The Digital Magazine Maker's Mobile Marketing Checklist

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If you have a digital magazine of your own, then you are probably always looking for ways to improve the performance of it. Improving performance doesn't just mean improving sales, it means driving results in five key areas:

• Findability
• Sales
• Renewals
• Readership
• Advocacy

To ensure you are making the most of your digital magazine marketing efforts, use this mobile marketing checklist and you will be on your way.

Findability:

• Boost organic search. Make sure the words "digital magazine" are in your meta data and on the header of your web pages.
• Boost app search. Make sure the title of your app has the word "magazine" in it.
• Work with affiliates. Offering text links to affiliates enables contextual relevance and increases findability.
• Give choices. Make sure you have a mobile version of, at the very least, an information page about your digital magazine.
• Fight the platform-domination urge. You wouldn't limit your print distribution to just one newsstand, so why would you limit your digital magazine to just one operating system? Be everywhere (including a PC version).

Sales:

• Be brave. Sell single, subs, back issues, and test new ways to sell (bundles, membership models, free samples, etc.).
• Be bold. Ensure your print price is not 50 percent or more less than your digital price. This will hurt you in the end.
• Be bright. Don't send your digital subscribers print renewal offers. You are hurting your business' bottom line when you do this.
• Be brilliant. Break into new countries by offering rates that appeal to the country's style of buying.

Renewals:

• Offer price parity on renewals to the original purchase price. You do it in print, so why not digital?
• Use digital to win back lost print subscribers.
• Add options into the print renewal notices you send to your customer's home.

Readership:

• Track it! If you are not tracking the readership of your digital magazines, you need to find a partner who can. This means where they are reading (location, device) as well as what they are reading.
• Share the learnings. Portrait vs. landscape, reading from front to back, or surfing and other interesting facts can inform your editorial and design teams as well as your marketing teams. Don't keep these a secret.
• Ask readers. Digital magazine readers love surveys. Let them help you shape what they want to read.
• Embed conversation. Embed Twitter topic feeds and Facebook conversations when you can to capitalize on the conversation.

Advocacy:

• Always survey your readers. Seriously. If you are not asking people why they:
  • Bought a single instead of a sub
  • Chose to buy from platform A instead of B
  • Didn't renew
  • Bought one product from your company instead of five
  • Read on one device over another
  • Have recommended, or will recommend your title to others
  
  …or other salient points, you are missing out. Digital readers are digital fans, they love being social. Leverage them to grow your business.

Got a good tip to add to my mobile marketing checklist? Email me.