Best Practices for Polybagging Premiums to Increase Newsstand Sales

Although the practice has declined in popularity, it can still be a powerful tool.

By Linda Ruth
03/12/2010 -11:14 AM

Though the craze for polybagging has been dying down a bit over the last year or two, premiums polybagged to a magazine can still be a powerful tool to increase sale. They can move the needle 20, 25 or even 30 percent pretty reliably.

What to bag? I’ve seen publishers bag items with little or no value—an advertising insert, a paper mask, and once a teabag—and still increase sales on a split test basis by 11 percent. But to follow best practices, the premium should be related to the editorial content of the magazine and be editorially based: guides, tip sheets, or CDs or DVDs with samples or demos or applications.

You can bag your premium on the front or the back of the magazine. If there is not a lot on the cover or the bag to draw the readers’ attention to the premium, the front can be best so the premium can sell itself a bit better. There needs to be something on the premium, on the cover of the magazine, on the bag or on all of the above telling readers what they are getting. Like anything else, you have to list the benefits of the gift and what it will do for the reader. Features along won’t do it. And “free gift” is useless—not because it is redundant, though it is, but because it tells nothing about why the reader is getting it or what the reader can do with it.

Sales will go up more if you pay attention to the packaging. Some publishers use carrier cards behind the issue: a piece of light cardboard rising an inch or so above the magazine itself. The entire carrier card on the back of the magazine can be covered with information promoting the content of the premium; the strip of card showing at the top of the magazine can also announce, in thrilling terms, the offer of the premium and a tantalizing promise of the content it contains. The inclusion of the card ensures that the premium can be affixed to the back of the magazine, leaving the front cover free to do its primary job of promoting the contents of the magazine itself.

Please put the seam of your bag down the back of the publication. This is hugely important, even if you run into obstacles at the printer. A polybag with the seam running down the front, especially if it’s a seam with a lot of excess bag around it, just looks tacky.

Bags usually should be clear, ideally with some nice Day-Glo type right across the top of the bag: “Bonus! 100 Free Fast and Easy Sock Patterns!” Still, with a carrier card behind the magazine or some nice bold copy on the magazine cover with a starburst or a very visible corner cut, you can call out the editorial premium that way.

Publishers sometimes remark that they believe that a polybag will actually reduce their sales, putting off those people that like to page through the magazine in the store. As reasonable as it may sound, this suppression-of-sale as a result of a polybag has rarely, if ever, happened. In my experience, polybags virtually always increase the sale of the magazine.

In fact, one year, PC Gamer magazine introduced an opaque polybag, solid gold, no writing. You couldn’t see through it.There was no way of identifying what was in it; there were no cover lines whatsoever, no picture of equipment. In fact, the only thing visible on the bag was the logo PC Gamer along with a graphic depiction of a ribbon and a bow around the magazine. It was like a grab bag. And to general astonishment, sales did spike with this issue.

It helped that this particular issue was about 200 pages, so the one thing the browser got was the heft of the magazine. It helped that it was the holiday season, and this edition looked like a holiday gift. It helped that this issue could offer the fascination of complete novelty—no one had ever done anything like this before. And it helped that PC Gamer consistently delivered quality editorial, so that it had developed a good level of trust with its readership.

There were a lot of factors that led the success of this unique technique, but the main factor was that people like freebies. They like value. Premiums help sell your publication.

Here’s a word of caution, though. When you begin to test bagging added-value premiums to your magazines, pay close attention to retailers’ guidelines, and in particular those of Barnes & Noble. If you send copies to Barnes & Noble with polybags that don’t meet their guidelines, the distributor will remove the bags in the warehouse, wasting the cost of the bag and the premium; and to add insult to injury, they’ll charge you 25 cents for every copy that they handle in this way. Read the guidelines, and if there is any doubt whatsoever, clear it with both the retailer and the distributor before you proceed.

Linda Ruth is Principal of Publisher Single Copy Sales Services. Her book of case studies, "How to Market Your Magazine on the Newsstand," is available at BookDojo.com and at Amazon.