5 vital features in every customer magazine
By Paul Green
The sole purpose of your customer magazine is to encourage your customers and potential customers to thoroughly read it, and develop a better relationship with your business.
To do this, your magazine must seem familiar to them – even if they have never seen it before.
Doing this is easier than you think and requires sticking to a number of unwritten rules.
Pick up a number of different magazine titles and no matter what the subjects, you will find the formats are often pretty similar.
Over decades of magazine and newspaper production, readers have come to expect certain things from the publications they read.
The best example of this is in newspapers: people expect sport to be at the back.
You can move it elsewhere in the paper, but you are breaking people’s habits and it’s hard to predict how they will respond.
Leave innovation like that to mainstream publishers. For your customer magazine you should stick to the rules and give people what they expect.
To breed familiarity and get the best response from customers, there are five vital features every customer magazine must have:
Plenty of content: A bad customer magazine is just a dressed up advert for your business. Readers will see through this, and are less likely to develop a better relationship with you. There must be oodles of relevant content in your magazine. Find out what your target audience enjoys doing and reading about, and get content written about that. Every article should contribute to the main purpose of the magazine: developing your relationship with the customer.
Interaction: All media relies heavily on interaction these days. Rightly so – done well, interaction fosters the relationship and allows them to feel part of the publication (and so, your business). You need to allow readers to interact in the way that suits them not you: phone, email, text, forum, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Interaction levels can be low to start with but will grow alongside relationships with your business and magazine.
A reader competition: Get the best prize you can and put on a fun competition, making it as easy to enter as possible (ensure it is legal). Readers love a competition; it encourages them to interact; keep the magazine; and if your prize is good enough, even daydream about your business.
Insider deals/knowledge: To help foster the reader relationship your magazine must contain items that make them feel special for reading it. This could be added information that “normal” customers don’t get, or a killer deal they can’t get anywhere else. Adding this regularly will encourage word of mouth marketing about your business.
Essential customer information: There are two places you must publish essential information your customers need to know about your business – your website and your customer magazine. If the magazine lists numbers, policies and other details they may need to refer to in the future, they are more likely to keep it for future reference. This helps keep your brand in front of them.
