Readers Digest
What was the issue?
Reader’s Digest wanted to promote a specific book product that was regarded as being of interest to most New Zealanders i.e., the target market was general / wide as opposed to being specific. However, notwithstanding the general / wide market, the rate of uptake would not be high. The product was a driver’s atlas of New Zealand.
Treatment of the issue
Working on criteria developed jointly between New Zealand Post unaddressed market specialists and counterparts from Reader’s Digest, a distribution plan was developed. The specialist profiling and demographics work leading to the distribution plan included:
- Cleaning of the existing Driver’s Atlas customer database (collected from previous campaigns by Reader’s Digest) of any non-geocodable addresses, including incorrect or incomplete address fields and “post office box addresses” (to which no demographics can be assigned)
- removing records of non-New Zealand addresses
- geocoding the remaining addresses in respect of the correct delivery point, street, suburb, or town.
- manually confirming accuracy at required levels.
- compiling and integrating all relevant demographic information into each geocoded record, basically assigning a specific demographic to each individual.
- analysing demographic trends to identify deliverable concentrations of delivery points that meet the target profile characteristics that Reachmedia created. A distribution plan was then built to a campaign quota of 250,000 homes.
The profiling was the crucial part of the exercise. Credibility of product and customer needed to be preserved, as well as ensuring to the extent possible a good level of uptake for a virtually commodity product.
Implementing the distribution plan
Having established the distribution plan, the mechanics of delivery were straightforward. Timing of the actual distribution was not a critical factor.
The results
Targets were exceeded – enrolment of customers purchasing the product bettered expectation by 10%.
In addition, the promotion provided new leads for Reader’s Digest to market other products (e.g., magazine subscriptions, music, movies, books).
The experience
Generating a constant flow of new customers is crucial to Reader’s Digest. While some activity is always budgeted there is often a need to increase budgeted activity or add new campaigns to combat erosion rates.
The unaddressed campaign was successful in generating a flow of new customers in an extremely cost-effective manner. Based on careful profiling – jointly-developed with New Zealand Post – the medium is one that Reader’s Digest will include as a core promotional tool in the future.
The initiative was a success!