Creating your publication is much more than ink on paper.

You can’t afford to waste money on a publication that’s thrown together. It has to be engineered to your needs. It must deliver a return on investment. At McMurry we engineer your publication from the ground up, starting with a strategy to meet your goals. There’s a psychology to getting the most of your readership, response, shelf life and pass-on rate. Consider our editors and designers reader psychologists with an obsessive goal of exceeding your expectations.

Taking your creative from computer to print takes a great team. McMurry has an in-house team of printing experts dedicated to making what appears on the screen perfect on paper, too. While lesser competitors outsource printing to Mexico and other foreign countries, you can count on McMurry’s production team to:

• Finesse and color-proof all of your pages.
• Create proofs exactly calibrated to the printing press.
• Conduct press checks of your publication directly at the printer to ensure that your pages are being printed in the correct order and that the color is in register.
• Handle all of the paper and printing negotiations so you don’t have to worry about whether or not you are getting the best possible printing rates and quality.

Quick payments equate to quick friendships. McMurry pays our vendors in seven days or less. Because of this, our partnership with our printers is second-to-none. Meaning they take extraordinary steps to assure your publications are perfect.

We’re sure you’ve heard the lip service out there: “We handle all the mailing for you.” Yet the fact remains that zero competitors do it in-house with their own department of experts.

McMurry is the only custom publisher for healthcare with in-house database marketing and mailing services. And that makes a huge difference when it comes to your budget. Can you afford to throw away 10 percent of your marketing budget? We didn’t think so. But that’s exactly what happens when cheap competitors use cut-rate mail houses to distribute your publication — 10 percent will be wasted to undeliverable addresses. That’s precisely why McMurry created our own in-house department of experts 15 years ago, to assure that your custom publication goes to correct and deliverable addresses on time, every time.

Our ROI Choice® Program provides a variety of options for measurement that use metrics meaningful to you, including:

Show me the money. Our intensive revenue analysis cross-references your patient database with the publication mailing list. Matches are tagged and the associated revenue is captured. The net revenue is then divided into your expenditure to produce and ROI ratio. Most clients have seen and 8:1 ratio—for every dollar spent, they receive $8 in return.

Question and answer. Reader surveys are an essential ROI tool to measure the intangibles, such as brand awareness, perception, loyalty, referrals, time spent reading, actions taken and content value. Surveys can be implemented as bind-ins within the magazine, coverwraps, outserts, phone surveys, e-mail blasts or as a URL in the magazine.

Crowd control. We can use a control group to more accurately determine your true ROI—by eliminating those patients who would have used your services anyway or creating a test group who do not receive your publication.

Dial for dollars. Don’t have your own answering service? Or perhaps you do and they just don’t keep track of where the calls come from. McMurry can set up personalized phone lines answered by real people just for your publication. Then we will take those responders and compare them to net patient revenue for true ROI.

Click tricks. Integrating your print program with your website enables you to track the traffic generated by your publication. Using unique URLs makes this effort particularly effective, as does incorporating pop-up surveys that enable you to capture responders’ names and addresses.

Interestingly enough, McMurry started as an internal marketing department of a healthcare system — Baptist Hospitals and Health Systems.

Back before there was McMurry Inc., there was Preston McMurry Jr. whose employer needed to attract paying patients, increase market share and promote profitable service lines. To accomplish this task, Preston created the first celebrity-covered custom health magazine, Vigor, which was later syndicated to other healthcare organizations. Now 23 years later, the magazine remains the most prestigious custom health magazine in the country.

Since its inception in 1985, the company has produced and distributed more than 150 million custom health magazines, using multiple languages and varied writing styles to support each client’s unique goals and philosophies.