Publisher, American History Illustrated
...nd February 1982 were broken into five separate categories including: gift subscriptions, renewal subscriptions, direct mail subscriptions, subscription agent subscriptions, and catalog subscriptions. This collection of data indicated that the renewal rate for the month of February increased to 64% compared with January’s rate of 51%. (See Exhibit A) Although we saw an overall increase in the renewal rate, no individual category experienced an increase in renewal rate. (See Exhibit B). Summary It is important to review the number of expiring subscriptions for each category when analyzing trends because it is possible to have a good overall renewal rate without across the board improvement. To understand why the renewal rates varied, an additional calculation was added to assess the weight of each category based on the total number of expiring subscriptions. This analysis revealed two explanations for the results. First, January’s overall renewal rate is highly impacted by the two agent categories. The subscription and catalog agents combine for nearly 46% of the total subscriptions that expired in January. Since their subscription rates are low (21% and 9% respectively...