At the end of the first day of WMM, Jeff Bruce, senior vice-president worldwide sales, Zinio Systems offered his key issues for publishers considering digital editions...

1. Digital strategy - Develop a digital rate base plan and timeline in advance. Digital readership levels should be large enough to get attention but not raise eyebrows. Advance planning allows a publisher to capture the economic benefits in the budget process and gain early advertiser acceptance and interest in new sponsorship opportunities.

2. Promotion - It‘s essential to have a well designed consumer marketing program that is integrated with current reader acquisition efforts. In general, electronic offers work best (email, web promotions, etc). Digital premiums and samples are as effective at selling print subscriptions as they are digital copies. Ask your digital vendor what reader acquisition programs and other circulation services they offer.

3. Audit - If auditing is essential to success, plan in advance with both the audit bureau and digital vendor to
ensure the auditing and reporting requirements are in place before launch. Rules vary by country, even
among the same provider, so check first and never assume.

4. Photo rights - Check the status of agreements for photographs, illustrations and other intellectual property by source. Sometimes they require incremental rights for use in digital editions and sometimes they don‘t. The exact digital usage can impact rights as well. So be sure to clear all appropriate rights in advance.

5. Production - Determine what it will take for the magazine files to be converted into digital format and how this process will affect the production workflow and schedule. Do a test issue or ‘dry run‘ in advance to determine conversion costs, impact on workflow and possible improvements before going live.

6. Fulfillment - Decide how digital subscribers will be integrated and managed on the database file. Two common options are integration with the existing fulfillment provider or stand alone support from the digital vendor. Make sure the digital supplier can support one or both of these solutions. If not, a lot of back end work falls to the publisher to develop.

7. Customer service - Investigate if the digital supplier will handle inquiries from digital readers. If so, ask how support is handled, if FAQ‘s are provided and if there is proper cross training and routing of subscription and
technical questions to the right source.

8. Editorial - Consider how editorial might bring the magazine to life with rich media enhancements; can digital
only supplements or special issues provide compelling new services to readers; and what is the proper timeline to phase in new services.

9. Research - Determine how and when reader acceptance will be evaluated and what will be shared with advertisers vs. internal planning. Great results can generally be achieved through inexpensive web surveys.

10. New Products - Revisit new product opportunities with digital delivery such as special reports, premiums, bundled issues, mid cycle alerts or launches. Publishers have only begun to explore the opportunities created by digital magazine publishing. By following these best practices and learning from those who went first, it‘s possible for publishers who have yet to introduce digital magazine services to their readers and advertisers to do so with greater confidence. With the right road map and knowing what questions to ask, there are now enough case studies and templates to follow that smart publishers can generate successful results in no time at all with far less risk of the unknown.

Source: FIPP‘s Magazine World, issue 43