Harvard Business Review uses Important and Rush to Attract more subscribers

Remember the post I did about how Time is promoting their magazine and how they are trying to attract subscribers by adding some urgency to their offer and using words like “final notice”? Well, they are not alone. Other companies are doing exactly the same thing, but using different words.

Check out the envelope I just received from Harvard Business Review:

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But will adding the word IMPORTANT to the envelope make people more curious? And the envelope that I was suppose to use for sending them my subscription details got another interesting word, just look at the picture below:

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They added the word RUSH to that one. My guess is that Harvard Business Review is trying to tell us that by adding this word to the envelope, they want us to believe that our subscription got first priority or something, but will it work at the postal services? Will our envelope be handled different than other envelopes without the big red letters?

What do you think about the marketing aspect of adding words like “important” and “rush” to envelopes? Does it work?

Well, most successful Internet marketers add some kind of urgency to their offers and it seems that a lot of magazines are doing the same thing, I guess that explains it.