The Sunday edition as a sales channel

The Super Bowl is the most coveted advertising medium of all. A 30-second ad sells for over $2 million. And yet the network that hosts the Super Bowl telecast often fills the broadcast with many of its own promotional ads, promoting new TV shows in the network's lineup. Why would the network give up the chance to sell $2 million spots? Because it wants to use that unparalleled platform to promote viewership of its own shows. Network executives know that they have a captive audience, and want to use that opportunity to keep those viewers throughout the viewing season. You can use the same strategy by using your Sunday paper as a platform for selling subscriptions to the Sunday-only readers. It’s the closest thing you have to a Super Bowl in your sales-channel mix.

Many newspapers are embracing the Sunday edition as a primary subscription vehicle. And this makes a great deal of sense. Many newspapers enjoy a Sunday circulation that is much higher than the daily circulation. Many of these additional readers are Sunday-only or weekend subscribers. Others are single-copy buyers that purchase the papers on Sunday. Either way these are people who already have a propensity to buy and read the newspaper at least on one day a week. These are people to whom you can appeal with less selling.

They already understand the virtues of reading a newspaper. They simply need to be given an offer to enjoy the weekday edition on a home-delivery basis. You should fill your Sunday paper with ads in every section appealing to all of the major prospect groups that you envision. Free-standing inserts should also be used in all of the Sunday single-copy editions. If you can afford it, free-standing inserts in the home-delivery editions that go to Sunday-only subscribers will also make sense. In-paper ads clearly promote features that are coming up in the coming week or standard weekday features.

The idea is to make Sunday readers realize what they have missed by not subscribing to the daily paper. You don’t need to over do the selling, but focus mostly on the offer. Just be careful with the offers that you put in the paper not to alienate current subscribers. What you might consider would be an offer that says, “Special offer for Sunday subscribers, call customer service for details.” Your database of Sunday-only subscribers is also your most important direct-mail database as well. The importance of this group should not be overstated. These are people who already read the paper and are willing to pay for it. As such they are much more likely than random adults in your market to be your next seven-day subscribers. The problem is that many newspapers don’t take full advantage of their Sunday edition because it is taken for granted as an advertising medium. But let’s say a newspaper with 70,000 daily subscribers has 120,000 Sunday subscribers. That variance of 50,000 people is a very large audience and is worth any investment that you make in your Sunday product to reach them. How much would it cost to reach 50,000 well-selected, highly targeted people with a direct mailing? That’s how much you should invest in your Sunday edition. Use a combination of ROP ads, FSIs, and even ride along fliers inserted with the bags.

Your carriers could be given fliers to insert in the bags of their Sunday-only customers with a special subscription offer. The appeal here is that you can carefully put this offer in front of people who are Sunday-only subscribers, without making the same offer to people who are already subscribing seven days a week. You won’t have to worry about alienating your current seven-day subscribers who see others getting a special offer that they are not entitled to. So use your best direct-mail response offer and creative approach to produce a flier to insert in the bags or with the paper exclusively for the Sunday-only subscribers. This tactic requires some management oversight of the carriers. You may want to implement it only on routes that you have control over. But it is perhaps the most obvious marketing-driven opportunity to increase sales among all of the sales channels today.

What can you expect from increasing the heat on your Sunday edition in terms of its use as a sales channel? You can expect high retention orders. Why? Because they will be voluntary orders. People will be responding to the strength of your offer, not to the strength of your sales pressure. So they will be like voluntary orders. And they will be coming from a base of people who are already predisposed to being newspaper readers. You will be moving them up the ladder of opportunity, which is the best way to achieve long-term sales success.