More magazine’s new direct mail creative doubles response
MORE — Meredith Corp.’s magazine for women over 40 — has, like many ladies today, finally become comfortable with age.
In a creative makeover of More’s direct mail control package, the target audience’s age is now colorfully splashed across the outer envelope. The tag line reads “Introducing the magazine that celebrates women over 40.”
And readers like it.
The 9-by-9-inch package, which touts a new “girlfriend” theme, rolled out in January, exceeding forecasted response by 85%. The costs for the rollout — delivered to close to 3 million prospects — topped $1 million.
“We had some resistance [in] that women didn’t like to be identified by age, but I thought wait a minute, how do they know More’s for them?” says Ellen de Lathouder, vice president of creative services at Meredith.
To keep the package fresh, a new outer envelope tested last month to 50,000 along with the nearly 3-million-piece quarterly mailing. More plans to send out some 5 million to 7 million direct mail pieces this year. It also intends to increase its rate base to 650,000 this fall and has upped frequency from six to 10 issues annually.
Defining the readership’s age also played a big part in the success of the names More rented for the new campaign, says Liz Bredeson, Meredith’s consumer marketing director.
She said that while tests indicated that selecting by age lifted response, this campaign was the first that aggressively used a reader’s age as a key criterion for prospects on files that weren’t obviously appropriate to More’s demographic — such as catalog lists.
“If we didn’t know a lot about the file, it really helped having that age overlay,” Bredeson says. “It probably made the biggest difference in response in that mailing. It helped us expand our universe because it allowed us to mail segments of lists that may not have made the cutoff in the past.”
The names were further segmented by age group: 40 to 50, 50 to 60, and some younger than 40. More also tapped Meredith’s database of about 60 million names to search for prospects, including subscribers to other Meredith publications. “Subscribers are a good indication of interest in another magazine,” Bredeson says. Less than 50% of the mailing went to the in-house file.
The first, and only, test mailed in June 2000 to “thousands” of More’s target audience. It doubled the response against the control.
“When you hit it right you hit it right,” de Lathouder says.
While More’s hard-working control package is “celebratory” and plays up the positive aspects of aging, the new creative gets real about the downside, de Lathouder says.
To develop support for the “girlfriend” theme, More looked to its target: an educated, affluent woman, age 40 and older, who is concerned about health, beauty, fitness and fashion. Most readers are married professionals and homeowners.
Focus groups were conducted for the title for the first time since its 1998 launch. Fifteen women in each of four sessions, held in Stamford, CT and Atlanta, hashed over the pros and cons of the second half of life. A copywriter and an in-house designer assigned to the project listened in.
More discovered the pluses: lots of discretionary income, an empty nest, plenty of self-assuredness and a love of spending time with girlfriends. And the minuses: chemotherapy, divorce, career transitions and physical changes.
And it played up both. The lift letter talks about being married to frogs, undergoing hysterectomies and having thoughts about murdering the boss. The sales letter and the brochure drive home the message that middle-aged women are brave and feeling great.
Cybill Shepherd, a confident woman with a successful career as an actress, singer and model, was chosen as the featured image for the outer envelope. The photograph was accompanied by the campaign’s tag line (which originated at the focus groups), “Go girl!”
The hook? A story about 11 women, ages 45 to 66, who “tastefully” posed naked for their annual garden calendar in the hopes of coming up with $2,000 for leukemia research. They raised $550,000. The calendar was wildly praised by the focus groups. “That is the spirit of this age,” de Lathouder says.
The package, which also includes an order card and a 17-by-21-inch brochure, features the same offer as the control, “an entire year free.”
The new outer envelope, mailed last month, tested a non-celebrity image. “We were worried because the [Cybill] outer is so distinctive that it would fatigue quickly,” Bredeson claims. “It behooves us to not wait until we saw our response decline. We wanted to be ahead of the game and hope that both outers perform equally well.”
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