Best Practices for Gift Subscription Offers —
5 Marketing Tips and 3 Operational Tactics

Last holiday season, more than $32 billion worth of gifts were sold online to Americans, including gift subscriptions to sites such as Angie’s List

Introduction

Gift subscriptions can be a great marketing tool to acquire new subscribers and increase revenues, especially around the winter holidays. Paid content websites are at a special advantage, as online retail shopping has been increasing around the holidays — in fact, Forrester Research recently found that 15% worth of holiday sales in 2011 was sold online, totaling $32 billion.

When constructing and executing on your gift subscription offers, there are some critical factors you’ll need to take into account, from who to target to how to construct the offer to be most effective. Here’s are five marketing tips and three operational tactics you should implement. We’ve also listed a host of creative samples to inspire you and linked to multiple case studies to learn from before you launch your holiday campaign.

Who Buys Gift Subscriptions?

There are four primary demographics who buy gift subscriptions for their friends and family:

Grandparents, especially those who live far away from children and grandchildren. This has been a very popular gift subscription (and referral source) for subscription sites like Consumer Reports Online (many grandparents buy Consumer Reports for grandchildren who have recently graduated or entered the work force). Keep in mind that many grandparents prefer to have a tangible item to mail or wrap and keep under a Christmas tree (see Marketing Tip #5 for ideas on what to send).
Women shopping for men. This demographic can consist of wives/girlfriends/sisters/mothers/daughters buying for husbands/boyfriends/brothers/sons/fathers. This demographic tends to shop ahead of time and shop competitively, so a discount gift subscription with a deadline would work best. Also, make sure your offer is tailored to the buyer not the recipient (see Marketing Tip #2 for more on this).
Men who are buying at the last minute. Online gifts are a great last minute purchase, especially if you, the publisher, send a congratulatory email to the recipient and/or provide a printable card/certificate the giver can download.
Fans of your site. These subscribers like to buy like-minded friends subscriptions in order to share the experience. Usually, this demographic consists of mothers buying for daughters or girlfriends buying for each other.

5 Marketing Tips for Offering Gift Subscriptions

Make sure your users are thinking of you and your subscription offerings around the holidays.
Just as Amazon lets users create a wish list of books, subscription sites (especially those with a freemium model) should let free users tell their friends and family via email and social media that they’d love a subscription to your site as a gift.
It naturally follows that you should make sure your users (free and paid) are thinking of a subscription to your site as a gift. That means using special holiday branding and tags, such as some of the one displayed below, near your “Subscribe Now” buttons on your homepage and content pages.
Tailor your offer and landing page for the person who’s buying the gift NOT the recipient.
For example, Haymarket tested long and short copy to sell their Manchester United fan magazine in the month of December. The short copy saw a 14.29% lift in add-to-cart clicks in December. But the interesting fact is that the majority of these sales were gift subscriptions — implying women were buying for the male Manchester United fans in their lives. (You can view the creative samples and see more results on this test by viewing our Best Subscription Marketing A/B Tests of 2010 on-demand video — the Manchester United test starts at minute 16:02).
At the very least, make sure your landing page for gift subscription offers is different from your standard landing page (our Case Study on A Story Before Bed has a great creative sample on how this can look — it’s also a great example of how to change your offer page so that a registered user can enter a gift recipient’s name and email address.)
Optimize email campaigns.
Forrester Research found that 46% of Cyber Monday buyers found out about an offer through email, and email has been proven to matter more for “soft sales” (like online or digital subscriptions) while search is more important for hard goods (like electronics purchases around the holidays). And repeat emails can help remind prospects during the busy holiday season.
Make sure you’re not just touching your current subscribers — hit your cancelled and expired lists with gift subscription offers, too. You’ll want to send more than one email, but make sure to track who’s opening and clicking your first and second emails — those are the prospects who should get third, fourth, even sixth notices.
Create deadlines and limited-time offers.
Deadlines create immediacy, which always helps conversion (so long as their well-timed — don’t expect anyone to buy a gift subscription as a holiday gift by the end of October). In addition, count-down clocks before major holidays are helpful and remind consumers to buy in time.
Make sure there’s a way that recipients can pick the date they want to “activate” their subscription — either by entering an authorization code (as in the case of the Writer’s Market Deluxe Edition bundle below) or determined by the first time a recipient logs in. The start date should NOT be the day the subscription was purchased by the gift-giver.
Bundle a gift subscription with a hard copy product, such as a CD, DVD or book.
Unlike bundling print + digital subscriptions, bundling digital subscriptions to a physical product can be highly advantageous around the holidays, especially for buyers who want a tangible item to wrap and/or mail. For example, Writer’s Market says that the Deluxe Edition of its print directory, which contains an activation code for an online subscription to the site, has been a surprising success for the company (see our Case Study on Writer’s Market for more info).
You can also upsell a tangible item at check-out. Why not offer a postcard to mail to the gift recipient for $2.99 (you can work with an automated digital printer to offer this, and most postcards cost 65 cents a pop). If you have the resources, you can even sell digital subscriptions through brick & mortar stores by tying it to a physical product.

3 Operational Tactics to Maximize Profits

Develop a special engagement campaign for the gift recipient.
Gift recipients are often harder to convert to active users than straight subscribers. Therefore, you should create a special welcome series for gift subscription recipients. This may include the mailed postcard detailed in Marketing Tip #5, but should also include a special email welcome series and possible video/site tour.
In addition, you’ll want to separate gift recipient subscribers in your reporting statistics for your site. They’ll likely be harder to renew than traditional subscribers, and may use the site more or less frequently than other users.
Determine renewal procedures for gift subscriptions.
It’s unusual to put a gift subscription on auto-renew, so when a gift subscription is up for renewal, who will you contact — the original purchaser or the gift recipient? Who will be more likely to renew? Would it make sense to alert the gift-giver first, asking them if they’d like to renew the subscription or not, and if they decline, then contact the recipient?
When constructing your original gift subscription offer, you’ll want to consider the term of the gift subscription — most sites choose one-year, in which case, you should send your renewal notice 60 days before the expiration date. But when renewing directly with a recipient, you may want to test whether a shorter term, like monthly or quarterly, will keep your gift subscribers paying after his/her gift runs out.

This is an important retention spot to test, and the solution likely varies by content and gift-giver demographic (i.e., grandparents are probably more likely to renew a gift than a man who bought one at the last minute — although you should send a marketing email to the latter demographic on the same day/time they bought their first gift subscription as it’s likely he forgot an important holiday again the following year).
Determine your refund policy for gift subscriptions.
If a gift recipient wants to return her subscription, do you refund the gift-giver? Or do you not give refunds at all and just offer “store” credit to the recipient?
Your customer service, operations and accounting teams will all have to be on the same page regarding gift subscription offers, so make sure to hash out these details before launching your gift subscription campaign.

And lastly, even if a recipient calls for a refund, don’t be afraid to upsell them at this point. Contact Any Celebrity has found that many of their subscribers cancelling a $29.97/month subscription will buy the site’s printed Celebrity Black Book for $97 (see the Case Study here).