A very common subscription model adopted by journal publishers is the bundling of titles together into packages/collections, often by subject or the age of the content. This provides libraries with economies of scale and access to a greater range of content.
Some packages will contain a standard set of products, while others may be one-off deals with their own negotiated price, which can pose some interesting challenges for publishers when it comes to tracking exactly what’s been sold to whom.
The problem with packages
Your subscriptions data may correctly capture sales at package level (cost, expiry, etc), but may not always include information about the individual titles each package contains. This can make deeper analysis more difficult, in particular identifying exactly which products and packages remain new sales opportunities.
A common use case is to up-sell a package to customers who already subscribe to multiple journals within the package. As a sales person you need to know which individual titles a customer subscribes to, whether or not they already subscribe to any packages, and exactly which titles those packages include.
Here’s where the problem with packages can arise – if your data doesn’t cleanly describe the relationship between packages and the journals they contain, you have no reliable way of analyzing existing sales and identifying new package prospects.
Unrolling the detail
Happily, help is at hand! We are often asked to help publishers ‘unroll’ their package products within MasterVision, to enable them to accurately analyze exactly which journals institutions have access to.
Where that information isn’t already available in the subscriber data, we can apply separate mapping files to add the missing journal or package information back into the relevant data tables.
And this extra detail at a customer level doesn’t just help to uncover opportunities for new sales – it can also help show how bundling content affects revenues over time, and support the tracking of usage and denials information at package level… all very good reasons to get to grips with your package sales.
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