Through a powerful database and switching from a B2C to a B2B focus, Contact Any Celebrity is able to generate more than $1 million a year in revenues. Learn how Founder and Owner Jordan McAuley tested his prices to generate more revenue with fewer sign-ups, as well as why he decided to go with a $1 trial instead of a free one. Plus, learn a new tip for testing your market’s receptivity to live events, and how you can make money from events without ever having to host one. This is a must-read, especially for other B2B sites that should be creating industry-specific databases of their own!
Company Profile
Founded: 2000
No. of Publications: 3
Staff: Owner + 2 virtual assistants, one full-time, one for blogging and sporadic projects (both based in U.S.)
Business Model: Hybrid
Paying Members: 5,000
Location: West Hollywood, CA
Websites: www.contactanycelebrity.com
www.celebrityblackbook.com
www.celebrityleverage.com
Target Market
Contact Any Celebrity is a great example of how a subscription site’s primary and secondary market can switch over time, and how being flexible can keep you profitable.
Originally, McAuley started the site for autograph collectors (it was a hobby of his in high school). But with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, autograph collecting has declined. Five or six years ago, McAuley switched his focus and started targeting organizations and professionals looking to contact celebrities for business purposes.
Nowadays, his primary market consists of authors, writers, marketing and PR professionals, celebrity wranglers, entrepreneurs, and nonprofit organizations. Most of these individuals or organizations are seeking a celebrity to endorse their product or cause.
His secondary market consists of individuals still interested in contacting celebrities for their own personal pleasure.
Content
Contact Any Celebrity primarily consists of a database of 60,000 celebrities, as well as their agents, managers, attorneys, and publicists — with contact info for each. Everything is cross-linked, so subscribers can search just for agents and managers and see who they represent. They can even choose charitable causes like “cancer” and find out which celebrities have been historically linked to those causes.
Even though a lot of the information in Contact Any Celebrity’s database is available online for free, the site’s database saves subscribers a tremendous amount of time and effort. As McAuley says, “We help people who don’t really know where to look, don’t have the connections, or simply don’t have the time to figure it out. We show them how and give them the tools. ‘We’re not really going after industry people, although we do have a lot of them as Members.’.”
The database is managed in-house by McAuley and one virtual assistant, and updates are added almost every day (McAuley says reality TV stars, who are eager to give product endorsements, constantly need to be added). He regularly reads trade magazines to stay abreast of changes in management or representation. The database was custom-built.
Contact Any Celebrity also produces eBook and print products that are sold on a one-off basis. These include:
- Celebrity Black Book, which lists celebrities and their addresses (but not their phone number and other information that’s listed in the database). It is available in print through Amazon.
- Celebrity Leverage, which gives people tips on how to get celebrity endorsements or harness the attention-power of celebrities in other ways (like holding a celebrity autograph auction for cause fundraising). It is available in print and for the Kindle through Amazon, and as a PDF download included in membership.
- Secrets to Contacting Celebrities & Public Figures: 101 Ways to Reach the Rich & Famous, which is also filled with insider tips. It is also available in print and for the Kindle through Amazon, and as a PDF download included in membership.
McAuley says the printed versions of the books used to fly off the shelves at Amazon, but now not as much, so he’s adopted a print-on-demand model.
Revenues
Contact Any Celebrity generates more than $1 million every year in revenues.
McAuley estimates that 80% of the site’s revenues come from subscriptions, with an additional 10% from one-off book sales and the last 10% from affiliate revenues from selling events for other companies and sites.
The site has two subscription plans:
- Monthly for $29.97/month, which includes a $1, seven-day trial.
- Annual for $197. (Technically, it’s $297, but when visitors click to charge the monthly fee, they are presented with an upsell offer for the annual subscription for only $197. Most annual memberships are billed at $197, indicating that most members are taking the upsell offer.) There is no $1 trial offer with the annual subscription plan.
The most popular option is the $1 trial + monthly offer, which gets about 30 sign-ups a day. However, McAuley says a large portion of these sign-ups are from people who are just looking to contact one celebrity and then cancel.
Annual subscriptions get two to three sign-ups a day.
McAuley ran some pricing tests on his monthly price, and found that $29.97 was the most profitable compared to $29.95 and $27.00 (this does not mean it got the most sign-ups; just that most people stayed longer at that price point).
The price for the books listed on Contact Any Celebrity ranges from $9.99 for Kindle editions to $97 for the printed Celebrity Black Book.
The Celebrity Black Book is the most popular one-off sale, and is oddly popular with prison inmates. McAuley says that two rather famous serial killers have bought his books, mainly because they’re bored and looking for autographs. McAuley has made a policy to not offer any special discount to prison inmates (even though they always ask) and requires they save up the $97 purchase price.
Lastly, the site generates affiliate revenues by advertising other company’s events. If you’re looking to test your market’s interest in offline events, this is a great way to begin. It’s especially lucrative for Contact Any Celebrity since the company doesn’t have to do anything associated with programming or marketing an event –just sends emails blasts to its in-house list.
Marketing Tactics
Contact Any Celebrity mainly attracts visitors through SEO, PPC and strong Word-of-Mouth.
SEO & (Free) Content Marketing
McAuley states that Contact Any Celebrity gets excellent organic traffic because it’s been around for so long. The site also has a free blog with tips, such as telling visitors to use a FedEx envelope when contacting a celebrity since everyone opens a FedEx envelope. The blog also posts interviews with PR experts, many of whom have just published books about marketing and publicity.
PPC
Contact Any Celebrity started its PPC campaigns early, and has found that long-tail search terms that mention celebrity names work best, especially when they link to specific landing pages on the site. Contact Any Celebrity advertises on more than 5000 celebrity names through AdWords. Two that are particular popular are “Contact Oprah Winfrey” and “Contact Tyler Perry.”
WOM
A few years ago, McAuley searched “Contact Any Celebrity” on Amazon and found it was mentioned in 30 books, from marketing to how-to-create-an-app manuals.
McAuley also attends writers’ conferences and publishing events in order to meet authors, who are a big part of the site’s primary market. Combined with the site’s books, these activities have led to solid word-of-mouth marketing for the site.
Postal Direct Mail
Contact Any Celebrity sends out three-panel postal direct mail cards to potential subscribers using an in-house list. The latest mailing contained 3000 names, half of whom bought one of the Contact Any Celebrity books. Other names come from sites that Contact Any Celebrity has acquired.
The cards have an order form that recipients can rip-off and send back in order to sign-up for membership. Since a lot of people who buy the printed books are older, postal direct mail works best with them.
Affiliate Marketing
McAuley also markets Contact Any Celebrity through affiliates. The site offers affiliates a 50% commission for the lifetime of accounts they refer, as well as a 10% lifetime commission on any accounts referred by affiliates they were responsible for recruiting to the program.
Checks are cut only after an affiliate earns at least $20.
One of the nice tech aspects of this affiliate program is that affiliates can deep link to a specific celebrity in the Contact Any Celebrity database.
Social Media
Contact Any Celebrity has a decent Facebook audience with more than 4,000 likes. The site, and McAuley himself, are also active on Twitter.
However, the use of the Facebook “like” box on the right-hand panel of the site seems to be more impactful than a Facebook page. McAuley found that the pictures of Facebook users elicited trust from new visitors. He also likes that the box displays the real-time number of Facebook fans; visitors know that’s a number that can’t be faked, so it serves as testimonial endorsement, and is perceived to be more honest than a site touting its membership numbers.
McAuley is currently testing to see if a social media login through a lightbox overlay on the homepage will affect conversions (“not yet,” as of the day we spoke).
Acquisition Marketing
Contact Any Celebrity has also had success in acquiring other smaller sites like Celebrity Fanmail. McAuley says these competitor sites are often run by people working from home, and he’ll offer them around $5000 for the site. However, few are subscription sites, and many are not technologically advanced. One person had all of his customer information on typed index cards, which McAuley then had to enter into his customer database individually.
Contact Any Celebrity folds the members of other sites into the main site, and then redirect traffic from the acquired sites to Contact Any Celebrity. The site then markets to the new members through email (for subscriptions to the site) and direct mail (for sales of books).
Conversion Tactics
Contact Any Celebrity’s best conversion tactic is that it allows visitors to “test-drive” the site. By entering their email address, visitors can search for a celebrity name. If the celebrity is listed in the database, visitors are then taken to a specific paywall that contains the celebrity’s name, photo, birthday and age. The contact information is not available, however, and visitors are presented with the $1 trial offer. (See image.)
Note: Contact Any Celebrity does not generate specific paywalls for celebrities whose contact information it does not contain.
Visitors are also converted through free eBook/PDF offers for the Contact Any Celebrity books. The offer page also lists a public-domain book that McAuley reformatted as a PDF. (If your company is strapped for content creators, reformatting public-domain content into user-friendly formats is a creative solution that can increase conversions and revenues.)
Visitors to the blog are converted through embedded links on celebrity names. When visitors click on the embedded link, they are taken to Contact Any Celebrity’s specific paywall for that celebrity’s contact information. (See image.)
The site tried offering a live chat to improve conversions, but got too many calls from kids and other individuals who just want to talk to celebrities. The site now has a phone number listed that people can call, but the calls go to straight to voicemail and are transcribed to an email that the customer service rep gets. By doing this, the company can screen calls and only deal with serious inquiries. Some people have been upset by not being able to speak to someone directly, but the staff simply explain that they “get tons of calls.”
Retention Tactics
The average monthly account for Contact Any Celebrity has a lifetime of four months, while the average annual account subscriber stays for three years.
The site guarantees its subscribers 50 cents for every returned letter that doesn’t get to the celebrity they’re trying to contact. McAuley says this leads them to get bags of mail sometimes, but it keeps subscribers very happy.
Note: The site uses a mail forwarding service to maintain a West Hollywood address even though McAuley is based in Atlanta. This has not only been convenient as McAuley has moved addresses multiple times in the past 12 years, but an efficient safety measure, considering the volume of mail the company gets and that some of it is from prison inmates and possibly dangerous celebrity fanatics.
Cross-Sales and Upsales
As already mentioned, Contact Any Celebrity tries to cross-sell and upsell a number of its products and services. For example, potential monthly subscribers are upsold a discounted annual membership at checkout. Cancelling subscribers are cross-sold into a one-off purchase of the printed Celebrity Black Book. They are also cross-sold external events through the site and direct mail that McAuley creates for these external events. He usually targets people who have already spent more than $100.
All subscribers are notified via email and direct mail of the printed Celebrity BlackBook available on Amazon. McAuley says he reaches out to his best prospects through direct mail and email.
About Jordan McAuley
Jordan McAuley truly turned his passion into a business. He was an autograph collector himself in high school. During college, he stumbled upon people selling celebrity contact information on Prodigy and AOL. Since he knew how often celebrity contact information changed, he started his own list that he updated and sold for $30 apiece. The service eventually morphed into a membership site and a business, especially since there were few other people who were running their contact lists like a real business.
McAuley says, “It was hard in the beginning — I couldn’t find anyone who would let you take credit cards online at first. So it was slow changing it over to a membership site. I just knew with celebrity changing contacts all the time, a recurring model was better–people would want that over a print directory.”
His advice for other subscription and membership site professionals is to remain flexible. “Our most profitable member base was not who I thought it was going to be. I started [Contact Any Celebrity] for fans. I never thought about nonprofits and those other types of people.”
Vendors & Technology
Hosting and Database –ObjectWare, now BridgeLine Digital
http://www.bridgelinedigital.com/
Payment processing — Net Billing
http://www.netbilling.com/
CRM — SendPepper.com, owned by Office Autopilot.
http://sendpepper.com/
McAuley says the service lets you not only send email blasts, but voicemail blasts and direct mail postcards. He says the postcard design is a little clunky, but you can upload professional ones.
Direct Mail Design — SendOutCards
https://www.sendoutcards.com/
CMS — WordPress for blog and outer shell. The database was custom-made.
http://wordpress.org/
Affiliate Manager — Tracking Soft.com
http://trackingsoft.com/
Mail Forwarding Service — Mail Service Center
http://www.mailservicecenter.com/
Subscription Site Insider Analysis
Contact Any Celebrity is to be congratulated on creating a thriving business in the early days of the Internet, and streamlining it to generate more than $1 million with only three staff members. It’s admirable the site has been able to change with the market and still remain highly profitable.
We applaud the site’s conversion tactics, like choosing a “test drive” offer with a specific paywall and a $1 trial instead of the standard free trial. We also like that the company sells subscribers during multiple points in the sales funnel, including cross-selling the printed Celebrity Black Book when subscribers call to cancel. And we love the site’s use of direct mail, especially for older customers. Lastly, we love that McAuley has tested his pricing and focused on finding the most profitable one, not the most popular one.
We think that the site can test raising the $1 trial price, and should test a variety of prices ranging from $1.99 to $9.97. If people are truly subscribing just for one contact, the site can afford to make them pay a more reasonable price for this contact. Also, McAuley told us that expired cards are the biggest problem in retention, which maybe why his monthly churn rate is four months. Talking to a consultant and switching payment processors can help alleviate this problem.
Contact Any Celebrity may want to explore the possibility of their own events, especially if the site has proof that its subscribers are already buying event tickets. Start with virtual events, like paid Webinars or teleconferences, and then branch out into offline events.
Lastly, the site may also want to explore marketing partnerships with other celebrity sites, like IMDB, or B2B sites targeting his niche audience, like Writer’s Market and Idealist.org.
