Business Management Daily Uses Webinar Trainings to Upsell Database Subscriptions

Online training can be the bread and butter of many industry and professional development sites. Business Management Daily (BMD) has capitalized on this by

Online training can be the bread and butter of many industry and professional development sites. Business Management Daily (BMD) has capitalized on this by tying subscription database trials to one-off Webinar trainings. Publisher Adam Goldstein spoke to us about how the site generates seven-figure revenues through a multi-faceted conversion process. Plus discover why display ads may be better than overlays for free product lead generation.

Company Profile

Founded: 1937, as the National Institute of Business Management, started Business Management Daily subscription site in 2006
No. of Publications: 11 paid newsletters, 2 paid online databases,
Employees: 9 exclusively for publication, 65 employees dedicated through parent company, Capitol Information Group
Business Model: Hybrid (subs, one-offs, ads, one live event)
Paying Subscribers: Tens of thousands
Location: Washington, DC
Website: http://www.businessmanagementdaily.com

Target Market

Business Management Daily (BMD) primarily targets managers and decision-makers in business leadership, HR, office administration and office technology. Their core users are from companies with 1000+ employees. Its secondary market consists of managers and professionals in these four areas in smaller companies.

Content

The site’s premium content is diverse, and includes newsletters, online tools and forms, podcasts, and Webinars. Subscribers can also get answers to legal and administrative questions. The site also offers subscriptions to two databases — HR Specialist Premium Plus Online and Office Technology Today Answer Center — which have audio and video trainings, tips and shortcuts, access to premium newsletter content and article archives, and even a help desk for customers’ toughest questions Free content is limited to articles and blog posts (which are extensive in their own right).

Goldstein told us that the site’s premium content is pay-worthy mainly because of the online tools, which include self-assessments, checklists and downloadable forms. The site found that some people would pay for premium content, but the online tools got them to renew.

New content is added daily, and is mainly produced by freelancers. Newsletter content is re-purposed after publication as free content.

Revenue Streams

BMD generates seven-figure revenues, 60% of which comes from subscriptions to the site’s newsletters. A little less than 40% of revenues come from one-off sales, and a fractional amount of revenues come from advertising and events (i.e., online advertising and events generated $100,000 each for BMD last year).

Subscriptions
The newsletters vary in price:

The site also offers subscriptions to two databases:

  • HR Specialist Premium Plus Online for $297/year
  • Office Technology Today Answer Center for $89/quarter or $289/year

Goldstein told us that HR Specialist Employment Law is most popular, and the price goes up after a subscriber has been on board for one or two years.

The print versions of the newsletters are still more popular than the electronic (PDF) versions, but electronic subscriptions are growing.

The databases, particularly HR Specialist Premium Plus Online database are strong products with hundreds of subscribers, but those numbers dwarf the thousands of subscribers for the newsletters. The database subscriptions are on auto-renewal while the newsletters are not.

BMD also offers subscriptions to its Webinar Training. The All-Access Training Pass has two subscription plans:

  • Annual at $1599
  • Quarterly at $499

A subscription allows subscribers to get access to all Webinars produced in their subscription term. The annual plan is more popular and the program is profitable even though “it doesn’t have a lot of subscribers” relative to the other subscription products, according to Goldstein. The quarterly plan is on auto-renewal but the annual is not.

One-Offs
BMD’s one-off products focus on paid trainings, which are sold either as live events or CD recordings. The site also offers an event + CD recording bundle:

  • Event only — $197.00
  • CD recording only — $203.00
  • Event and CD recording — $297.00

The site also sells other one-off products, such as podcasts, reports, CDs, and brochures, such as “A Manager’s Guide to Preventing People Problems.” Webinars and their recordings are also sold on a one-off basis with variable pricing that makes the subscription Webinar package more attractive and/or upsells database subscriptions. For example, one Webinar had the following pricing:

  • Video Recording — $229.00
  • Webinar and Free 30-day trial to Office Tech Answer Center — $197.00
  • Webinar + Video recording and Free 30-day trial to Office Tech Answer Center — $329.00

The paid trainings are by far the most popular one-off product sale.

The site did some price testing around events that resulted in an increase of their event price by $100 while seeing a 15% increase in registration. “Larger companies are not balking at price changes,” said Goldstein.

Marketing Tactics

BMD has quality SEO, coming up second for keyword search terms like “free reports on business management.” But the site’s premium content is not SEO-ed, and so, given the site’s legacy in the print newsletter market, BMD primarily uses direct postal mail to drive people to the site. Goldstein told us that BMD drops about 600,000 direct mail pieces a quarter, and dropped 2.2 million in 2012.

The site has a decent social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. But Goldstein admits that the company’s biggest marketing obstacle is getting people to the site.

Conversion Tactics

What BMD lacks in traffic-driving tactics it more than makes up for in conversion tactics.

The site offers a number of free reports, downloads and e-letters (basically eNewsletters, but called e-letters to differentiate them from the site’s premium newsletters), all of which require email address registration. The thank you page then makes another offer, this time for a related premium product. For example, a free report on “Outlook Tips and Training” was followed by a premium offer for a premium handbook titled “Microsoft Outlook: Beyond E-mail to E-fficiency,” priced at $39.95 for a PDF and $45.95 for a hard copy version.

The site also offers a free 30-day trial of database subscriptions for Webinar attendees. These Webinar + database subscription packages are priced lower than the Webinar by itself, a clear incentive for prospects. And because they’re already paying for a product, the site receives a credit card number which it then charges on the 31st day. Trial members are sent a welcome email that lets users know what their password is and what “swell” tools are available for them. They then receive 3-4 more emails during the trial, but are not notified before their credit card is charged. Goldstein said this conversion tactic helped triple subscribers in two years.

The site conducted an interesting A/B test on its free report lead gen forms. They tested making the offer available alongside free articles through a lightbox overlay, a pop-up box and through display ads interspersed throughout the page. The pop-up box clearly did not do well, but the lightbox overlay also had middling results. Instead, the sidebar display ads performed best.

Group Sales

The site is just starting to offer group subscriptions on Webinar trainings, and use data mining of companies with multiple subscriptions and Fortune 500 companies to identify prospects. They then make outbound calls, and Goldstein often closes the deals himself.

Retention Tactics

Goldstein says BMD measures its average account lifetime for print, but doesn’t have statistics on its online subscriptions. But the site’s online tools are the best retention tactic. The site is also revamping its renewal series to offer a few more free bonuses and looking to move its online subscriptions to auto-renew.

Cross-Sales and Upsales

As we described above, BMD often cross-sells its products. Webinar and event attendees are prospects for the site’s databases, often receiving a free trial with attendance.

Email marketing is by far the best method the site has found for marketing and closing these deals. The site has had the most success with eblasts promoting free gifts, such as a free HR employment law guide ($137 worth), as opposed to “access to 11,000 articles” or access to tools.

About Adam Goldstein

Adam Goldstein started in the print newsletter business in 1985. He did telemarketing while attending college and then got a job with a publisher using telemarketing and direct mail.

His biggest lesson learned is that the best buyer is the one who’s already bought, and that low priced “minimum information units” ($5 or $10) gets customers moving up the product pyramid much more quickly.

His advice to other paid content professionals is to “underpromise and overdeliver.”

“Even our free content is valuable, and that gets people thinking if this is good, I wonder what the premium stuff is like. Without good content, people won’t buy and they certainly won’t renew.”

Subscription Site Insider Analysis

For a legacy print publication, Business Management Daily has done a fair job of transitioning to the online environment, absorbing valuable lessons, like the importance on online tools for conversion and retention. We particularly like their pricing models for one-off and subscription Webinars — this is a great way for existing subscription sites to offer eLearning or online training without the complications of setting up a “drip” content system. And we also like that they’ve gleaned valuable lessons from A/B tests, including the surprising fact that overlays are not as powerful at lead generation as display ads.

There are of course areas for improvement. One, the company needs to adopt more multi-channel marketing tactics to drive traffic to the site. Most critically, the site should SEO its paywalled content (see our SEO toolkit and How-To article on Getting Into Google News for more on how to do this). BMD might also want to consider PPC and trade show speeches in order to market their valuable content to prospects. And they should translate their print group subscription program into an online version. Lastly, the site definitely needs to start measuring online account lifetimes and launch a robust retention program that’s data-driven.

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