Via campaign India (via PSFK):
“So we started a mobile updates channel – a first in The Economist world. This is a great way for people to sample our content. Everyday a message is sent out at 11:00 am to the channel members. The message is either a summary of the Leaders in the current week’s issue, or a snippet of a couple of interesting stories. There is always a call to action, directing the person to read the entire story by picking up a copy from the newsstand, or visiting www.economist.com or even m.economist.com (which has been launched recently).
Create awareness, find the needles in a huge haystack – and there is still another issue that needs to be dealt with. “When we started marketing in India ,” says Guha Thakurta, “we realized that one of the biggest problems we faced was our price. People who had not sampled our product found the price to be a barrier to trials. At the same time, we also found out that our single most effective source of subscriptions was through www.economist.com. What this told us was that people who had sampled our content online were most likely to subscribe to the newspaper. Hence, a lot of our subscription effort was driven to get people to sample and in generating trials.
Read the entire story here.