Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Buyer’s Guide
� Give away the digital edition to all print subscribers or to some subset of them,
e.g., print subscribers who live outside the United States.
� Digital-to-print conversion: if you like the digital edition, take advantage of this
special offer to subscribe to the print edition.
Some of the Case Studies in this report describe scenarios that require subscriber
system integration. In any of these cases, it is necessary to feed subscriber information
from one subscriber management system to the other. If you are thinking of making
any of these or similar offers, then you should determine how a digital edition provider
can make the process of subscriber data integration easy.
There are a few ways to integrate print and digital subscriber data. One is for the digital
edition provider to pull subscriber information from your print subscriber database.
This approach is useful, for example, for promotional e-mailings of your digital edition
to your print subscribers.
The major fulfillment houses now have APIs (application program interfaces), which
enable outside service providers to write software that interfaces to their databases. You
should check with your fulfillment provider to see what interfaces they offer and choose
a digital edition provider that can work with those interfaces. If your subscriber system
or fulfillment provider does not offer an API, then some digital edition providers will
accept periodic data feeds from those systems in flat file format.
Another possibility is to move the data in the opposite direction: to pull it from the
digital edition provider’s subscriber database to your own subscriber system. This
would apply, for example, if you want to convert digital subscribers to print subscribers,
or if you want to handle combination pricing offers. See if your digital edition provider
can integrate with your subscriber management system (or fulfillment provider) in such
a way as to push data to it.
Finally, you may want to use your subscriber-management system to track all digital
subscribers (as well as print subscribers) and not use the digital edition provider’s
subscriber system at all. This might be the way to go, for example, if you want to give
away your digital edition to all print subscribers, or to a subset of them (e.g., based on
their addresses). In that case, you will need to feed the digital edition provider a simple
set of data including subscribers’ email addresses.
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