FulcrumTech Analyzes Over 5,000 Email Newsletters Sent by Top Magazines and Uncovers Major Problems

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. - July 9, 2013 - PRLog -- Many of today’s consumer magazines are suffering due to declines in circulation and advertising. To determine whether magazine publishers are doing everything they can with email marketing to improve their situations, the email-marketing agency FulcrumTech, LLC (http://www.fulcrumtech.net) conducted a data analysis of over 5,000 free email newsletters sent by 11 leading fashion and lifestyle magazines. This analysis identified many major problems the magazines are having with email, as well as opportunities for substantial improvement.

The magazines used in this analysis included Condé Nast’s Allure, Glamour, Lucky, Self, and Vogue; Time’s InStyle; American Media’s Shape; Rodale’s Women’s Health; and Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Marie Claire. FulcrumTech compiled and analyzed data from eDataSource on these magazines and assessed various factors that affect email-marketing performance and return on investment. The following are examples of FulcrumTech’s findings:

•   Deliverability – Some publishers have had regular or periodic challenges getting their emails delivered to subscribers’ inboxes. For example, in 2012 Condé Nast’s Allure magazine had an average Google spam rate of over 18%, while the Google spam rate was over 22% for Rodale’s Women’s Health. Hearst’s Elle magazine also had an average Yahoo! spam rate over 20% in 2012 and over 17% in 2013

•   Email Performance – The data showed a wide variation in read rates among the lifestyle and fashion magazines; however, read rates for the magazine’s newsletters seem to be low across the board, although some did perform noticeably better than their competitors. In the second quarter of 2012, for example, Condé Nast’s Vogue had a read rate of 6.67% compared to American Media’s Shape at 11.54%. Vogue’s read rate has remained about the same at 6.66% in 2013, while Shape dropped to 8.75%.

“The results from this analysis indicate that many of the magazines we looked at are using their free email newsletters as more of a value-added tool,” observes FulcrumTech President Mitch Lapides, “rather than a strategic tool that could be used to drive serious revenue.”

To use their email newsletters more effectively, says Lapides, magazines would need to implement an end-to-end model for calculating and tracking the key performance indicators (KPIs) required to regularly measure success. The model would track extra advertising and impressions on the website that can be generated from the newsletters, for example, as well as the email newsletter’s ability to migrate people to paid subscriptions.

“Then, there should be a clearly articulated plan,” he advises, “for testing such factors as email lists, subject lines, incentives, and personalization, to optimize and continually improve email-marketing results against the KPIs.” He adds, “At FulcrumTech, we developed the ROI Goalsetter® tool (http://www.fulcrumtech.net/email-roi/) to help with such modeling.”

The complete results of this data analysis, as well as important ways consumer magazines can use email marketing more effectively, are presented in the FulcrumTech article, “How Consumer Magazines Can Use Email Marketing to Maximize ROI,” at http://www.fulcrumtech.net/resources/email-marketing-for-....

About FulcrumTech, LLC
Based in Doylestown, PA, FulcrumTech, LLC is an email-marketing agency that provides strategic guidance to design, develop, and implement comprehensive email-marketing programs. Each of FulcrumTech’s client engagements is tailor-made to accurately communicate the marketing message that best reaches the customer base. FulcrumTech was founded in 2004 by Mitch Lapides, a senior interactive-product executive with more than 20 years of experience in strategic planning, marketing, IT management, software product development, and content licensing and product management.