• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, April 6, 2018

Want to reach Millennials and Centennials -- and Baby Boomers, too? Supply them with products they need, as opposed to ones they simply crave, on a continuing basis. And do it via email.

So says Jim Fosina, the CEO of the Fosina Marketing Group, a specialist in subscription marketing.  Email Insider talked with Fosina to catch up on this growing field.

Email Insider: What’s new in subscription marketing?

Jim Fosina: Things are moving faster in this marketplace than anything I’ve seen in 30 years. There is a huge demand for replenishment services, especially among millennials: point, click receive. And it’s for necessary products — needs as opposed to desires. We call it brown-bag services.

Email Insider:  Can you give an example? 

Fosina: The types of products you don’t necessarily want to go into a store and buy at a checkout counter: health needs, bathroom needs, feminine needs, masculine needs.

Email Insider:  Are Baby Boomers interested in such services? 

Fosina: Sure—Baby Boomers and even the Gen Xers. For example, I don’t know one single individual who wants to go in and buy an adult diaper. And there are other things that all human beings need. Millennials and Centennials are saying: “I don’t have to do that. I can have it delivered at home privately.

Email Insider:  How did you come to this?

Fosina: At Nestle, I worked on Poland Springs, water delivered to your home, totally on your terms. With that model, you can move the day if you realize you need it today instead of tomorrow. Or you can change it if you need two bottles instead of four. Some companies are still learning that model.

Email Insider:  Where does email come in?

Fosina: One of the most essential parts of subscription marketing is how you stay in touch with the customer. One type of email is self-help—come online and manage the account. That’s passive. The second is more of a nudging type of email contact strategy: Did you know we have this new product line? Are you aware your next shipment is coming? 

Email Insider: How do you know if you’re succeeding?

Fosina: By retention and lifetime value. You may see someone who only stays for one or two shipments or only dabbling. That’s one of the biggest things we look for when we’re engaging the consumer. If they’re not opening their email, you may go to another subject line a day or two later, and so on. If they don’t open, that’s the red flag ,and we can almost build a predictive model. They’re going to fall off.

Email Insider:  Could it be they don’t like the product? 

That’s always a possibility, or it could be that the information you’re sending is just not relevant. But if that’s the case, you would have seen them open somewhere along the line. If they are not interested in the product, the message you’re probably going to get when it ships is ‘Cancel.’

We may go so far as giving them a call if they provided a phone number. Is everything OK? Or we may put a personalized message in their shipment. Then there’s the email delivery problem: Are the messages getting through?

Email Insider: What turns people off in email?

Fosina: Millennials find it quite obnoxious if you’re contacting them only when you’ve shipped the product or billed their credit card. Why not in a more proactive way? 

Email Insider: I assume all this is automated?

Fosina: Most of it is done through automation. You set it up so the email is being deployed automatically, based on a particular schedule or event, or a disposition or an action that the consumer took, which will take them down a different  path. If we had to do manual reporting, it would scare anybody away from maximizing the tools of email. But you have to test and retest.

Email Insider:  Where do you see the growth?

Fosina: A lot of industries are jumping on this. Take the automotive industry. It used to be you bought your car for cash or with a note from a bank. Then the industry revolutionized itself, and now you can lease a car for X dollars a month. A lease is kind of a closed-end subscription. Everyone is going to have some kind of subscription option. Amazon’s going to do it through its purchase of Whole Foods and whatever their next target is. The consumer is driving the purchase behavior, and the industry has to keep up. 

Email Insider: The last time we spoke, you were declaring the Sunday after Black Friday ‘Subscription Box Sunday.’ How did that go? 

Fosina: We’re going to do it again. We had over 100,000 visits to the website on that Sunday alone.