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Byline: Andrea Forker

Budget Living's tagline urges readers to "Spend Smart. Live Rich," and the shelter title's team is taking their own spending advice when it comes to building circulation for this high-profile launch.

The shelter title has eschewed direct mail in favor of agency sources and marketing partnerships since its Fall 2002 launch - and still has no plans to move into mail.

Subscriptions accounted for more than 200,000 of the total 300,000 circulation/rate base at launch. (Rate base is being raised to 400,000 as of the April/May issue.) And partnerships - although not initially banked on for rate base management purposes - produced some not-insignificant volume even for the October/November issue, and their contribution continues to grow, according to Carole Mandel, circulation consultant for the new bimonthly. (In the agency arena, the magazine is working with all of the majors, including QSP, Synapse, Special Data Processing, EBSCO, DialAmerica, Media Outsourcing and Blue Dolphin, which are marketing under various prices and programs.)

Creative leveraging of brand synergies has resulted in several innovative partnerships, starting with on-board distribution of 10,000 copies of Budget Living on JetBlue Airways, the discounted airline that offers one-way trips and 100-percent e-ticketing for the economically-minded but chic traveler.

The copies, distributed on the title's official launch date, October 8, 2002, bore a sticker driving home the title's relevance to JetBlue travelers ("Finally, a magazine that thinks like JetBlue") and included a bound-in sub order card. (JetBlue deemed blow-ins too costly to clean up.)

Gift subscriptions were also promoted in the in-flight effort. A full-page print ad offered an "Outrageous Holiday Gift Offer": Order your own subscription for $14.95 and give up to five gift subscriptions for $1 each. In lieu of an insert card, the ad listed the magazine's subscription Web URL and a toll-free phone number. "We were hoping that people would make a $20 Airfone call to send a $1 gift," jokes Budget Living president and COO Eric Rayman.

While partnership marketing has since become an integral consumer marketing strategy for Budget Living, this first deal came about through a combination of chance and intuition. "My partner, Don Welch, and I had flown JetBlue many times, and we had noticed that they do not offer an in-flight magazine," Rayman explains. When JetBlue became one of the magazine's launch advertisers, the partnership-concept gears started turning.

Relationship marketing will show results for Budget Living, Rayman believes, because of its root connection with stylish-but-affordable businesses. "In the beginning, when we thought about the magazine, the best way to describe it was to describe other marketers and retailers who had recognized this demographic: What Jet Blue is to airlines, and what Ikea and Crate & Barrel are to retail, we wanted to cover in the magazine market."

Budget Living crafted a very different partnership with Bed, Bath & Beyond, also run during its launch week: 5,000 consumers who made online purchases above a set amount from BB&B were sent a free issue along with their order.

But perhaps the most symbiotic relationship so far is one with Sure Fit Slipcovers, the country's largest slipcover manufacturer and retailer. In addition to buying a 16-page catalog insert in the launch issue, Sure Fit volunteered to send an email to its customer list. The email directed customers to the Sure Fit Web site, where a Budget Living subscription promotion was featured. The options were to request a free sample copy or to order a one-year (six-issue) sub at a special price of $9.98 that includes two free issues (as opposed to the title's standard introductory offer of $14.95).

"Sure Fit benefits from promoting our magazine because 25 percent of our content is about how to decorate inexpensively," notes Rayman. "That's what they're all about." The relationship was further cemented through another creative effort, in which Budget Living's editors created and oversaw Sure Fit's Eighth Annual "Ugliest Couch in America Contest." (The winner received a $10,000 home makeover prize.)

Two more partnerships came to fruition in time for the second (December/January) issue. One was with BoomBuy, a firm primarily engaged in building Intranet sites for internal corporate use. (For example, BoomBuy has a section on the Citicorp Intranet, where it offers the bank's 80,000 employees special deals on merchandise ranging from cooking utensils to cameras.)

BoomBuy created a special Intranet site accessible to Budget Living readers. A "Use a Subscription to Save" house ad directs readers to www.budgetliving.boombuy.com, accessible only with the password "Spend Smart." Once logged on, readers are offered deals on an array of products ranging from jewelry to electronics (BoomBuy picks the products to be featured).

If readers show a strong interest in the site, Budget Living plans to make access to the site a subscriber-only benefit to add value and increase subscriber retention.

Another alliance, with home decor cataloger west elm (which doesn't use caps in its name), is designed to help Budget Living collect reader demographic data. The cataloger's 12-page ad insert in the title's second issue included a promotion for a Budget Living sweepstakes, reachable through a pop-up ad on west elm's Web site. Readers who filled out a two-page survey received two free issues of the magazine and a chance to win a $500 west elm gift certificate. The cataloger benefitted from enhanced Web traffic and co-access to the survey data. And for Budget Living, the opportunity to bond with a major advertiser was not the least of the benefits.

All involved acknowledge that basic circulation management requires careful, conservative volume projections for any partnerships, particularly at their outset. But Budget Living's team is confident that its network of alliances - which will be actively expanded in the months to come - will build momentum over time. Collectively, this network should result in targeted exposure and significant numbers of renewable subs, at costs that any publisher would envy.