that kind of expense?
It’s just not an economic option. It’s not a sensible business option for us at all. Right now it would be commercial suicide!
No other mag has a Discount Club for all it’s subscribers valid for the entire life of a subscription. That is the only possible way we can offer an incentive to existing subscribers in addition to the 25% discount off the cost of the magazines. And lets also add in to that the free postage. An 8 issue subscription = £5.50 in postage that we pick up the bill for. So for the full value of your subscription you need to factor that in too.
We genuinely are doing everything we possibly can do to make it worthwhile being a subscriber. We do not abandon our subscribers once they have signed up. To do so would be similarly commercially idiotic. We need to retain our customers like every other business. But we need new subscribers all the time. All magazines need new subscribers and all magazines run promotional offers exclusively to attract them.
The feeling of missing out is one we appreciate and sympathise with and we have tried to at least take the sting off with our Subscribers Club. I’m afraid that is all we can do. Hopefully there will be something in the Club that will offer some benefit to as many of our subscribers as possible at some point.