Lovatts adopts Zuora platform to manage more than 150,000 print and digital subscriptions worldwide
Sydney, 24 October 2013
Family-owned Australian puzzle business and publisher of the well known Colossus Crosswords, Lovatts Media, has deployed the Zuora subscription commerce platform to support the company’s global growth strategy of digital diversification, multi-media content delivery, smartphone and tablet applications.
Since the launch of its first crossword more than 30 years ago, Lovatts’ business has grown to include a complex mix of business-to-business and business-to-consumer subscriptions across three areas of activity: magazine publishing, the YouPlay.com online games enterprise, and syndicated content to more than 100 publications worldwide. Today over 20 Lovatts titles are sold across Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The company boasts a strong revenue stream from newsstand and retail sales, and has more than 150,000 local and international subscribers.
With the number of customers expected to increase substantially in the coming years, Lovatts needed to replace its five separate payment gateways and subscriber systems with a single, efficient platform for lodging, managing and analysing subscriptions.
The selection and deployment of Zuora’s Z-Business platform provides Lovatts with a centralised system that, for the first time, will unite subscription and billing information from across all three areas of the business. This will allow the company to send accurate bills through an automated payment gateway, better analyse revenue and customer trends by gaining visibility into subscription metrics, and to implement cross-promotional pricing strategies between its magazines and online offerings.
Zuora allows Lovatts to collect and store credit card information which can then be used both to automate YouPlay subscriptions as well as facilitate magazine renewals.
Lane Russell, Sales and Marketing Managers for Lovatts Media Group said, “Zuora will make it easier to manage our subscribers and it will also give us more information about our subscribers. For the first time since YouPlay.com launched six years ago we will have a cohesive approach to managing customers. As a result, we expect to grow. We’ll be able to obtain 360 visibility into account information, produce highly targeted offers and increase the dollar spend per customer. For us, that’s key in the digital economy.”
Zuora is now being used to manage subscriptions and billing for Lovatts more than 140,000 YouPlay users and 14,000 magazine subscribers. The final phase of deployment, which involves Lovatts publication syndication activities, will occur during 2014.
Greg Cullen, Vice President of Sales for Australia and New Zealand, Zuora commented, “The publishing industry is undergoing deep structural change, due in no small part to the impact of digital content. It’s impacting everyone from the major players like Fairfax, to niche publishers such as Lovatts. To compete with free content and still make a profit, publishers have to build new subscription business models that take advantage of the flexibility of digital delivery and use the opportunity to value add. Lovatts has recognised this and is proactively equipping itself with new tools and metrics that will support the company well into the future.”
About Zuora, Inc.
Zuora is the global leader in subscription commerce and billing, helping companies in every industry transition to the Subscription Economy. Enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike use Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications work where traditional ERP applications fail: Subscription pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from salesforce.com, PayPal, and Netsuite, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box.net, Xplornet, Ustream and Reed Business Information. To learn more about Zuora, please visit zuorainternprd.wpengine.com