"I cannot express enough gratitude to Scott Bullock. His expertise as a circulation consultant has been invaluable to British Columbia Magazine and to me in my own career development. His input and suggestions have far outweighed any expectations we had of him. We thought we would just get good advice on circulation! Instead, we received a passionate, intelligent, creative go-getter who assisted us in coming up with creative strategies to help balance our circulation file, create award-winning covers on the newsstand, award-winning direct mail campaigns, increased newsstand promotions, online renewal analysis. The list goes on and on.

Scott continues to serve as a mentor to me, and consistently delivers on his promise to assist us in any way to ensure our success. He is a true gem in this industry!"

Shannon Fleurie
Circulation Manager
British Columbia Magazine 

British Columbia Magazine, a 100% paid, CCAB audited title, is a quarterly magazine, with circulation of 118,000. It competes in a market dominated by high quality controlled circulation titles such as Vancouver Magazine, Western Living, and the Georgia Straight. It also competes against Canadian Geographic, one of Canada’s elite magazines. Like Canadian Geographic, BC Magazine enjoys one of the highest readers per copy as measured by PMB, is premium priced, and has an extremely loyal audience.

Although British Columbia Magazine enjoys strong renewal rates, generating cost effective new business remains a priority to maintain rate base. Rising postage costs for direct mail, combined with increasingly restrictive privacy legislation that reduces list availability makes traditional direct mail too costly. Plus, with so many controlled circulation titles in the British Columbia marketplace, getting direct-mail lists is difficult.

The decision was made to turn to regional newspapers as a potential new source of subscriptions.

The goals:

• Prove that newspapers could be a reliable source for new business acquisition
• Generate large volumes of subscribers prior to Christmas, so we could hit them up for gift giving (a highly profitable part of our overall circulation strategy).
• Reduce gracing (which is already at an extremely low threshold)
• Generate more circulation in the British Columbia market (as opposed to the rest of Canada, U.S. or Foreign), as it is more highly prized by advertisers
• Build renewal pools for future circulation profitability
• Boost PMB metrics by getting our Cover and Logo saturated in the marketplace

We did a complete FSA penetration analysis to help us target our newspaper selections beyond the obvious Globe & Mail, National Post, Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province lists. Community papers in Victoria, Kamloops, Cranbrook, Quesnel and others were identified to supplement our test.

It was decided to roll the dice, and without the benefit of testing, we rolled out 498,000 FSI/Magalogues, which was a high-risk strategy. Plus, we chose to test both subscriber and newsstand copies, which we knew would depress response, but which would provide valuable information for future campaigns.

The results exceeded our expectations. We generated 3,527 gross orders, for a .71% response overall. Many of the subscriber lists pulled a 1% response, and most of the smaller papers performed well above expectations. Plus, some of the newsstand lists yielded very positive circulation metrics.

The client was thrilled when our pay-up on a soft offer came in at 71%…radically better than industry averages. And we were able to quickly include these folks in our extremely profitable gift-giving program.

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