After we developed our original pricing model, our good friend Mitch Rouda sat down with us and showed us how our multiple-title pricing could work against larger publishers. Plus, our old pricing was so complicated, we had to engineer an Excel pricing calculator just so publishers could see how much our service would cost. The other problem with our pricing was the setup fee. Because we were relying on an external web development firm to set up new customers, we were being charged an expensive setup fee, which we had to pass on to customers.
Bottom line: Too complicated, and too expensive!
So Jim and I went back to the drawing board and reworked our pricing model. Plus we hired our own in-house developer, who is now at work enhancing the product. Bottom line: The new pricing makes it much easier to set up one brand. And for multi-title publishers, the setup fee is several orders of magnitude cheaper!
Field trial option
When we first launched Mediadroit, publishers asked us if there was a way to try out LeadWise without committing to it. The answer was always no, because of the setup involved. But we’ve been asked this enough now that we’ve figured out a way for a publisher can “try” LeadWise extremely inexpensively with very little risk. So we’re delighted to announce our new field trial option.
For $2,500, we will deploy LeadWise in a three-month test. The trial includes:
- Setting up LeadWise for TWO different newsletter templates
- Take a one-time dump of your reader data
- You can send these two newsletters as often as you want in the three-month period
What the trial doesn’t include:
- Ongoing daily sync with your database
- Lead gen for Web site campaigns
- Newsletters can’t be in two different brands groups; have to be part of the same brand group with the same database
This limited trial still demonstrates the full power of the product in a real world situation, without incurring the full cost of setup. If you decide you love LeadWise, we’ll of course set up the full product and remove these limitations. Plus, your $2,500 is deducted from the setup fee! So you really have absolutely very little risk.
Old versus new pricing comparison
So how much does LeadWise cost to use if you decide to buy the real thing for a 12-month contract? The new pricing is pretty straightforward. It’s similar to a cell phone model. You buy only however many leads that you think you’ll need for the year. And unlike the old model, you can now share those leads across however many brands you want to setup with Leadwise.
I’ll show two examples — a single-title publisher, and a multi title publisher.
Single title publisher
$4,000 – Setup fee
$1,500/mo – ongoing fee
Fine print: This would include up to 1,500 leads per month. (All contracts are 12-month commitments except for the field trial as delineated above.) The setup fee assumes our standard package of 3 newsletter templates and 3 web ads per brand group. And if the publisher is upgrading from a $2,500 field trial, they’d only have to pay $1,500, since the $2,500 applies toward the $4,000 fee.
By the way, a Brand Group consists of a mothership publication and Web site and e-mail newsletters, but can also include ancillary Web sites and microsites, and ancillary publications, so long as they share a common database format and field structure.
Single-title publisher–adding a second brand group
What if that single title publisher wanted to launch a new title and add it to LeadWise? The additional fees would be:
$1,000 – one-time setup fee (vs. $8K to $12K previously!)
$100 per month additional (vs. $1,500 per month more previously!)
Multi-title publishers save much more
Where the real savings come in is for multi-title publishers. Let’s say a publisher wanted to launch with 10 titles. The previous setup fee would have been $80K to $120K which is obviously a non-starter in this or any economy. But now, because we’ve dramatically shifted our own internal cost structure, we’re able to set up and run 10 brand groups much more cheaply:
$8,000 – one-time setup fee
$4,675 – monthly fee (vs. $15,000 per month previously!)
The monthly fee would really depend on how many leads that publisher would think they’d need. In this example, I chose 100,000 leads per year. The nice thing is, the publisher can spread these leads out across all 10 brand groups. In this example, you can see that lead generation would cost less than $500 per month per brand group.
And if a publisher sees they’re on pace to use up their leads too quickly, we make it easy and painless to shift into the next higher plan.
The return on these investments is indisputable. We see over and over that the best way to monetize low-trafficked Web sites (which are typical of B2B sites) is not banner ads, but by lead generation. Why not use the best tool on the market to make it painless to scale lead-gen across multiple web sites, newsletters and hundreds–even thousands–of advertisers?
