Direct Marketing - Moneyweek Case Study

Moneyweek is a weekly magazine published by Efinancialnews Ltd that summarises investment and financial advice for its readers. The data is collated by specialist editors, who study over 2000 individual articles, and produce succinct and relevant investment information.

The Challenge

Moneyweek was purchased by Efinancialnews Ltd from Dennis Publishing in August 2002. After relocation to Efinancialnews’ offices the challenge was to quickly:

Increase the circulation through cost effective marketing; and
Minimize customer churn by improving customer service levels.

The Solution

The company needed to bring customer enquiries “in-house” and use their subscription house purely for fulfilment.

The Mediahawk system was introduced to review performance against key advertising response objectives, which included:

The success of their different direct market campaigns for generating enquiries
The operational efficiency of their new in-house subscription department.

Mediahawk would take less than two days to implement and provide Moneyweek with the ability to quickly, inexpensively and efficiently review how they were performing against their key objectives.

The Results

OBJECTIVE 1 - Success of Different Marketing Activities

Knowing which marketing initiatives generated what response allowed Moneyweek to accurately focus their resources. Mediahawk response analysis highlighted the following.

Response Generators
- The magazine generated 79% of enquiries
- Brochures generated 10% of enquiries
- Direct mail letters generated 6% of enquiries
- Other activity generated the remaining enquiries
Time Based Analysis

Despite a dip over Easter in April inbound enquiry levels started rising when the marketing activity increased and have continued to show month on month increases.

Advertising Shelf-Life

Four months after the campaign broke; the direct mail was still generating enquiries, indicating that subscribers are holding onto their mail information longer than expected before they make a decision to subscribe.

Product Promotion

Subscriptions where significantly uplifted when complimentary copies of Moneyweek were distributed as part of direct marketing material.

Geographic Analysis

Mediahawk provided a full geographic response breakdown by region, county and town, using live data. Moneyweek has been able to effectively target their campaign into areas they know will generate the greatest results. For instance, Moneyweeks most recent marketing initiative involved handing out sample copies with the Evening Standard which hit their largest market segments of the South East and East Anglia.

The geographic analysis enables Moneyweek’s advertising sales department to have easy to use, up-to-date figures showing the growth and spread of the magazine’s readership.
OBJECTIVE 2 - Operational Efficiency of In-House Subs

The decision to respond to enquiries in-house was taken in the knowledge that Mediahawk’s management reports would provide time based analysis for operational staffing purposes.

Time Based Response

By plotting the time of day of responses Moneyweek were able to staff their response centre accordingly.

Immediately after publication, there is a noticeable uplift in enquiries with the levels dropping off as the week progresses. This information has also been important when looking at the days when staff are most needed for answering the phone.

Meeting Objectives

Moneyweek were delighted that:

Customer retention has increased and paid subscriptions have risen by over 20%
Inbound enquires have increased by 89% and the time spent on the phone dealing with the enquiries has gone up by 100%.

Anne Putty, Head of Marketing & Circulation at Moneyweek says:

“Implementing Mediahawk was incredibly easy and straight forward. The management information that we receive every day has been central to helping us plan and review the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns.

It is great to be able to conduct a campaign and see the return on investment with certainty rather than acting on the marketers favourite weapon of good old “gut feel!”

Having Mediahawk has justified our decision to bring subscription enquiries in house whilst still giving us the flexibility to outsource them at a later date and retain all the management information Mediahawk provides.

We have been extremely pleased with Mediahawk and it has provided a better control of our business objectives”.

Mediahawk would like to thank Moneyweek for permission to put together this case study.