In addition to our regular renewal letters, we do an annual “Global Renewal.” This is simply a renewal offer that we send (usually in February) to all of our current magazine subscribers – regardless of how many issues they have remaining – and we additionally mail to expirers one or two years out.

Our Global Renewals offer a premium such as a wall calendar (that we produce). In the letters, we are careful to let everyone know when their subscription ends and what their account number is so when they call in they have all the pertinent information.

Our Global Renewals are the most successful revenue-generating mailings that we do each year for our magazines.

Here are a couple of things that we have tweaked over the past few years to generate extra income from the mailings:

1. Our subscription software allows us to generate a subscriber’s personal link so they can access their account without typing anything in – just clicking on a “Click Here” button.
   
   
   
2. We first send out emails with the Global offer a couple of weeks before our USPS mailing so mailing costs can be reduced.
3. Because subscribers with a few years left on their subscription may be hesitant to respond to the Global Renewal offer, we started offering the option to purchase just the calendar. As a result, not only have we sold hundreds of additional calendars as a stand-alone purchase, many people purchase extras for themselves.
4. We also have the printer put the subscriber’s name, account number and address in the tear-off form on the bottom of the page so the customer doesn’t have to rewrite this information. The printed piece is folded and the address shows through a #10 window envelope. This preprinted tear-off form saves a ton of time with data entry when it is mailed to us because the data entry people only have to type in the account number instead of all the subscriber details.
5. The last thing we realized is that our response is greater if the Global Renewals are mailed around the same time that an issue is mailed.