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HH&S have been providing newspaper promotional and circulation solutions for over 20 years. In the last year HH&S have focused on delivering electronic subscription and reader recruitment discount solutions.
Home news delivery is in decline and the need for reader data is on the up.
An online electronic subscription scheme can enable reader convenience, real time reporting and the basis of a valuable CRM function.
Home news delivery accounts are seen by many newspapers as being a secure daily sale that can be relied upon. With HND declining the recruitment of HND accounts are expensive and commonly involve door to door merchandising, direct mail or telephone canvassing. One of the many reasons given for readers either not taking up a HND recruitment offer or cancelling their HND account is that it no longer suits their way of life.
We developed a complete contactless payment solution including bespoke hardware, software, payment solutions and transactions, and website. The cards were initially merchandised in the main London railway stations, free credits being exchanged for an email address linked to the card number to facilitate a CRM strategy. This was supported by in-paper promotions and POS advertising.
A range of offers, exclusive to cardholders, was developed to encourage participation in the scheme. Being able to track customer use of the card in real time, meant that a CRM strategy was developed, targeting the reader with specific offers to drive increased use. The programme is no longer in operation as the title is now available for free.
We developed a customer recruitment campaign whereby potential new readers were sent an electronic discount card to trial for 12 weeks, offering them a 50% discount on the cover price of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday at participating retailers who use the PayPoint network. The recruitment trial experienced sufficient usage rates to evolve the trial to stage 2 where regular users of the card were targeted for a card subscription. The key benefit of the card subscription model is the real time usage reporting mechanism which ultimately will feed into a targeted CRM programme with variable pricing, special offers and rewards tailored to individual purchase habits.
In recent times newspaper "paper based cheque book style" subscription schemes have been developed to give the reader more choice as to where they can pick up their paper. However paper vouchers have a number of inefficiencies primarily related to the delay in reporting of the reader's transactional history. HH&S have a distribution agreement with PayPoint where a subscription reader may load value onto a card and then use the card at over 22,000 news retail points to pick up their daily paper. An electronic solution provides real time reporting of reader transactions and when used with cardholder data provides a valuable customer relation marketing function.
A member of the Tangram Group