Quick Overview
There’s no shortage of free, golf-related content on the web, yet Golf Odyssey has for 20 years published a successful premium newsletter that offers exclusive golf-related travel tips and reviews. Publisher and Editor-in-Chief David Baum tells Insider how his team uses a free, non-premium content site to attract search visits and drive traffic to the subscription offer, and how they use an email onboarding series for trial members that’s improved conversions and reduced chargebacks. Plus, you’ll learn how they get annual subscribers to update their credit card information before they’re up for autorenewal.
Company Snapshot
Print Newsletter Founded: 1992
Membership Website Launched: 2007
Free Website Site Launched: 2006
Employees: 7 (mix of full- and part-time)
Business Model: Hybrid (75% subscriptions, 25% ads/ancillary products/travel services)
Paying Subscribers: “Thousands”
http://www.golfodyssey.com
http://www.golfvacationinsider.com
Target Market
Primary audience is affluent male golfers looking for unbiased reviews of golf courses and golf-related travel advice. Subscribers are 86% male, ages 50-65, with a median income $475,000. The majority belong to at least one golf club, and 30% belong to two or more golf clubs.
Content Model
The company publishes two sites: One is the membership website for the premium Golf Odyssey monthly newsletter, which is available in print and electronic versions. The other is a free golf-travel information site called Golf Vacation Insider.
The Golf Odyssey site is 100% repurposed content from the monthly print newsletter, available as both as PDF editions and as HTML-versions of the stories that are in the PDF editions. The reason for offering the HTML version is searchability.
The PDF edition features a professional layout with four-color photos. It’s designed to be read in print, and Baum assumes that most subscribers print it out to read it. For that reason, he makes sure to send his email announcing the publication of the monthly edition on a weekday so subscribers can print their issue on their office printers. He never sends on the weekends.
Content quality is paramount for Golf Odyssey. The newsletter staff often conducts incognito trips to various destinations to generate detailed, unbiased reviews. They also publish exclusive tips for getting the best deals on golf-related travel.
“We rely heavily on outsourcing for many functions such as technology, email production and layout, but NOT for editorial,” says Baum.
Baum underscores there’s no difference between the content on the site and the content a print subscriber would get. Although the publishing platform Baum uses offers multimedia functions, he just doesn’t use those bells and whistles.
“It would take too much money to create a [multimedia] product that would look and be high-end, so we purposefully don’t try.”
Which is a good lesson: Don’t do multimedia for multimedia’s sake alone. While it’s easy to do a cheap video, it would be cost prohibitive to do videos or other interactive content with the production values that this demographic expects. And if they are happy enough to buy the text-and-photos version, why not stick with it?
Golf Vacation Insider’s content, on the other hand, is not premium. It’s designed entirely for three purposes:
– Lots of text with SEO-keywords to gain traffic.
– A variety of special report offers to convert that traffic into email opt-ins.
– Frequent publication of additional content as a reason to email the Golf Vacation Insider list, so as to build good relationships and provide a platform for subscription offers to the main site.
Revenue Streams
Subscription fees provide the bulk of revenue for Golf Odyssey. Annual subscriptions cost $147 for a digital edition and $195 for a print newsletter.
Baum is now testing two-year subscriptions that cost $267 for a digital edition and $347 for print.
Smaller revenue streams for Golf Odyssey include ecommerce sales in the online store, which from time-to-time includes some golf-related items. However, the big sellers are an annual, hard-bound collection of the previous year’s newsletters, and “destination guides” that feature repurposed content about a particular golf vacation area (proving that content sells best to people who are on your site for content).
Branded, subscriber-only golf trips have proven to be “hugely successful,” says Baum, and are a small-but-growing revenue stream.
– Golf Vacation Insider
Most revenues from the free site are generated by sales of subscriptions to Golf Odyssey. The site also has a small advertising revenue stream from Google AdSense ads, which mostly are there to meet the expectations of visitors looking for links to golf vacations, rather than advisory content about them.
Finally, Golf Vacation Insider makes a small amount of revenue from highly relevant third-party offers sent to the site’s list of 44,000 double confirmed opt-ins.
Marketing Tactics
Here are some of the major tactics Baum uses to drive traffic and convert visitors into subscribers:
PPC search advertising
Baum buys Google PPC ads for his brand term “Golf Odyssey,” because he wants to make sure that people who are looking for his site can find it easily. (Note: Major ecommerce sites such as eBay have run the data and found that even if you have the top organic result for your name, it’s still worth it to get a PPC ad for it as well.)
Baum is also testing a Facebook ad campaign, but it’s early days yet. He’s considering LinkedIn for future ad campaigns.
Email marketing
Golf Vacation Insider’s twice-weekly email messages are a major source of subscription orders. Baum’s marketing team also sends email broadcasts with many third-party organizations. They generally don’t rent lists, but instead work directly with the list owner to craft co-branded creative to indicate that they’ve arranged a special Golf Odyssey subscription offer for members of that list.
Free trials
Baum has tried a variety of trial offers, but the best seems to be a 10-day trial offer with credit card required.
He charges the regular subscription rate for trials on his site. But if the trial is offered through a marketing partner, such as an email broadcast from another golf-related publication, he usually includes a special discount such as 10 free days plus $50 off the regular rate for a year.
He only wants names in his file who truly want to be subscribers, and wanted to reduce time-consuming and expensive chargebacks (~$20 each in fees). So although the trial is officially for 10 days, he actually doesn’t charge until day 14, giving potential cancels a little bit of an extra cushion.
This tactic, plus his renewal letter strategy (see below), helped “dramatically cut back on chargebacks while improving conversions.”
Trial members receive four emails automatically:
#1. Sent at sign-up with user name and password.
#2. A welcome note sent on day three, which features recommendations for some the best content they should view before their trial ends and a reminder that they’ll receive an alert before the end of the trial so they have time to cancel.
#3. A reminder email on day 7 that their card will be charged at the end of the trial, featuring details on how to cancel and reassuring information about the 90-day, 100% money-back refund if they cancel after they are charged.
#4. An emailed receipt on the day the card is charged.
(See Relevant Links, below, for samples of the email series.)
Site design for conversions
As mentioned above, Golf Vacation Insider is designed to be a traffic and lead generation machine, and has great search rankings for keywords such as “Golf Vacations.”
GolfOdyssey.com, on the other hand, is completely the opposite. It’s not designed for SEO. The homepage has no story teasers with links to paywall pages. You can’t access any content if you are not a subscriber.
Instead, the copy is dedicated to a letter explaining why you should subscribe, including testimonials. The offer on the site is a full-price offer — discounts are only available through marketing partners so it’s clear to anyone who checks that those are indeed special deals.
Renewals
Baum hates to lose subscribers to bad cards. “You work so hard to get a subscriber and then you lose them for technical reasons — it tears me apart.”
So although all new subscriptions are auto-renew, he sends a printed “early” renewal notice via first class mail to all expiring accounts 90 days before they will be billed. His goal is to get as many subscribers as possible to hand over “fresh” credit cards. A secondary benefit is to get cash flow quicker.
The advance renewal letter features an offer for a digitally-delivered premium, but they can only renew via return postal mail, fax or phone and they must include a new credit card number. The campaign gets about a 15% response rate. (See Relevant Links, below, for a sample of the letter.)
Baum recently started offering a two-year discount for renewals. Again, the goal is to get funds from people whose credit cards on file might have gone bad before he could renew them again.
If a card doesn’t work due to a bad expiration date, Baum’s site contacts the subscriber via a series of three automated emails over 30 days. They also retry the card with a blank expiration date field, and a date that’s updated two- and four-years out.
Technology and Vendors Used
MemberGate: Membership site platform used for GolfOdyssey.com
http://www.membergate.com
WordPress: Platform used for GolfVacationInsider.com
http://wordpress.com/
Global IntelliSystems: Baum’s email service provider
http://www.gliq.com/
UFF Corp.: Printing and fulfillment vendor for print newsletters and other print products. The newsletter is printed digitally, not offset, so they never print more copies than are needed for fulfillment.
http://www.uffcorp.net/
About David Baum
Baum spent 17 years working on Wall Street before realizing he wanted to do something “radically different” and entrepreneurial, he says. “Passion is good for business.”
An avid golfer himself, he was a subscriber to Golf Odyssey before purchasing the newsletter from its founder, Terry Sieg, in 2005. In addition to his duties as publisher and editor-in-chief of the newsletter, he’s written two widely-read golf travel books, and served as the golf travel columnist for Dealmaker Magazine.
Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis
We love how much attention Baum pays to credit card processing — and think other publishers could increase their own revenues with similar tactics. Mailing a printed renewal letter with an incentive offer is a great approach for longer-term subscriptions. But you’ll also notice that he’s not content to use just one technique to reduce credit-card breakage. A combination of email outreach, payment recycling attempts, and printed letters is the kind of comprehensive strategy you should employ to avoid losing good subscribers to payment processing challenges.
But we think Baum could get more aggressive with ancillary products and revenue streams. The newsletter’s audience is the kind of niche demographic that marketers would pay a great deal to reach, through offers such as postal mail list rentals, a companion ad-based print publication, and maybe even a joint venture with a TV production team for a show (much like Cook’s Country has branched out into TV and radio). We’d also like to see some testing to optimize the order form on the Golf Odyssey site, which appears little altered from the standard MemberGate order form. For example, they could test a new design that gets the registration form above the fold, and try less scary alternatives to the dreaded “submit” text on the button.
