Top green-living magazine sends renewal notices via Zumbox
If you’ve ever subscribed to a print magazine, then you’ve received renewal notices in the mail. If you miss or ignore these notices, you’ll get additional notices. Wouldn’t it be great if these could be sent paperless? We’re happy to report that Mother Earth News is the first magazine to send paperless renewal notices via Zumbox.
If you’re a Mother Earth News subscriber, then you now have the option to receive renewal notices in your Zumbox and ultimately choose to go paperless. This is the official press release:
Zumbox today announced that Mother Earth News, the nation’s largest sustainable lifestyle magazine, became the first magazine to deliver paperless renewal notices to its subscribers via Zumbox. Ogden Publications, parent company of Mother Earth News, is thereby giving subscribers the ability to go paperless with their renewal notices and renew subscriptions directly from their Zumbox.
“In addition to clearly reducing environmental impact, Zumbox represents a powerful way for us to communicate with our subscribers,” said Bryan Welch, Publisher and Editorial Director of Mother Earth News. “Our audience has already started to embrace this paperless postal system, which could become another content distribution channel for us as well. Considering we send out between 30,000 and 40,000 renewal notices in a typical month, the cost savings of transitioning even a portion of that to Zumbox would be tremendous.”
Zumbox has created a web-based platform that powers the world’s first paperless postal system. For every U.S. street address, there is a corresponding Zumbox – a digital mailbox – which enables postal mail to be sent as digital files and received online with no paper and no scanning. This new category – paperless mail – represents the first practical alternative to traditional postal systems.
Zumbox also represents an important alternative to commercial e-mail. Because it is based on street addresses (and is independent of e-mail addresses), publishers like Mother Earth News, as well as all other senders, can utilize it to deliver paperless mail based on the information they already have on file. What’s more, Zumbox enables optimum targeting and segmentation – which e-mail can’t do – and is both secure and spam-free.
With Zumbox, publishers can immediately start delivering paperless renewal notices in parallel to the paper versions because the Zumbox platform uses the same street addresses. Subscribers can access this mail by going to Zumbox.com, at which point they can make the choice to go paperless through a “Paperless Please” button that sends a request back to the publisher to stop the paper. Each renewal notice can also include a “Renew Now” button that will take the subscriber to the website of the publisher where the renewal can be completed.
“Not only does the Zumbox platform offer publishers an exciting new channel through which to reduce renewal costs,” said Zumbox CEO Donn Rappaport, “but it can help to maximize their renewals as well. Research has shown that the rich media capability of our system leads to higher involvement, engagement, and response rates. Plus, Zumbox demonstrates an important commitment to responsible environmental practices. It’s not surprising that the company behind the longest running sustainable lifestyle magazine is the first publisher to embrace Zumbox.”
Ogden has already been working to establish the Zumbox channel by promoting it to the Mother Earth News audience through e-mail and its website. By making subscribers aware of this new channel, the publisher can save on printing, paper and postage costs while providing a more convenient, earth-friendly and dynamic way for interested subscribers to receive mail.
