At any given moment, 50,000 subscribers are paying to access WritersMarket.com’s robust database. Winter Thielen, Director of Online Product Development at WritersMarket.com and Robert Brewer, Senior Content Editor, spoke with us about how the site maintains its listings, succeeds with email marketing, and creates perceived value with limited-release compilations. Plus, get inspired by some great conversion tactics, including an unusual navigation bar and a well-designed site tour.
Company Profile
Founded: In print, 1921; online 2000. Owned by F+W Media.
Employees: 5-10 for the whole brand (5-7 for Web, around 3 work on the print books)
Business Model: Subscription mainly
Paying Subscribers: Around 50,000
Location: Cincinnati, OH, but a lot of virtual employees
Websites: www.writersmarket.com
www.writersdigest.com
www.WritersDigestUniversity.com
www.writersdigestshop.com
Target Market
WritersMarket.com primarily serves writers who either make majority of their income through freelance writing or want to get a novel or book published and need help getting to the next level.
The site has a secondary market consisting of beginner writers, who often subscribe and then unsubscribe because they realize they’re not ready to use the information on the site.
Content
WritersMarket.com, a subscription database published by the Writer’s Digest brand, consists of more than 9,000 listings for book publishers, literary agents, publications, contests, conferences and other information to help a writer get published. The site also has record-keeping tools, such as auto-reminders for when to pitch or follow-up with a contact, personalized folders, and the ability to track one’s submissions to editors.
While many editor and agent names are available elsewhere for free, WritersMarket.com makes it listings pay-worthy by making them centrally located and easy to search. In addition, unlike free listings, WritersMarket.com details what editors/agents are looking for from queries and submissions. The site also has convenient online tools, like a submission tracker.
There is an editorial team of six that handles all the listings, which are updated a few times a month, and can number in the thousands. The site tries to limit updates to 200-500 at a time. WritersMarket.com created a custom Content Management System to handle their listings. This system allows them to mark a listing as active or inactive (sometimes listed contacts are not accepting queries).
The editorial team hears of new people in the publishing industry from customers, by monitoring media feeds like IWantMedia.com and MediaBistro, and by going through other directories like Cision and Literary Marketplace. Also, because of the brand’s reputation, the editorial team is frequently contacted by new publishers and/or agents. The team sends out detailed surveys to each listing, asking for contact information, subject areas of interest, and what they pay.
Originally, there were also articles in the paid database, culled from the Writer’s Market books. However, Brewer says those articles weren’t viewed much by members, so they are now placed in front of the paywall and used to drive traffic through social media and search.
Revenues
WritersMarket.com gets most of its revenues from subscriptions (on rare occasion, they sell advertising in their email newsletters).
WritersMarket.com has three main subscription plans:
- Monthly Subscription for $5.99
- 6-Month Subscription for $24.99
- Annual Subscription for $39.99
While the monthly is the most popular option, followed by the annual and then the six-month option, the site actually receives 48.2% of its revenues from annual subscriptions and 40% from monthly subscriptions. All subscription plans are on auto-renew.
Thielen says the site used to have a two-year subscription plan and lower price points, but changed their pricing options after testing.
In addition to these pricing options, Writer’s Market offers a Deluxe Edition of its print directory, which contains activation codes for a one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com. The full Writer’s Market Deluxe Edition is priced at $49.99, while specialized directories, like Poet’s Market, are priced lower but offer limited online access (i.e., only access to the listing relevant to poets). Brewer says he’s been surprised by how many subscribers want both the print book and online access.
Marketing Tactics
Between the four sites and the original print publications, the company has a big house email list. Therefore, the biggest drivers of new traffic to WritersMarket.com are email blasts and email newsletters to print buyers or customers of the other Writer’s Digest sites.
In order to get better results from their email campaigns, the marketing team sends surveys asking customers detailed questions about the types of projects they’re working on (novel, memoir, screenplay) and what they want to know more about (getting an agent, getting published, etc.).
In addition, WritersMarket.com consistently runs split tests on its email marketing, testing everything from creative and copy (bullet points v. paragraphs) to interest in new products by genre of interest. The marketing department then tracks the links and site traffic all the way through to sales. See the Creative Sample section at the end for one of the Writer’s Market promotional emails.
PR and Trade Shows
WritersMarket.com share success stories, such as break-out novel written by a subscriber, via its community newsletter or on-site promotions. This usually results in a spike in traffic.
The Writer’s Digest brand also sponsors and speaks at a number of trade shows, at which they always mention WritersMarket.com as a resource for aspiring writers.
Social Media
The site is very active on Facebook and Twitter, and has found that “soft promotions work better than hard ones.” For example, the site will promote an article on “how to improve your query letter,” and then in the article, direct readers to more tips on WritersMarket.com.
We like this tactic since directory listings are not really conducive to social media postings, and this is a good way for the company to incorporate its plethora of evergreen content in a social media strategy. Most of the free articles are hosted on the other Writer’s Digest sites, and prospects interested in Writer’s Market are taken to the homepage with the hard paywall and free newsletter offer.
Conversion Tactics
Site visitors are presented with two conversions offers:
- A free email opt-in
- A free trial (“7-day, money-back guarantee”) with an annual subscription
- A monthly subscription plan with no free trial
For the subscription plans, WritersMarket.com requires a credit card at sign-up, and Thielen says the annual subscribers are charged at the end of the 7-day trial period. She also says that the “majority” of trial-takers stay on after the trial period is over.
Other conversion tactics include a unique navigation bar and site tour. Instead of a boring nav bar listing departments, WritersMarket.com’s nav bar asks “What Would You Like to Accomplish?” — a great way to entice engagements from visitors (see image).
Lastly, the site offers a very helpful demo/site tour. We like how fluid the navigation is on this video, as well as the clear explanation of how to use – and not use – the site (i.e., the Submission Tracker just tracks submissions, it doesn’t submit a subscriber’s material for him/her). The 2-minute video is shown through a pop-up window and is NOT on auto-play (which we also like).
Retention Tactics
Thielen says average account lifetimes vary by subscription plan — the monthly subscribers stay for about 3 months, the annuals for a little over a year. They don’t yet have data on the six-month subscribers.
Main retention tactics include auto-renew, keeping the listings as up-to-date as possible, and providing writers with quality content that makes them feel they are being mentored through the publishing process.
Cross-Sells and Upsells
Obviously, since WritersMarket.com is part of a larger brand with four other related sites, the site has a lot of upsell/cross-sell opportunities. The most common upsell is the Writer’s Market print books, including Writer’s Market, Children Writers and Illustrator’s Market, Poet’s Market, Guide to Literary Agents. Through the Writer’s Digest brand, the site also cross-sells Webinars, tutorials, online classes, eBooks, print magazine subscriptions, live events, critique services, CDs, and software.
One of the most interesting upsell products we found was the series of limited-edition Premium Collections. These collections include a variety of content types, such as on-demand videos, paperback books, a one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com, or even an entry to a writing competition — all for a reduced price. (Current prices can vary from $99 to $129.) The collections are released on the first of each month at 10am EST, and only 100 copies of each collection are available. “When they’re gone, they’re gone,” says Thielen.
Key: WritersMarket.com doesn’t email its entire list with every cross-sell offer. Instead, the site is careful to “mentor enthusiasts” in his/her area of interest. So, for example, if someone just bought something on how to finish a manuscript, Writer’s Market won’t try to market them on children’s writing.
About Winter Thielen and Robert Brewer
Winter Thielen came to F+W Media about four years ago. She said it was great to work with a brand that had more than 90 years of content — including interviews with famous authors, from Ernest Hemingway to Nora Ephron. The wealth of content gave her a lot to play with in terms of expanding the site’s online presence.
Thielen advice to others in the subscription business is “to offer something no one else is offering.”
“The majority of WM competitors are free,” she says, “but we provide the most detailed and comprehensive agent and publisher listings. The details on an agent or publishing house and can make a difference between whether you get a rejection or whether they request more pages from you.”
Robert Brewer has been working for Writer’s Market for more than 12 years, and began shortly after graduating from college with a degree in English literature and business writing. His responsibilities include editing Writer’s Market, WritersMarket.com, and Poet’s Market, as well as helping out on other Market Books and Writer’s Digest brand products.
Vendors and Technology
Hosting — Hosting.com
http://www.hosting.com/
Payment processing — Sterling Payments
http://www.sterlingpayment.com/
Email management — Exact Target
http://www.exacttarget.com/
Content management — Custom design by Librios
http://www.librios.com/
Analytics & Revenue Tracking — Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Subscription Site Insider Analysis
WritersMarket.com seems to have figured out early on that the online media is highly conducive to updating and searching directory listings with ease, and we like how they’ve enhanced their service with submission tracking and other record-keeping tools. We also like how they’ve used and grown their internal list and continued to split test their email marketing. Lastly, we love their idea for a limited-release Premium Collection — finite editions are a great way to make any creative work more valuable and expose customers to a variety of your products.
We’d like to see them test their conversion pages a bit more; we think they may benefit from some cleaner copy and perhaps a few design tweaks. And they should definitely be employing more SEO. We’d also like to see them upsell their monthly subscribers into annual subscriptions, and look for ways to get annual subscribers to stay longer than a year — especially since it takes most writers more than a year to get published.
Creative Sample
Below is a sample email from Writer’s Market, promoting their Deluxe Edition and other Writer’s Digest products.
