Outdoor Living
Give Life Texture
Vacation in your own backyard.
Exceptional fabrics that hold up to everything under the sun.
year, and how many more alumni your school can now reliably reach because of it. If engagement is top-of-mind, try to tally up how many letters to the editor and social media shares or comments your articles generate bonus points if you can demonstrate that those are from previously disengaged grads. If you’re in the midst of a fundraising campaign, try creating trackable vanity URLs from your print issues to giving webpages and track how many readers use them.
READERSHIP SURVEYS ARE CRUCIAL
Simply put, print magazines lack the kind of immediately accessible, always-on data collection systems that our digital communications channels, like websites and blogs, automatically have. By contrast, to understand how your readers are engaging with your printed issues, you have to ask them. That’s why regularly fielding a magazine readership survey is so crucial.
Shortly after arriving at Kellogg, 1 fielded the CASE Magazine Readership Survey, a tool developed by higher-ed alumni magazine editors that offers preset questions and the ability to benchmark your results against those of other institutions. I had a hunch that our feedback would be pretty positive. After all, Northwestern Wildcats are known for their school spirit and close knit community.
When I got the results, I suddenly had my proof. It revealed that nearly 70% of our readers read every issue or most issues of the print magazine, and that many of them read most or all of it. I was flat-out astonished when 17% of our readers told us they spend an hour or more with each issue and that 82% of readers spend at least 10 minutes with their copy.
That’s data I could take right to my CMO, to show the incredible amount of time and attention we were “buying” with a modest average cost per copy. I encourage you to field a readership
survey yourself. You may be surprised at how favorably your “sticky” print magazine’s metrics line up against digital metrics of cost-per-click and time-on-page for reaching this same audience online.
WHEN IN DOUBT,
ASK YOUR AUDIENCE
The same survey provided critical insights into our biggest question: Should we return to print? The results were unequivocal. About 80% of our readers preferred to read us in print, or in print and online both. Only 20% preferred to read online only. This was a key piece of data that helped me make the case for reviving the print edition, while keeping our website for those who preferred digital.
A well-constructed survey will also ask your readers what they most want to see in your pages. We’re redesigning our magazine later this summer, and these insights from our readers will steer our new editorial framework.
A good survey will also attempt to quantify how your magazine has increased your readers’ connection with your school and the actions they’ve taken as a result of reading. I was pleased to see just how many alumni said they attended an event, recommended Kellogg to a friend or relative, or made a donation because of our magazine. Now that’s evidence I can take to my colleagues.
METRICS DON'T HAVE TO BE SCARY
I’m a writer and editor by background, so you might be surprised to learn that the reference book “Web Analytics 2.0” by author Avinash Kaushik is front and center on my bookshelf, right next to my dictionaries and stylebooks. It wasn’t always this way. It was a mindset I gradually adopted after I took a marketing analytics course at a previous job. (Use those higher-ed perks and get back in the classroom!)