I am seeking alternatives to Royal Mail's Presstream magazine distribution
May 13, 2005 2:18 AM Subscribe
I am trying to a UK-wide postal distribution system for a bi-monthly magzine.
Presstream 2 by the Royal Mail is what has been suggested to me. I want to know if there are there any others?
Also if anyone has experience of setting up distributions like this, I would appreciate some pointers - more specifically, I will be charged with creating the subscriber database and no doubts have to clean our data too.
Presstream 2 by the Royal Mail is what has been suggested to me. I want to know if there are there any others?
Also if anyone has experience of setting up distributions like this, I would appreciate some pointers - more specifically, I will be charged with creating the subscriber database and no doubts have to clean our data too.
Response by poster: Thanks i_cola, just what I needed.
posted by ajbattrick at 7:41 AM on May 13, 2005
posted by ajbattrick at 7:41 AM on May 13, 2005
This thread is closed to new comments.
I can't remember the name of the mailing house we used (but I have emailed a friend to try & find out).
Subscription data was stored as part of a FileMaker database (which also contained advertiser & other data) & the relevant mailing data (Name, Job Title, Company, Address lines 1, 2, 3 etc., Post Code & unique subscriber number) was extracted & emailed (IIRC as an Excel file) to the mailing house along with the mailing sheet design (PDF or TIFF format).
The mailing sheet (AKA cover sheet) is what contains the mailing address. Basically an A4 sheet (same size as the mag) that we could put what we liked on (adverts, 'See page x', 'Come to our conference', 'Is your info correct?' that sort of thing) apart from in a blank box in the middle of the sheet where the subscriber's name, address & sub no. would go & a standard section at the top for a return address & the postage mark.
The mailing house would produce individual coversheets by merging the cover page with our mailing data & bag them up with a copy of the mag & mail 'em out.
By supplying multiple databases we had options for mailing sheets to go with different types of subscribers e.g. people who qualified for free copies, people who had never subscribed (from the original database created from going thru industry directories), paid subscribers (the holy grail in b2b) and so on.
The subscriber database is the lifeblood for any b2b mag & clean data is a must. Once it is clean then make sure you do a daily update of new subs. Getting subs via a website form is always helpful.
[Numbers involved - between 5,000 & 15,000 subscribers per issue, 6 issues a year from 88-128 pages full colour perfect-bound, +1 annual review issue up to 300 pages. Mailing to UK & rest of world & US & Canada (different mailing rules). We had a dedicated circulation/database manager.]
posted by i_cola at 5:11 AM on May 13, 2005