Cricket and its six sister pubs use e-commerce to enhance good old-fashioned quality
Consider the typical child: He or she spends latchkey afternoons staring at imaginary death rays shooting from blasting computer games while absentmindedly eating a microwavable snack.
Cricket Magazine Group has a different vision: Children and parents preparing rose petal bread from a recipe they found on the Cricket Web site, which emphasizes art rather than special effects, and then curling up with a good story about “a berserk moose” or “an old coot’s expanding fibs.”
Carus Publishing, Cricket’s parent, sells subscriptions to children’s magazines that are based on the idea that children should be offered “the best of the best,” says John Toraason, vice president and general manager of operations at Cricket. Mariana Carus, whose family founded the company 137 years ago and is now Cricket Magazine Group editor, believes “that you have to challenge kids,” Toraason adds. “We don’t go out and do a focus group to find out what kids want. We feel that if you putgreat literature and art in front of kids, they will come.”
And come they do – or at least their parents and teachers do – subscribing on their behalf. There are seven magazines: five fiction (the flagship Cricket, plus Babybug, Ladybug, Spider and Cicada) and two about science (Muse and Click) – for children from newborns through teenagers. The database of this Peru, IL, publisher contains 600,000 names, 12% of them from e-commerce channels.
And subscribers stick around: 40% of them renew. “We really make money through renewals,” says Barbara Konrardy, Cricket’s circulation manager.
The magazines have been advertising-free since Cricket debuted in 1973. Carus didn’t want to “kowtow to advertisers” over the magazine covers and editorial content, according to Toraason.
The group’s reputation is burnished enough to attract pre-eminent juvenile authors, illustrators and experts, such as Tomie dePaola, Eric Carle and Fred Rogers.
But all of this puts a heavy burden on the marketing department, which is, of course, completely dependent on customer acquisition. So the publisher set out to enhance its marketing mix through the Internet.
In 1997, it launched a Web presence, then revamped the site in 1998 to respond to young e-mailers and to accept orders online. Last year, it began investing several hundred thousand dollars in testing and perfecting its e-commerce channels. This year, it is executing the lessons it has learned.
One big lesson to come out of the online marketing push is the necessity of adding an e-commerce page to the Web site (www.cricketmag.com) to satisfy increasing numbers of visiting prospects. The site is attractive – it’s set up like a forest corner with street signs designed by woodland creatures pointing to magazines and activities – but slow to load and hard to navigate. “Our very loyal subscribers will wait for that to load,” Toraason indicates. “They don’t mind waiting for 64 choices to see where they want to go.” New customers, however, do mind.
By the end of the year, the new e-commerce page will be the first screen to appear when customers type in the URL. It will display the magazines, age groups they target and a simplified subscription-ordering process. “We want them to get in and get that order,” explains Andy Senica, promotions manager. “This will be faster, more functional and user-friendly.”
If the site is a weak area of Cricket’s e-commerce, then that weakness was revealed by one of the strongest areas: acquisition efforts. Banner ads, partnerships and e-mail promotions have all been successful, based on the idea that it should cost $40 to acquire a new customer.
E-mail is such a strong channel for Cricket that this year the company is more than doubling the seven e-mail campaigns it ran in 1999.
Renting e-mail addresses of a typical Cricket subscriber demographic – people with children who earn $50,000 annually – hasn’t proved detailed enough. Selects that perform, though, include book buyers, interest in reading and in education. But other segments, such as interest in gardening, perform well too. “Everybody who likes gardening seems to like reading, so we no longer look for both reading and gardening,” Toraason notes.
Gift-givers are the best bet, but e-mail gift lists are difficult to find. So Cricket marketers look for files in which purchases of apparel, toys or books for children were made before the December holidays. Gift-givers tend to buy again, so it’s no surprise that this segment comprises 40% of the database. Plus most gift-givers pay cash right up front. “You’re not going to give a gift of Ladybug and then stiff us,” Toraason maintains.
This month, Cricket will send its first campaigns using a merge/purge service – the first one available for e-mail lists. This will make the e-mail campaigns more effective, seeking out dupes from Cricket’s in-house file and prospecting lists and then culling them out.
Another prospecting medium, banner ads, which bomb with many marketers, deliver for Cricket “in certain very fine, little niches.” For example, Toraason found that if a banner reached educators, their conversion rate was higher than any other group.
Cricket is also testing sponsorship programs in which other sites include a link to cricketmag.com in their customer newsletters in return for a portion of sales or for Cricket-provided content. These average about $65 per acquisition – “nothing to write home about,” Toraason remarks, but about half of the dozen or so sponsors deliver customers.
Though a retention tool, the e-Cricket newsletter program is also the most successful customer acquisition tool by far. E-Cricket is a page-long, free e-mail newsletter that’s sent out twice a month to whoever signs up for it. Most recipients are subscribers to the magazine, but 15% are not. Those e-Cricket subscribers who become magazine subscribers at about $5 each “are very profitable,” Toraason notes.
The newsletter mirrors the magazines, with a typical offering including craft advice such as how to decorate a jack-o’-lantern and a short article entitled, “Why Do Leaves Fall,” with links back to the site. Recipients who become subscribers “do well because they are the ones who know our publication well,” he adds.
The newsletter list totals 20,000, with about 1,400 new registrants coming in from the other e-commerce channels a month. Some 8% click through to the site, and of those, 12% subscribe to a magazine. “I’m excited about that,” Toraason enthuses. “I’d like to mine our own list for subscribers.”
He also plans to send renewals by e-mail and organize the database to upsell magazines from one age group to the next.
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