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Sure, it’s easy to get people to come to the show. But getting them to buy a ticket is another story. Chet Van Wert, strategic marketing director for Advance Publications Inc. in New York, spoke with Direct recently about how Advance’s titles are using e-mail to encourage retention and pay-up. Van Wert — who will speak at Direct Marketing Days New York this month on online strategies for acquisition and retention — joined Advance six months ago, following 14 years with Columbia House (where he launched four businesses, including ColumbiaHouse.com) and two-and-a-half with audio programming site Audible.com. He oversees online marketing for Advance Publications’ consumer magazine stable, which includes the Condé Nast magazines (such as The New Yorker, Glamour, Bride’s, Vanity Fair and Wired); Golf Digest; Fairchild Publications’ titles W, Details and Jane; and the CondéNet Web sites Concierge.com, Style.com and Epicurious.com. “There’s really a variety of things happening here online,” he says. “My job is to do things that will benefit all the titles across the board and ensure that our Web sites are converting as much of the traffic to orders as possible.”

DIRECT: Have you had more success with online promotion for certain titles as opposed to others?

VAN WERT: Yes, but I think it’s all very logical. Five of our titles are part of CondéNet — Bon Appétit and Gourmet are part of Epicurious.com, Vogue and W are incorporated into Style.com and Condé Nast Traveler is incorporated into Concierge.com. So because there’s such rich content, strong traffic and loyal users, those titles have done very well in terms of online circulation. And the books that are skewed younger, like Teen Vogue and Self, have done well.

DIRECT: How is the quality of subscribers acquired online vs. the quality of those acquired through more traditional methods, like direct mail?

VAN WERT: I think it varies as much or more than direct mail. The customers we acquire through CondéNet are extremely high quality. They’re self motivated. They’ve raised their hands as having an interest and they’re very engaged with the subject matter, so they’re perfect prospects for us. [But then] we can go out to co-registration sites and get appallingly low quality, so it’s extremely variable.

DIRECT: What are your criteria for judging ROI?

VAN WERT: We’re looking at cost per order. Different titles have different allowable CPOs. In every case, there’s a consumer marketing director responsible for those titles, and I’m working with them on what they’re willing to pay. We keep our efforts within those constraints.

DIRECT: How are you driving people to your Web sites?

VAN WERT: We’re testing a variety of things in very low volumes. One thing we’re not doing any of is e-mail list rental. Part of our problem is most of our subscriptions are a pretty low ticket purchase — $12, $15, $18. It’s pretty hard to go out and rent a high-quality opt-in e-mail list at any rate that’s going to allow us to come up with an allowable cost per order. It’s just not going to happen. We’re looking more to partnerships, where there’s a really good fit between our brand and a partner’s brand, and we can structure an offer to a partner’s customers that’s compelling and makes sense.

DIRECT: Are you doing e-mail prospecting to a house file?

VAN WERT: Yes. We started in January testing a variety of approaches to people who opted in to get promotional e-mail from us. The challenge there is building the e-mail list. People aren’t going to give us an e-mail address unless there’s something in it for them. Some of our magazines — Glamour, Self, Allure, Lucky and Jane — are doing e-mail newsletters. So there’s a reason for a customer or even a prospect to give you their e-mail address and allow you to open a dialogue and have an extended selling process with that person.

The other thing we’re looking at is downloadable editorial premiums. For example, we have an offer for Allure where when you subscribe online you can immediately download Allure’s beauty tips. There’s immediate gratification.

DIRECT: Is e-mail a retention tool for your magazines?

VAN WERT: Absolutely. I’m particularly interested in people who are sort of tentative [about subscribing]. Here at Condé Nast, the ‘maybe’ customer is somebody who is subscribing and saying ‘Bill me, I’ll pay you later.’ Clearly, if you look at ‘bill me’ people, there are people who absolutely intend to pay, there are those who absolutely don’t intend to pay, and then there’s a group in the middle who are really looking to get that first magazine and will make a decision on whether they’re going to pay later. I think there’s a lot that e-mail can do to improve the rate that people pay you.

DIRECT: How can you do that?

VAN WERT: Suppose I subscribe today and say, ‘Bill me.’ I get an e-mail back within the next 24 hours that resells all the benefits and why I’ll love being a subscriber. ‘You just subscribed to Condé Nast Traveler and you’re going to get the issue with the hot list and the issue with the reader’s choice,’ etc. — all the things [coming] in the next year and all the reasons to subscribe. Between the time people say ‘Bill me’ and the time they pay, there’s an opportunity to continue the selling process and give people reasons to pay.

From a magazine publisher’s standpoint, that’s the biggest opportunity to use e-mail — to build loyalty in a brand-new customer relationship. You can offer downloadable premiums, other incentives to pay now and not do it in a series of a dunning or billing series but just in the sense of implicitly acknowledging that you’re a ‘maybe’ customer and I still have to complete the sales process.