About the client
William Reed Business Media publishes magazines and runs events aimed at the UK food and drinks industries. Its flagship title is The Grocer, a weekly magazine published continuously since 1862.
What did they want?
Our brief was to create a subscriptions acquisitions campaign across multiple channels – print, web, email, in-magazine – that reflected the independent, occasionally maverick stance of The Grocer and pushed a new offer of print and online subscriptions combined.
How we went about it
We met with the editor and subscriptions manager to thrash out the basic approach. Because offers are so prevalent in food and drink retailing we went with the most iconic offer of all – BOGOF – Buy One Get One Free. We repurposed the acronym as Buy Our Grocer, Online Free and created a “ransom note” style headline using letters from the logos of UK supermarkets.
The writing
Direct response copywriting is one of our specialities. Drawing both on our own expertise and decades of carefully controlled scientific testing that we have studied, we created a direct mail pack, email promotion, advertising, flyers and banner ads that reflected both the Grocer brand and best practice in subscriptions copywriting.
The results
Results were excellent: 30% above target.
“Dear Andy, thought you might want to know that the new subs campaign for The Grocer using your copy and design across all channels is doing extremely well. We’re well ahead of target!”
