The Taunton Press, publisher of Fine Cooking, Threads, Fine Gardening and other house and home magazines, is outsourcing its circulation department operations to ProCirc.
Effective immediately, ProCirc will take charge of source development and management, print and lettershop purchasing, fulfillment scheduling, rate base management, strategic planning and performance reporting for all Taunton’s consumer magazines. Single copy sales and digital marketing efforts will remain in-house at Taunton.
“While the Taunton magazines have demonstrated great success on the newsstand, they’re not matching that on the subscription side,” explained Janine Scolpino, SVP, enthusiast group and consumer marketing at Taunton. “Despite a lot of good effort here, we just haven’t managed to deliver on the subscription side in the way we need to, so a big part of this decision was to go out and secure an instant infrastructure of talented circ people to help us do that.”
ProCirc has already started planning Taunton’s holiday marketing blitz, which will include inserts, wraps and direct mail for gifts. The holiday campaign will be followed by a winter direct mail campaign. One particular goal for the partnership is to increase the rate base of Fine Cooking, which currently reports a paid circulation of 250,000.
ProCirc has been consulting with Taunton for a month, and the publisher also has a preexisting relationship with ProCirc’s parent company, DJG Marketing. These connections, coupled with ProCirc’s established infrastructure and performance on previous ad hoc jobs for Taunton, contributed to the formation of the partnership.
