Octane Magazine Digital Marketing

Over the years I've been commissioned by Octane magazine to work on a number of their digital properties for both acquisition and retention purposes.

For a limited time the magazine was offering a subscriber perk by way of digital content download accessed from the subscription confirmation email. Users needed to arrive at a landing page that was clean, simple, and clearly evocative of the brand to initiate the supplement download of articles and features. To answer this brief I designed and coded the straightforward yellow and teal themed landing page above.

Reports from the Octane magazine website's search analytics indicated that many users were looking for information on how to renew their subscriptions to the magazine - a chapter of content that was absent from the client's core website. Until this information was made available on the website I was tasked with producing a landing page outlining the renewal process. The challenge of designing this page was balancing the content which was 2 parts service to 1 part marketing. It had to blend the selling the benefits of renewing a subscription with the important steps of how to actually renew, then be subsequently broken down into the renewal process for each of the three subscriber types; print, digital and both. Owing to the huge volume of copy and instructions for each subscriber type I reasoned that the best way to offer a simple user experience would be to segment them into tabs headed by icons. Simple javascript loaders triggered by the user's tab selection would generate the pricing tier information and various calls to action to initiate the renewal process.

I've been briefed on a number of occasions to design and code responsive marketing and service emails for Octane magazine. Each month the title makes a fresh bid to acquire new subscribers through strategic marketing campaigns. A core vehicle in driving these campaigns is direct email communication; the client's most effective means of bringing their message to potential customers. The message in question is uniform in narrative, namely that a perk (normally a free gift) besides the year-round receipt of their magazine is tendered for a limited time to encourage action from readers. Once a user has engaged with a marketing email and is converted, their free gift along with their first issue is dispatched, prompting a confirmation email be sent, and enrolling the user into a programme of future renewal emails, reminder emails, and cross-promotion emails to other magazines held by the publisher. Owing to the volume of email communication comprising this funnel, there is always plenty of work for me to do.