Customer story: American Apartment Owners Association

How the American Apartment Owners Association measures ROI on their Quarterly Magazine with FlippingBook

The American Apartment Owners Association (AAOA) provides landlords and property managers with a network of resources and benefits, ranging from tenant screening services to rental application forms to apartment financing. Established in 2004, it has since grown into the largest landlord association in the country, boasting over 145,000 members nationwide. The AAOA's goal is to equip property owners with the necessary tools to make their day-to-day work easier and more efficient.

Challenge

To provide current members with helpful information and attract new customers, AAOA publishes a quarterly magazine. It features legal advice, property management tips, and industry news, along with promotional materials and ads from association vendors, which helps generate ad revenue and justify the magazine's costs.

Until 2018, the company printed the magazine, but eventually, they had to stop.

We weren’t sure there were results of what we were doing, we weren’t able to send it to that many people, and it was expensive.

This is how Alexandra Alvaro, Director of Marketing and Education at AAOA, explains their decision.

The project was put on hold—not because it wasn't important, but because it was impossible to solve the problems of costs and calculating ROI without reinventing the magazine format.

First and foremost, AAOA needed to be able to measure engagement with the magazine to see if it gained traction. In 2021, while looking for a way to reintroduce their print magazine in a digital-only format, Alexandra came across FlippingBook and immediately saw the potential for reviving the magazine.

We hadn’t really thought we would bring the magazine back but once we were looking at FlippingBook, we saw that it would be a good way to do that.

Solution

FlippingBook proved to be a great fit for AAOA’s needs. With its help, the association digitized the magazine and could publish it directly on its website, saving printing costs.

Moreover, FlippingBook removed the biggest obstacle to the project’s revival—uncertainty about profitability. Thanks to the built-in user activity tracking, Alexandra could now see how many people engaged with the content, which links they clicked, and which articles they spent the most time on. This allowed her to show advertisers and vendors the traffic the magazine generated and prove its ROI.

Knowing how readers interact with the magazine has been really helpful for us to do better sales and also to know what our customers like and what they spend time on so we could make it better for the next time.

Besides publishing the magazine on the AAOA’s website, Alexandra also uses it as an effective marketing tool in collaborations. Some of AAOA’s partners distribute their magazine as a benefit to their audiences. When sharing the magazine, Alexandra provides each partner with an individual trackable link, which essentially works as a UTM code. This allows her to gather personalized statistics from different sources and analyze it.

Individual links allow us to track which partnerships are bringing in the most traffic. Within the last couple of years, this has helped us keep working with influencers who have an impact.

However, analytics wasn’t the only benefit that FlippingBook brought to the AAOA’s magazine. Having gone digital, Alexandra could now enhance her content with interactivity. She often embeds links and videos into the magazine to boost user engagement with the content. She also appreciates the ability to update the magazine after it has been published—ensuring that the content stays current and error-free without extra re-printing costs.

We love adding videos and links or changing them if we need to upload a new PDF when we made a mistake. This was always a problem we had with the print magazine because you can’t change it once it’s printed.

Results

With FlippingBook, AAOA managed to turn their magazine into an effective and profitable marketing and sales tool. The association uses it to communicate better with its members while generating ad revenue. Whereas previously it was impossible to understand if the magazine was an asset to the company, now its success is evidenced by concrete figures.

The trackable magazine also turned out to be a beneficial tool for building partnerships, as it helps identify the best opportunities and traffic sources, giving AAOA a clear picture of where to focus their marketing efforts.

In today’s world, you must grab your readers’ attention quickly with the right content. Before we used FlippingBook we felt like what we were publishing was a shot in the dark. With detailed metrics, we now know when our efforts are paying off and we can confidently attract new readers (and advertisers) with proven content. FlippingBook brought our magazine back to life and gave it purpose.