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Case
Studies
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| How unique
institutional identifiers can help you
understand your customer base, save staff time, develop and protect revenues
Many publishers’ customer databases will have been set up during the print era, when institutions typically held multiple subscriptions to key journals. The customer name associated with each order would vary depending on where the purchase was initiated – perhaps a department, a subject library, the faculty library or simply the overall institution. The print fulfilment process did not require records for a particular institution to be connected in any way, so for simplicity, each of these would usually be set up as a separate customer record within a publisher’s system. This proliferation of data was exacerbated by varying translations of overseas customer names, particularly those originating in non-Roman alphabets. The problem: calculating customer numbers and per-customer value Multiple records for each customer, and no function or data to connect them, meant that publishers could not calculate precisely the number of customers they had, or how much each of those customers was spending overall. The impact of this was minimal during the days of growing institutional budgets and print orders, but caused problems when the shift to online and, in due course, budget cuts began to trigger cancellations.  Lori Carlin, Director,
Fulfillment and Marketing at the American
Institute of Physics (AIP),
recalls the challenges faced by AIP
prior to its adoption of Ringgold in
2004:
“We couldn’t be sure
whether we were losing subscribers,
or just seeing consolidation from
multiple subscriptions. We had
people poring over numbers trying to
work it out, because we needed to
understand what was a cancellation,
what was a renewal, and what was a
new subscription, in order to plan
our strategy and our resources. Only
once we implemented Ringgold were we
able to be sure that we weren’t
losing customers, and to be precise
about how many new customers we were
winning.”
Case study: accurate, complete data to inform pricing decisions In order to balance the transition of revenues from print orders to online site licenses, publishers need to know which print orders will be replaced by the site license, and what price is currently being paid overall. This information is even more critical when selling to library consortia where the number of current orders can be in the thousands; understating past spending can have serious consequences for the business. Nick Niemeyer, Site License Manager at Annual Reviews, encountered this problem frequently: “Analyzing our old
fulfillment systems to understand
what we were selling and to whom
could take days of compiling and
massaging data. The data had not
been standardized in a way that we
could have confidence in tracing
each customer entity back to a
parent institution.”
Allison Durocher,
Licensing Manager for Scholarly
Journals at the American
Academy of Pediatrics (AAP),
agrees:“Our in-house database is
set up primarily for fulfillment,
not customer relationship
management,” she explains.
“Subscriptions are listed in
different names and at different
levels; I had to do a lot of
detective work to make sure I had
found all the relevant orders. Even
researching the holdings of a single
institution could take me hours.”
AAP began working with
Ringgold in 2006.  “Ringgold audited our
entire customer data set, adding
unique identifiers for each
institution and clarifying for us
which purchasing units could be
grouped as a single customer. Now
when I am asked to quote for a new
site license, I can quickly and
easily find everything that should
be counted within that institution
or consortia’s subscriptions. What
used to take upwards of half a day
now takes 15 minutes.” Case study: integrating intelligence to improve business strategy Most publishers will have several separate databases including subscription fulfillment, marketing communications, author submissions, online usage, and more. Many business decisions will require intelligence from more than one system; the prohibitive expense of collating and integrating information from different sources often means that decisions are taken in relative ignorance, resulting in suboptimal strategies. Applying Ringgold identifiers across multiple datasets enables different sources of intelligence to be integrated, enabling a more sophisticated response. “Last year, Ringgold
audited all the institutions on our
marketing database,”
states Jane
Makoff at SAGE
Publications, which had
initially audited its fulfillment
data. “This meant we could load
our institutional subscription data
into our marketing database more
easily, and so tie our researcher
and faculty contact details with
their institutional access rights.
This enables us to carry out
targeted marketing, for example, to
encourage greater usage of big deals
and ensure that COUNTER statistics
for those deals would encourage
renewal".
External data can also be
combined with internal data if both
sets have Ringgold identifiers. “Our usage data from
EBSCOHost comes with a Ringgold ID,
so I can mash up that data with my
records to inform our usage and
marketing campaigns,” says AIP’s
Lori
Carlin. “Before, we would
never have had the resource to join
up our EBSCOHost data with our own
systems – Ringgold makes it
infinitely easier.”
 “Ringgold has
the potential to answer all the big
questions that publishers ask of their
data,” concludes Nick Niemeyer at
Annual Reviews. “For each institution,
how many subscriptions do we have?
What’s the revenue? Do we have contact
details for personal subscribers?
What’s the usage? What aren’t they
subscribing to? Most of us don’t have
the resources to answer those
questions; with Ringgold, we can.”How understanding the wider market can reveal new business opportunities Ringgold’s Identify service provides a foundation on which to build a sophisticated market strategy. Beyond the initial audit of your own data, licensing or loading the full Identify dataset enables you to understand the size and structure of your wider revenue potential. Profiling your subscribers to prioritize segments with the highest propensity to purchase allows you to allocate resources effectively. Matching your own usage or analytics reports to Ringgold’s breadth of institutions enables you to identify and target existing “anonymous” users. The depth of Ringgold’s data gives you sufficient intelligence to research and model more complex strategies, for example, new pricing structures. Case study: analysing your market penetration and opportunities At Oxford University Press (OUP), Ringgold’s data is used to assess the size of the target market, regionally or by institution type.  “We can then query our own
data against the Ringgold dataset,”
explains Senior Library Marketing
Manager Colin Meddings, “to
assess what level of penetration we
have – whether in terms of our
overall customer list, or of a
particular market segment. Because
our data has been audited by
Ringgold, we know that we’re
comparing like-withlike, and that we
can have more trust in the results.”Case study: profiling your subscribers to prioritize new leads Having established the size and potential of different target markets, publishers can use Ringgold’s data to identify and prioritize target institutions. “Ringgold’s records include a range of information about each institution that can be used to profile your current subscriber base,” explains Camilla Braithwaite, Marketing Manager at TBI Communications, which has used Ringgold’s data in projects for a range of publishers and societies, including the American Society of Plant Biology, Edinburgh University Press and the Society of General Microbiology.  “Categorizing current
subscribers by, for example,
geographic region and institution
type helps you see where your
content has strongest appeal. You
can then search the rest of
Ringgold’s system for other
institutions that fit the profile,
so Ringgold is giving you both the
background intelligence to plan your
marketing strategy, and the data to
action that strategy.”Case study: identifying 'turnaways' and authors' institutions Publishers often receive “denial of access” or “turnaway” lists from their online host or technology partner, which typically show IP addresses that attempted to access content but were not licensed to do so. In the past, with little resource available to research the institutions represented by these IP addresses, the value of this information has remained locked up in such reports. But once Ringgold added IP address to the growing depth of information that Identify offers for each institution, it became much simpler and more cost-effective to match the IP addresses in the report to a named institution. “From our own data, we can
identify potential up-sell
opportunities within institutions
that subscribe to some of our
content, but are trying to access
journals that they don’t currently
license,” says Jane
Makoff at SAGE. “The
advantage of Ringgold is that it
enables you to identify
organizations that are trying to
access your content and with whom
you don’t currently have any kind of
relationship – new business, with demonstrable demand
for your content.”
“Ringgold also helps us to
identify those institutions that don’t
subscribe, but from which we have
authors. It’s like a shared service
forpublishers,” adds Lori Carlin, Director, Fulfillment and Marketing at the American Institute of Physics (AIP).  “We could not justify the
investment in researching that level
of intelligence ourselves, but
Ringgold can achieve economies of
scale by doing this on our behalf;
the richer their data is, the more
we all benefit.”Case study: researching and price models The transition from print to online subscriptions has led many publishers to review pricing policies in order to monetize peripheral markets and ensure future sustainability in core markets.  “We’ve used
Ringgold’s data to inform a number
of projects that have resulted in
new tiered pricing models,” says TBI
Communications’ Camilla
Braithwaite. “Key variables
for pricing include the number of
sites being licensed, the size of
the overall institution and its
categorization according to systems
such as Carnegie and JISC.
Ringgold’s system includes all this
data and more, and enables the
current subscriber base to be
structured and profiled as a basis
for modelling potential changes in
pricing. Prospective customers,
including those from new markets,
can also be identified and analyzed
to ensure that any potential model
will support market entry and growth
as well as maintenance of the
existing customer base.”potential scenario that publishers face: “If we sense that lots of
customers of a new journal are not
paying the correct price (under a
tiered pricing model, for example),
we can use Ringgold to see what the
scale of the problem is, so that we
know how urgently it will need to be
addressed.”
Case study: evaluating and implementing journal acquisitions Oxford University Press (OUP) contracted Ringgold to audit its data in 2002. Senior Library Marketing Manager Colin Meddings describes the value of the reliable customer and subscription reports that Ringgold has enabled: “OUP takes on publication
of new journals each year as
societies choose to partner with us.
Analyzing and managing customer data
is a critical aspect of taking over
publication of a journal. Incorrect
records at the early stages of an
acquisition can have an impact on
the journal’s ongoing success, so
it’s important that we can have
confidence in that data – which is
what Ringgold gives us, by ensuring
we can understand the structure of a
journal’s current subscriptions and
compare that in a meaningful way to
our existing customer base.”
Accurate, complete data
that can be readily integrated into a
new system is also vital for ensuring
continuity of service for customers
during a transfer. “Exchanging
journals with another Ringgold
publisher is much smoother,” says Jane
Makoff, Associate Director,
Marketing at SAGE Publications.  “The Ringgold
identifier is a common field between
our subscription system and that of
the transferring journal publisher.
It means we can load subscription
records much more easily. Where the
transferring publisher does not use
Ringgold IDs, there is always a risk
of institutions not matching and
subscription rights not being set up
correctly; the whole transfer
process is much more manual. If
everyone’s data had Ringgold IDs,
then transitions would be easier and
there would be fewer cases of
subscriptions getting ‘lost’ during
the transfer.”Don't let the perplexity of your customer data prevent you from making smart business decisions. Talk to Ringgold today about how we could help. Contact us for further information or take a look at our Products and Services. |
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