There is a lot of excitement about new tools and technology in our lives.  You get a new smartphone and all of sudden you can take and send great photos, while simultaneously posting them on your favorite social networks.  You subscribe to a new accounting program and invoicing takes you five minutes instead of two hours. You get a new Enterprise Publishing System (EPS) for your business and your editorial workflow becomes creative - almost pleasurable, not torturous. 

But, we get it: We all put energy into learning enough to meet our current needs with the new tools, but often, we don’t get much past that.  A new EPS is a BIG, powerful tool and you can only take so much in at once. As a result, you probably focus on what is most pertinent and shiny and maybe set other capabilities aside, to explore sometime in the future.  The problem is, day-to-day demands might prevent you from ever getting there and you might forget that there are other ways that the technology can make your life easier and even save you time and money.

Are you using your EPS to its fullest potential?  As part of our ongoing best practices service, we’d like to help you check in with your EPS.

Start by taking a look at these capabilities and make sure you can check them off!

One Click Subscription Sign-up:  You want to make it as easy as possible for potential readers to subscribe and that means the fewer clicks the better. 

Want to see for yourself?  FDAnews’ subscribe page presents you with subscription options, and when you choose, the page presents a subscription form. You never leave the site, allowing FDAN staff to track buyer behavior and present upsells.  FDAnews' shopping cart handles subscriptions, books, events and download purchases, with all products managed with the EPS eCommerce system.

A-B Testing: One of the best ways to find out if what you’re doing is working is by performing A-B tests.  But, it’s more than that, it’s also about finding out what works the best for your audience.  A-B testing provides critical data for your deep data trove—and you can leverage contextual selling to sell more, and more . . . 

Are you testing critical action areas of your site?  Your landing pages? Your featured content? Your product pages? What about your topic pages?  If not, there is a chance that you are missing an opportunity to make the difference between “yes” and “no” for your customers.

Want to get started?  We recommend Optimizely.

Specialized Information Products: Speaking of data, you know it's a valuable tool for your own marketing purposes, and it’s also a valuable product. You gather data every day that is valuable to your advertisers and sponsors; the challenge has been to capture behavior, purchases and preferences in addition to traditional demographics that indicate interest in related products and services.

Your EPS gives you the ability to gather diverse data into a centralized location, then target subscription offers or new products to discrete groups.  FDAnews has had great success with both product development and targeted promotions. Check out their 484 Reports.

Or look at Natural Gas Intel’s Natural Gas Price Date Landing Pages. The combination of more content and more traffic from their relaunched site, with stellar audience behavioral data reporting has resulted in a double-digit increase in subscription sales and NGI's release of new spin-off reports.  NGI attributes its success to Customer Relationship Management and Marketing Automation capabilities built in to their publishing system to inform content and marketing strategy.

Responsive eNewsletters: Your entire website should be responsive, but let’s focus on newsletters for a minute. Is your existing layout and template responsive?  We consistently see higher clickthrough from mobile and tablet readers after converting newsletters to a responsive design.

Let’s give you a little time to look at your EPS through the lens of these four capabilities and come up with a plan to implement them, if you haven’t already.  What else should your publishing system do for you? We’ll continue with several more in our next post.