Why we offer subscription gifts
 
Subscribers are key to all publishers in the longevity and growth of their magazines. The stability and loyalty of these readers allow publishers to invest in their magazines to ensure the content meets the high standards today's readers demand.

Publishers, including ourselves, try many different marketing approaches to entice our readers to become subscribers. Such as cheap trial offers, standard price discounts and offering gifts that we think will be of relevance to our readership.

A proportion of retail promotions, that we all find in our day to day shopping, make very little or even no profit. This marketing approach is called a 'loss leader' and is widely used to attract customers to the particular retail outlet. These, as their name suggests, actually lose money but the retailer hopes that either the customer buys more goods or increases their loyalty to the store so that they return in the future.
 
This is a similar approach we have when offering a subscription gift. When you take into account the cost of buying and then delivering the gift to our subscriber, in most instances we make very little profit and even for some titles, no actual profit from the sale. Fortunately our products are loved by thousands and our experience shows that readers are more than happy to pay a more reasonable price for their second term. This will therefore return some money to us to be able to invest in the magazine and ensure it will be around for many years to come.

Therefore, it is financial unviable for us to provide subscription gifts to every subscriber every year. We simply would not return any profit to the company and inevitably magazines would close. Simply the gifts, and for that matter
trial price discounts, are used throughout the industry to entice occasional readers to subscribe. We hope the content we provide on a weekly or monthly basis becomes the reason people continue to read our publications.

We hope this provides some clarity. If you have further questions on this then our Head of Audience Development would be glad to hear and answer your queries. Please email Andy Cotton on andy.cotton@kelsey.co.uk.

Thanks for taking the time to read this note and I hope you continue to read our publications for many years to come.
Regards, Andy.