56% of marketers believe personalized communications outperform traditional mass-market delivery and there is plenty of incentive, and lots of opportunity, for magazine publishers to help their advertisers do more targeted and personalized advertising as a strategy to further engage readers and improving revenue.

Today’s print technologies offer a full range of personalization options from simple versioning techniques to sophisticated, OCR-driven systems that Match Up! highly personalized advertising content to an individual reader.

Getting Over the Data Hurdle

But publishers are non-participants in the personalization arena, nor are many marketers. According to CMO Council Executive Director Donovan Neale-May:

1. “…marketers are still missing the mark on how to leverage and utilize data, and because of this they are unable to realize the full potential of personalization tools, services and solutions.”
2. The main reason on both the publisher and advertiser sides is a lack of database development.
3. In fact Neale-May group’s study, “The Power of Personalization,” indicates that 47% of CMOs rate their company’s data as deficient.

But that doesn’t have to be your case. Publishers—particularly of controlled circulation magazines—usually have plenty of data available. The challenge is mustering the resources to get the data into a usable form.

First: Look at what you already know

All type of personalization helps, and publishers can begin by using basic and easily sourced data and then start collecting information to build a more sophisticated database. In other words, start by keeping the personalization simple and develop a plan to work upward. On the advertising front, talk to key advertisers and see who might be an enabling partner.

1. Look at your subscriber database.
   Every magazine publisher will likely have a subscriber’s name, gender, complete address and subscription renewal date. This simple information can help you develop personalized subscription renewal strategies, use versioning strategies based on location or gender and even call out their names on the cover, inserts, or within magazine pages.
2. Don’t try to personalize everything. 
   You can pick and choose the strategy that makes sense to your publication’s growth.  For example, analyze for which type of subscribers it would be relevant to target personally, as well as for which issues, or for which advertisers.  Ask yourself: What do I want to accomplish? What will it give me in return?
3. Clean up your database
   Before you do anything to your database, make sure it’s clean and current. This includes using good list hygiene practices. There are horror stories about post offices throwing away large quantities of non-profit-sponsored publications, for example, because the lists are so outdated. And an advertiser’s potential ROI on undeliverable addresses is zero.

Second: Establish What You Want and Start Building your Database

Once you determine your objectives, different strategies exist to build your database. For example, you can:

• Incorporate additional questions on subscription renewals
• Develop a contest that includes answering questions during the signup process
• Organize or sponsor events, and invite your subscribers to see their level of interests in them
• Develop a strategy with your advertisers to get the qualification criteria that are most important to them which will allow you both to leverage the data through more personalized communications

Transcontinental Database Services can help you mine, analyze and manage your subscriber data, enabling you and your advertisers to discover hidden customer intelligence that will generate higher advertising performance.