Quick Overview

Founded in 1970, Cabot Heritage Corporation proves a family-owned publishing company with fewer than 30 employees doesn’t have to be limited by tradition or staff size to keep aggressively evolving. Currently 100% of the company’s marketing is online, and they’re continually testing tactics such as video, pricing offers, and online quizzes. We think they make a great role model in many ways for paid content brands with multiple titles.

Target Market

Mostly men in their late 50s who “want to retire soon, but don’t trust anyone with their finances,” said Andrew Palmer, Director of Ecommerce Marketing at Cabot. “They want to do it themselves.”

Content Model

Cabot publishes ten paid subscription newsletters plus one free email daily. The company differentiates each paid newsletter with its own hook. Some are guru-based, such as Cabot Benjamin Graham Value Letter edited by a Ben Graham “disciple,” some feature proprietary market timing calculations, and some are in a niche topic such as Cabot Green Investor.

Fulfillment is in transition, matching customer desires (some subscribers have been on file since the 1970s.) Half of the newsletters are still available in print as well as via email. The other half are email-only. All titles provide access to a secure website that fulfills paid content via the subscribers log-in located at the top of Cabot.net. Online-only features include special report downloads, portfolio updates, and searchable past-issue archives. The most popular paid content are weekly updates and alerts that offer subscribers a chance to take action.

In addition, Cabot has tested multiple online video formats and lengths. However, data showed far more free site visitors were clicking on video, than paying subscribers. Palmer said, “We found it best to limit video to free users. For our paid people, both time and money are short. They just want to get the info as soon as possible.”

The team also publishes free content for marketing purposes on Cabot.net, a free single-destination site. It contains a new 4-6 minute stock market analysis video each week, as well as sample issues of Cabot Wealth Advisory, the company’s only free newsletter, which features editorial and upsale offers for the paid newsletters. The free newsletter is published every weekday. As of Aug. 2010, it has 200,000 opt-ins. Cabot.net also features investment advisory articles and other SEO-keyword rich educational resources.

Revenue Streams

Cabot gets nearly all of its revenue from paying newsletter subscribers. Regardless of fulfillment method, most are priced at ~$94 for one year and ~$177 for two years and renewed traditionally (i.e. not recurring billing.) Only two titles are currently sold via recurring billing, in both cases the pricing is higher, one is $147 quarterly/$497 year and the other $350 quarterly/$1200 year.

Based on marketing test results (see below) all pricing is presented as a discount to subscribers. Example copy, “One Year for only $129 (a $51 savings),” “You save $575 off the regular two-year price. That’s a 77% savings.” Cabot also offers premiums – one or multiple special reports – as an incentive for subscribing.

Cabot has a far-smaller secondary revenue stream from promoting other publishers’ investment advisories to its own in-house lists of paid and free opt-in prospects. It’s basically a marketing barter that allows each party to show income. Cabot advertises in its partners’ newsletters and partners advertise in Cabot’s newsletters. Then, both partners split the acquisition revenue they make 50/50 and share it with each other.

The biggest challenge is finding a partner with a similar, but not too overlapping, audience. “It has to be a really good match,” said Palmer. “I don’t want to cannibalize my list.” He adjusts copy and offers by partner because one audience may respond more to aggressive marketing, whereas another may respond better to soft offers.

Other Marketing Tactics

All of Cabot’s acquisition marketing is currently done online or via email, although Palmer is a big advocate for direct postal mail. “If I can get someone who received direct mail to sign up for our free email newsletter, I think I can convert them (to pay) better than from online,” he said. “We re-examine that every year.”

In addition to the marketing barter partnerships described above, Cabot’s marketing tactics include:

• Search Marketing: In addition to SEO-tactics on the main Cabot.net site, Palmer and his team run paid search ads on Bing and Yahoo as well as Google. He notes, “We get more people from Bing, than Yahoo, but the biggest amount of traffic is all from Google,” Palmer said, adding: “We focus a lot on pleasing Google.”
• Social Media: “We have good trends in (traffic) growth from social media,” Palmer said. “But it’s small in comparison to strides from marketing to Google.” The main site promotes its Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube pages on its homepage. As of Aug. 2010, Cabot has about 1,000 Twitter followers, 150 Facebook fans (since January 2010), and 35 YouTube channel subscribers.
• A/B & Multivariate Testing: “We have different tests going on every day,” Palmer said. “That’s one of the great things about Cabot, I can toss out an idea to test and they support it.” The team run tests on PPC landing pages and Cabot.net free content pages, mostly to convert visitors into free Cabot Wealth Advisory opt-ins. They also run tests on paid offer conversion pages, including testing pricing, price terms, discount offers, auto-renew vs. renewal offers, etc.
• Email Newsletter: Most of Cabot’s free-visitor-to-paid conversions come from nurturing free newsletter opt-ins. That’s why Palmer spends so much time and marketing efforts trying to get people to opt-in. The goal of each issue is to be engaging, educational, and entertaining, Palmer said. It’s a very soft-sell approach to getting the conversion. “We’re trying to be a neighbor,” he said. “That’s how we use our emails, website, and social media. It has to be an ongoing relationship.” Most issues are ad-free, except for small text-only ads promoting Cabot’s own products and free reports. It’s extremely rare to see a third party offer or aggressive promotion.
• Homepage Quiz: The most clicked free content on the homepage is a “Which Cabot Letter is right for You?” quiz placed prominently at the top of the right-column. It was created because it was one of the most commonly asked questions in the comment box of Cabot’s reader surveys. It steers visitors to the appropriate newsletter based on their level of investing experience.

Technology and Vendors Used

Sitecore: Content management system http://www.sitecore.net/

Net Atlantic: Email service provider which uses a version of Lyris to send email. https://www.netatlantic.com/

Google Website Optimizer: Testing tool used to run A/B and multivariate tests on Cabot’s website and search marketing landing pages. http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Google Analytics: Website analytics technology that Cabot uses. http://www.google.com/analytics/

About Andrew Palmer

Palmer came to Cabot from Agora Financial, where he helped develop and market its ever popular The Daily Reckoning, a free online-only financial newsletter, currently with more than 500,000 opt-ins, which Agora uses to promote its paid offerings. Before that he was an attorney who became interested in internet marketing during the late 1990s. “I fell in love with it,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘I could always be an attorney.'”

What he likes about subscription marketing: “It’s never boring… The industry is constantly changing, technology is changing. You always have to think about what’s new. Stay ahead of the curve.”

Subscription Site Insider’s Quick Analysis

We think Cabot’s “Which Newsletter is right for You?” quiz is something that all publishers in this space should be testing. So many financial newsletter publishers, such as The Motley Fool, TheStreet.com, StreetAuthority, and Zacks Investment Research, offer multiple newsletter subscriptions but none of them give readers an opportunity, on the homepage, to take a quiz and see which one is right for them. It’s Cabot’s most popular free content, even more popular than videos. That tells you something.

On a side note, we think Cabot may be under-utilizing one of the most relevant social media sites for their target market, LinkedIn. Joining and posting comments on LinkedIn groups dedicated to stock investing could round out their social media strategy and generate more traffic. (http://www.cabot.net)