Key to custom magazine success: mail them, thicker and more often

A recent study about customer magazines sponsored by Britain's Royal Mail and the Association of Publishing Agencies (APA) has determined that one of the keys to their success is to mail them (rather than set them out to be picked up) make them thicker and publish them more often.

While it must be pointed out that the Royal Mail and the APA have a strong vested interest in proving that heavier, more frequent mailed magazines are the way to go, the research is still interesting:

• 10% more readers read half of more of magazines' content if they are more frequent
• twice as many pick the magazines up more than five times if they are more frequent.
  
• Over half the respondents (54%) respond to content in the magazine when it is more than 50 pages, 23% more than when they are thinner.
  
• Mailed customer magazines are kept for longer than those that are picked up; a quarter of readers keep mailed titles for over a month, compared withonly 16% for picked up titles.
• Mailed magazines have 8 minutes more reading time than picked-up magazines.
  
• Average time spent with a customer magazine is 25 minutes; (perhaps logically) increasing to more than 30 minutes formagazines with more pages.
• When a magazine is more than 50 pages and more frequent than biannual, customers respond more favourably than they do with thinner, less frequent publications.

Customer publications (sometimes called "contract publishing" or "custom publishing") do huge business in Britain, where some of the largest circulation magazines on newsstands are created under imprints controlled by major retailers such as grocery chains.