Comparison
Looking for a ReminderMedia alternative.
American Lifestyle is a good-looking magazine with your face on it. The trade is that the inside isn’t about your business. Here’s when that trade is worth making and when it isn’t.
What ReminderMedia actually sells.
ReminderMedia publishes American Lifestyle, a bi-monthly magazine mailed with the agent’s branding on the cover and personalised pages. Their published pricing runs roughly $4.49 to $6.99 a copy depending on volume, with a 50-piece minimum and an activation fee of about $299.99. For an agent with a sphere of two hundred people, that is a workable number and a genuinely handsome object.
The magazine is the point. Recipes, travel, design, the sort of thing that sits on a coffee table for six weeks instead of going in the bin on Tuesday. If the goal is staying visible to a small sphere at low volume, it does that, and it does it without you writing a word.
Stay with ReminderMedia if this describes you.
You mail fewer than a hundred people. You are the whole marketing department and you have no intention of doing a monthly interview. You want a physical object that looks expensive, and you are comfortable that the value is presence rather than persuasion. Under those conditions, per-copy magazine pricing at a fifty-piece minimum is very hard to beat and you should keep it.
The same is true if what you have is a referral sphere rather than a client list — people who like you and would happily send a cousin, but who don’t want a market update. A magazine is the right register for that audience.
The limitation is the one they’ll tell you themselves.
A lifestyle magazine is not about your business. Nothing in it explains why inventory in your zip code moved in the spring, what the new roof-age rule did to your clients’ homeowners premiums, or what happened to the listing on the corner that sat for ninety days and then went over ask. Those are the things a sphere actually forwards, and they are the things that turn goodwill into a phone call.
For insurance in particular the gap is sharper. A renewal season is a specific event with a specific date and a specific set of things a client should check. A recipe spread cannot carry that, and the six-week window between bi-monthly issues rarely lines up with it.
Presence keeps you in mind. Specifics get you called.
Blue Ocean Strategies
What we do instead.
One issue a month, four pages, written from a twenty-minute conversation with you. For a real estate agent that usually means what actually sold near them and for how much, the one thing sellers keep getting wrong this season, a note on a client who closed, and your own column. For an insurance agent it is coverage gaps that showed up in real claims, the renewal calendar, and what carriers changed this quarter.
It goes out printed and mailed, plus a digital flipbook you can text to a client and an email version to the list. There is no fifty-piece style minimum tier structure — the number is driven by how many households you mail.
- Monthly, not bi-monthly — closer to how fast your market moves.
- Written about your listings, your claims, your market.
- Print, flipbook and email from the same issue.
- Print and postage passed through at cost, not marked up.
The honest cost comparison.
Per copy, at low volume, ReminderMedia will usually be cheaper than a written-for-you newsletter. That is not a trick of the comparison; it is what happens when production cost is spread across every agent in the country versus written once for you. If your list is fifty names, the arithmetic favors the magazine and we will say so.
The comparison changes as the list grows and as the value of one transaction climbs. One additional listing, or one retained policyholder who would otherwise have shopped the renewal, is generally the whole year of either program. That is the number worth running before you choose on price per copy.
You can also run both, and some people should.
The magazine to the broad referral sphere, the written newsletter to the people who have actually transacted with you. They are doing different jobs and there is no rule that says one vendor has to win. If you are already happy with American Lifestyle, the question is not whether to cancel it — it is whether your past clients deserve something more specific.
Questions
The things people ask before they hire us.
At low volume, usually yes. Their published price is roughly $4.49–$6.99 a copy with a 50-piece minimum and about a $299.99 activation fee, and a shared magazine spreads its writing and design cost across thousands of agents. Ours is written for one person, which costs more and is the entire point of it.
No. You talk for about twenty minutes a month and approve a draft. If you’d rather not do even that, a lifestyle magazine is the more honest fit and you should keep one.
Yes — there’s no large minimum. But be honest about the arithmetic: under about a hundred households, a per-copy magazine program is often the better buy and we’ll tell you that on the call.
Monthly is the default because real estate and insurance both move on shorter cycles than six weeks. Some clients run every other month, usually when the print budget is the binding constraint.
Keep reading
Related pages
Send us your list size and we’ll do the arithmetic.
If the magazine is the better buy for your numbers, that’s what we’ll tell you. If your past clients deserve something written about your market, we’ll show you what that looks like.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.