Polybag cross-sell builds profits; polybag carrier successfully promotes MLR magazine subs

Polybag cross-sell builds profits * Philadelphia--The Postal Service may have slammed the door on many polybag opportunities, but MLR Publishing Co. has found a lucrative--and legitimate--use for the bags: cross-selling its publications.

The technique is producing extra subscriptions with little Extra cost, according to Roxanne Christensen, circulation director for the company that publishes Mergers & Acquisitions, Directors & Boards, M&A Europe, Corporate Restructuring, and a number of related reports and handbooks. Inserted into the all-clear polybag is a a four-page brochure, topped with a carrier sheet advertising the subscription offer. The sheet, easily read through the bag, includes a perforated business reply card with the mailing label already attached.

New subscribers simply check off the appropriate boxes on the card and include a credit card number. The simplicity was key to MLR's success, says Christensen. The technique produced mediocre results until the mailing label was attached to the card so subscribers don't have to fill in their addresses.

MLR has used the carrier sheets and brochures to push new launches, sell existing publications and promote nine different publications at once. Beyond selling subscriptions, however, the carrier sheets also act as advertising--"softening people up for a sell"--and as image-building. "They get us out there as a heavyweight in our field," says Christensen.

Sales cover costs

The additional sales, furthermore, "have always covered the costs of printing and producing" the inserts, which mail to about 10,000 subscribers of Mergers & Acquisitions and Directors & Boards. Although the response isn't very high, Christensen says, the products' high-ticket prices make the cross-selling profitable. The carrier sheets, for example, have sold 56 subscriptions of the newly launched M&A Europe for $319 apiece; and about 20 industry reports, which are priced at $495 each. A few new subscribers, furthermore, have purchased the full set of publications promoted on the carrier sheet.

"The beauty of using the carrier sheets with new subscribers is that you're hitting them when they are most primed--when they want more information," Christensen says.

Often, she adds, other publishers have used carrier sheets to ask for renewals, to requalify readers of controlled circulation publications, and to preview what's coming up in future issues. But, she says, she has never seen anyone else use carrier sheets to cross-sell a publisher's own publications. "It seems like such an obvious thing," adds Christensen.

Despite new polybag rules, there is nothing in the postal regulations that says you can't cross-promote subscriptions, according to a spokesperson from the business requirements division of the USPS. "It is permissable to have a combination subscription form and advertise subscriptions to two or more publications in the same company," he says. "That's always been in the regulations." He refers publishers to the Domestic Mail Manual, section 425.6D.

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