Why Parenting Publications Need Promotions and Email

by Liz Huff Second Street

Why Parenting Publications Need Promotions

Promotions like contests, quizzes, and readers’ choice ballots are perfect to identify potential new readers, grow your email database of parents, and make more money.

Whether a giveaway for tutoring services, an “Are You Ready for Your Newborn?” quiz, or your Parents’ Choice ballot, promotions engage your audience. To increase engagement, offer a prize relevant to your audience to not only draw in a big audience, but draw in the right audience. See how one magazine used a sweepstakes to identify 30+ hot leads for a daycare.

Incorporate an email opt-in for your newsletters and your advertisers on your promotions. This way, you can grow your email list and provide an email list to your sponsors. Additionally, lead-generating questions will better qualify leads, identify prospects for your advertisers, and collect more robust user profile data.

Promotions deliver measurable results. This makes them great for driving incremental revenue from existing advertisers, as well as securing new advertisers interested in new, unique opportunities. Additionally, contests, quizzes, and ballots generate engagement and data you can use to enhance your own database. But once you grow your database, how do you keep it?

Why Parenting Publications Need Email

Once you have people in your database, the next challenge is keeping them there. Email is the best way to establish and foster a relationship with your readers. That relationship is also valuable to advertisers who will pay to reach the parents in your audience.

An email newsletter is your key to driving high engagement and revenue from your audience. These could be a weekly email with all your recent content or a curated message like “Toddler Tips Tuesday.” Newsletters present a powerful brand experience, direct traffic to your digital content, and drive high conversions for your sales team.

While an email database is great, an email only works if it’s opened. Creating a large database that’s engaged and eager to open messages from your magazine is important. Leverage the data you’ve collected to send targeted messages to segmented audience about topics they care about most. Your “Preparing for College’ guide is best sent to parents with students in high school. However, an offer about a new top-of-the-line stroller should be sent to those with newborns.

You’re producing great content. The more people you have to deliver it too, the more people who will read it, and the more revenue you can bring in. Promotions and email make a powerful combination. Together, they grow your database of interested parents while also create a strategy for keeping those readers actively engaged with your brand.

So what are you waiting for? Now is the time to start (or reinvigorate) your strategy around promotions and email. A robust strategy will set your parenting publication up for more success in the future.

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