Australian Newsagency Blog

We have been running an in store loyalty program for magazines for eleven months now. Year on year sales are up close to 30%. That is way way above the industry average. Customer reaction from that campaign suggests to us that it would work with newspapers. The trouble is we can’t get a publisher interested in trialing a campaign with us.

We have a couple of strategies:

Customer pre pays for x copies with a discount built in for their up front commitment. To redeem a copy we scan a customer card or they give us a code and we enter that in our computer system. It would take no more time than transacting with cash.

Customer received a coupon with each newspaper purchase and x coupons will redeem a free newspaper. Coupons have an expiry date on them.

It makes sense to me that you should reward loyalty to a product with lower cost access to that product. Hence these two ideas. There are more but I’ll save them for a publisher who wants to talk about the idea.

My message here is that we want to grow newspaper sales beyond the 10% we have already achieved year on year. We want 20% growth. It’s there if we can negotiate the right consumer offering which will attract sales which otherwise no one gets.