Publishers are well aware of the costs of printing and delivering magazines and trade journals to their clients. If everything is done manually, the clients will always phone in to make changes to their subscriptions, to make payments, to change their addresses, to go on vacation, etc. Thus there is a constant incoming stream of telephone calls related to subscriptions, and a system that helps manage client information and reduce duplication of records is invaluable. It saves time for the publisher and the client. It makes the publisher seem much more professional. It enables staff to respond to requests in a uniform way that makes business sense.
Magazine and Trade Journal publishers that have gone online - and this is a large and growing community - have mostly opted for in-house unique software that is custom-built for their businesses. This has an attractive initial price tag, especially with outsourcing - as many publishers find programmers willing to quote $2000-$5000 for a system that works. But this is the beginning of a voyage, a long and distracting one that involves many missing features, bugs, and problems. In other words, the cheap custom system is never adequate for the publisher's purposes, and new features will cost another $2000 per month for years and years, and the end of this story is that eventually the software will be hard to maintain and the programmer will say that a new version must be written, and the development will begin all over again.
Please allow us to advance this proposal that you, as an online publisher, should not attempt to re-invent a wheel that we have already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars inventing. Time spent by programmers, project managers, and users in a real publication - several complete rewrites - and over eight years of online publishing experience.
We have software prepared that you can use immediately, without needing to be exposed to the risk of a project going over budget or over its allowed time. We have a package that gives you all of the benefits of having an in-house solution, including the ability to request fixes or new unique features, and we will make your system perfect for your unique business for no extra charge.
The difference is that instead of starting from scratch, your online publication will benefit from our investments, and the investments of our other clients, in a virtuous circle of product improvement that is beneficial to everyone. Everything is taken care of, just as if you had hired someone to try to program a system from scratch, except that you'll get there faster, and have better quality control, and a better support system including
- 24 hour tech support
- we take care of backups for you
- unlimited improvement requests fulfilled for no extra charge
- we make the system perfect for you
Any feature that you would want as an online publisher is included, and that's a guarantee. If it's not included, we'll take your input and include the feature, for no extra charge. Here are some features that we already have included:
- Credit Card Processing
- Automatic Credit Card Rebilling
- New clients can prepay for a year or two, and when the time is up, it rolls into a monthly billing structure
- Reminder emails for many events such as
- Signing in for the first time
- Subscribing to a new publication
- Credit Card Rebilling
- Changes to the Client Profile (e.g. address, credit card, etc)
- Supports multiple publications, and up-sells the client to try to get the client to spend more
- Very sophisticated system to handle promotions with promotion codes that can change prices or automatically purchase special packages, which may also include one-time bonus or promotional material
- Template-based reminder emails mean that your staff can give the right message
- Graphical User Interface for editing email templates
- Graphical user interface for adding new free content (special content for improving search engine optimization of the site)
