The digital publishing industry is a densely populated industry. More and more new digital publications and magazines are emerging every week. The competition is high. With so many options available for the consumers, you will need to go the extra mile to ensure that your digital magazine stays relevant to your readers. Here are some tips on how to improve engagement of your digital magazine:
Improve Engagement by Maximizing Content
It goes without saying that your content is what matters most when it comes to your digital magazine. Consistently putting out high-quality content for your magazine can earn you some loyal subscribers, but oftentimes that is not enough. In order to improve engagement on your digital magazine, ensure that your content has these things:
Visual content
Your copy content can be very awesome and insightful. But if you put them in your magazine without any visual, chances are people won’t be interested enough to start reading them in the first place.
Most people read magazines for their own entertainment. Seeing just a big block of texts without any illustrations or pictures can be very underwhelming.
Interactive widgets
Being able to add interactive widgets is one of the biggest benefits of having a digital/online magazine compared to traditional print ones. Especially considering the technology available now, there are endless possibilities that you can include in your digital magazine.
The most basic example would be adding hyperlinks. You can add external links that would lead your readers to more resources or perhaps even your website. You can also add links that navigate to each article or section of the magazine. It sounds very simple but can boost the overall reading experience. Which in turn, will improve engagement in your digital magazine.
There are many more interactive widgets available out there. With MagLoft’s very own TypeLoft 2.0 editor, you can even add parallax effects, panorama, slider widget, and many more!
Responsive design
Based on our experience, we feel like this is what most publishers neglect the most for their digital magazines. Most publishers are used to the traditional PDF format. While PDF is a great format that has been used for print magazines for decades, it’s still not quite right for digital magazines.
Digital magazines are being read mostly on tablets and mobile devices, and using PDF will give these readers a terrible user experience. You will need to pinch the file to zoom and try to read the text, and PDF magazines felt very static and flat most of the time.
Check out our article here to see our PDF vs Responsive HTML comparison.
Having a responsive layout or design means your magazine will adjust on any screen size and orientation. This guarantees your readers will have a good reading experience no matter what devices they use to read your magazine. In turn, this will greatly improve engagement of your magazine!
Improve Engagement by Publishing Articles
We are all busy. It’s the modern era, and it seems like everyone always has something they need to do or finish.
Reading a full magazine issue can take up to an hour or longer. Most of the time, people won’t be able to spare the time right away after the issue is published. They will most likely just check out the issue very quickly and skim it. They might also just put a mental snooze to read it later (but then forget to).
Either way, the level of engagement for this will very likely be very low. They will only check out your magazine once or twice per month. If the magazine is being published quarterly or bi-annually, the number will be even less.
Publishing shorter articles more frequently might be the answer here. Shorter content takes less time and resources to produce. That means your magazine can roll these articles out a lot more often than you do your issues.
Rolling out content more frequently means that your readers will be visiting and engaging with your digital magazine more often. New readers might also be more inclined to check out your articles first. This will most likely help them decide to purchase a subscription or paid issue.
Considering that typically short articles don’t take more than 5-10 minutes to read. Your readers also will be more likely to read them. This is because they can do this while running an errand, waiting in line, during a commute, etc.
Interested in publishing articles along with your magazine issues? Then find out more about MagLoft’s Articles feature here, and how it can benefit your digital magazine!
Push notifications & In-app Pages
If you don’t take advantage of push notifications and in-app pages features, then you are seriously missing out. Push notifications are a very simple way to stay connected with your readers (who already have your app installed!)
At the very least, you can send out push notifications to your readers every time you roll out a new magazine issue, informing them that it’s ready. You can also alert readers when you publish a new article.
The most important thing to remember is sending out push notifications is a lot like sending out marketing emails. The message that you send depends largely based on your demographic. However, the general rule is that you don’t want to sound too robotic and flat. You also don’t want to sound unprofessional or too friendly. A good push notification message will make readers more likely to revisit your app.
The same goes for setting up your in-app pages. In-app pages are basically messages that pop up within the app whenever your readers do a specific action. You can set up the message to be very specific to the action.
For example, set up a pop-up that shows every time your readers launch your app. You can set this pop-up to always show up until they subscribe or purchase an issue. You can also set up a separate pop-up with a thank you message when a reader completes a purchase. Kinda neat, don’t you think?
Looking for more?
Check out our page here for more tips on digital publishing. If you need help, please check out our help center and our YouTube channel. We have some helpful articles and videos regarding our features and service that you might find useful.
Have any questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us via live chat or send us an email at support@magloft.com
