Perfecting Content

I enjoy reading Men's Health Magazine; it has a mix of tips on what to eat while you are on the road, a few good exercises to change the routine, some funny stories from Jimmy the Bartender and a lot of decent information to keep me company while in flight. I used to have a subscription delivered to my home; the only problem was that amongst the useful stuff there were a few articles that I didn’t want my then 11-year old son to go get from the mailbox. So after much consternation, I didn’t renew my subscription but subscribed to their email program instead.

I continue to receive their “Daily Dose” email, the subject lines are really great and I usually keep them all for the week, reading them all at the end of week. Here are some of their attention-grabbing headlines:

Monday: Health Food Making You Fat?
Tuesday: The Money Mistake Smart Guys Make
Wednesday: The Appliance that Makes You Fat
Thursday: Lust at First Site
Friday: Don't Take a Break

First good lesson for email marketers. If you are marketing varied content - you can leverage the subject lines to probe and target different areas of interest. Not everything will interest all your readers, yet if a few lines do, and your articles within are also interesting - the reader will go through all your emails to find information.

Pretty cool on the surface, but more interesting inside – the Don't Take a Break opens up to exercise downloads that sculpt the perfect physique and tips for custom workout plans. The article keeps you engaged and coaxes you to go to the landing page, where they offer the up sells of a subscription, personalized services or a book.

The Appliance that Makes You Fat tells you that watching TV in bed is bad for you. There are a few nice articles that lead to an article that says - 'fight fatigue all day long.' You click on that link, and it takes you to a nice article listed across three pages. Each page has an up sell. Good stuff, useful stuff - they do a good job keeping you engaged.

Maybe the next level for their campaigns would be to personalize my communiqués with dynamic content – built from tracking my clicks or maybe asking questions on what I like to receive from them.

Until then I’ll give them credit for my abs (okay, maybe Allyson the Cable Chick and HTML Diva). Their daily dose of online articles coax me to consider purchasing their magazine. Yes, their emails are effective enough to get me to pay full retail ($5.00 each) instead of the $20 annual subscription… yes, the tagged “cheap buyer” pays full retail!

Kudos to the folks at Rodale - they take the time to put good stuff together, I hope they sell a lot of magazines.