Marketingsherpa Blog

If you’re into boats, horses, planes or pets you’ve probably read a Belvoir Media Group newsletter. With thirty titles and two million readers, you might even be a subscriber to Practical Sailor, Aviation Consumer, or Whole Dog Journal.

Belvoir started taking its ad-free newsletters online six years ago, allowing subscribers to access back issues. But in a move that surprised us, they still charge even paying customers wanting to download product and gear reviews.

“If you’re buying a $200,000 boat, you’ll pay $7.50 for a boat review, Greg King, Belvoir’s SVP Circulation, told ContentBiz. Same with canned dog food reviews.

Belvoir charges non-subscribers for other content as well (only a snippet summary can be viewed on the site before the paid wall redirect appears). Even so, no one’s biting (and we’re not talking about the dog food).

“We discovered pretty quickly that people will only pay for our evergreen content,” King explained. General back articles, interviews or news don’t go anywhere.

Of Belvoir’s thirty pubs, only eight focus on product reviews. The numbers are small so far: just about 2500 downloads per month at $7.50 each. “This is definitely ancillary income,” King said.

But it’s also easy income. Belvoir uses the same basic template for each of its titles, provided by vendor IProduction.com which has set up its 300 primarily newsletter customers for usually under $10K a title plus a monthly maintenance fee.

At these prices, when Belvoir expands to a hoped for 12 online titles next year, it should be mostly gravy on the dog food reviews that are making up a small but healthy side dish. And it’s a savings over the way Belvoir did business before when consumers ordered a product review, they’d receive the whole issue by postal mail.

As King puts it: “it aint huge, but it’s money.

Are you about to send a special “warm fuzzy” holiday card or gift to your top customers? Here’s an idea I love from Teri Schacker, head of marketing for the Credit Union Executives Society…

This fall she researched to find out which common attributes her top 100 best customers all shared — aside from being great customers of course. These might be location, number of employees, types of purchases, email open rate, whatever….

Then she ran those attributes across the rest of the Society’s customer files to pinpoint who else matched those attributes, but wasn’t a top customer yet. Turns out roughly 50 additional members matched the demographics and characteristics of top buyers.

So now she’s launched a year-long campaign focusing on those should-bes, and essentially giving them the kid-glove special treatment that top 100 customers get. I’ll bet by next holiday season many will have moved into the ranks of top buyers.

This is such a great database marketing idea — you can copy it a bit by simply extending the reach of your normal holiday goodwill campaign. Perhaps you can encourage a few more pretty good customers to grow into extremely good ones

Are you about to send a special “warm fuzzy” holiday card or gift to your top customers? Here’s an idea I love from Teri Schacker, head of marketing for the Credit Union Executives Society…

This fall she researched to find out which common attributes her top 100 best customers all shared — aside from being great customers of course. These might be location, number of employees, types of purchases, email open rate, whatever….

Then she ran those attributes across the rest of the Society’s customer files to pinpoint who else matched those attributes, but wasn’t a top customer yet. Turns out roughly 50 additional members matched the demographics and characteristics of top buyers.

So now she’s launched a year-long campaign focusing on those should-bes, and essentially giving them the kid-glove special treatment that top 100 customers get. I’ll bet by next holiday season many will have moved into the ranks of top buyers.

This is such a great database marketing idea — you can copy it a bit by simply extending the reach of your normal holiday goodwill campaign. Perhaps you can encourage a few more pretty good customers to grow into extremely good ones

If you’ve been to one of our ContentBiz Subscription Summits, you’ve no doubt heard Patrick Spain speak about how his firm HighBeam Research makes for better researching on the web. Now HighBeam has put together an unusual, yet fascinating new promotion.

They’ve partnered with Christopher Locke, co-author of the best selling Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual and Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, to write a blog about how to use HighBeam in, well, blogs.

Confusing? It was to us as well at first…it’s not clear whether the demo site, which has the tongue-in-cheek URL of ChiefBloggingOfficer.com, is supposed to be a good blog read or a not-so-subtle advertisement.

The site has Locke blogging on various subjects with links to HighBeam-researched articles. Good news is the linked articles are free. The idea is to convince bloggers who often need to research deep into the archives for their blogs to use HighBeam to locate that background material.

Locke has assembled a blogging A-list of buddies linked on the left side column, including Cory Doctorw, Esther Dyson, Doc Searls, and Chris Pirillo among others, who he says will also post links to HighBeam content.

The model makes sense in a certain way, though it’s bound to rub some bloggers the wrong way. In the ongoing quest to figure out a sustainable blogging revenue stream, HighBeam is essentially saying: let us help your blogs dig deeper.

Microsoft vs. Apple’s as unavoidable as death and taxes. But the battle has taken an interesting twist that should be carefully monitored by anyone in the online content publishing business.

Apple’s iPod is essentially defending a proprietary model selling content as one-off downloads (in this case songs for 99 cents each).

Microsoft, on the other hand, is taking the spoiler role, selling monthly subscriptions like the new Napster to Go which gives you 1000 songs for $10/mo.

I don’t know about you, but if I add up the price to own those same 1000 songs on iTunes, I’m looking at, what, $1000?

I’ve been a big fan of Apple cut my multimedia teeth on the Mac (though I am forced to admit I went big blue ten years ago). Still, this seems to be shortsighted on Steve Jobs part.

Give us a similar subscription model, Steve, and we’ll be loyal for life.

NYTimes.com has the story (log-in required)

– Brian Blum

We all know that the BBC is the big gorilla of the British web scene. But, according to a committee that was commissioned to write up a report on the Beeb’s online presence, the BBC is overlapping too much with the private sector in some areas. Indeed, concluded the Graf report, the BBC could even be undermining the development of private web content in the UK.

In response, the BBC has already closed five of its sub-websites. In addition, the broadcaster announced that a minimum of 25% of its online content would come from external providers by 2006.

The BBC’s news website was not affected by the announcement.

The full story is here

OPA’s latest online content sales report is out here..

With data from comSCORE (who track what people actually do online, not what publishers say they are selling) Jan-June 2004 content sales were $753 million. It’s a 14% increase over the same period in 2003.

Bear in mind, this does *not* include the vast majority of B-to-B content sales (comSCORE has a very hard time tracking anything sold to a micro, vertical or niche audience) nor does it include porn.

According to a separate study from the Internet Advertising Bureau, online advertising dollars shot up 35% in Q3 to $2.43 billion. To our knowledge this data is self-reported by the publishers who sell ads. So it’s not nearly as accurate as comSCORE stats.

Anyway, OPA says the point is the gap between online ad spends and content purchases is widening. The ratio will be something like 10 to 1.5 in favor of ad spends supporting content online.

I say, hey, at least everything is growing.

– Brian Blum

I’d like to thank Sherpa Reader Jeffrey K. Rohrs, President Optiem LLC, asking me to look into tests he’s noticed retailer Ross-Simons conducting this year.

He wondered why sometimes he gets email campaigns from them in text and other times in HTML. (Link below to samples Jeff sent me.)

Ross-Simons’ Internet Marketing Director Anne Driscoll told me, “We tested HTML when years ago just like everybody else, and it was four-times as effective as text. However, now we’re testing to see if text can convey an urgency that’s not necessarily there in HTML.”

So her team has created two different HTML templates for their house-list campaigns. The first is a standard, branded HTML email that looks similar to their site. They’ll use it for regular announcements, and a first wave of sales promos.

The second is a looks-like-text HTML format with all obvious graphics stripped. This pared-down look is used for promo reminders – sent as a second wave to a campaign. Turns out it’s “as effective or even more effective than standard HTML” for an urgent reminder that a sale is about to end.

“It’s less to do with deliverability and more to do with the way a customer interprets a message,” notes Anne.

Here’s a link to the samples Jeff sent me of the text vs HTML: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ross/ad.html

Thanks again for your support, and keep those suggestions coming!

Most marketers are so obsessed with their own search rankings (i.e. where your site and ads show up on search engines), that they may not always think about search from the other side — how what people are looking for is also constantly changing.

Mike Grover the Marketing Director over at CMP TechWeb’s just sent me results from the past 90 days of hundreds of thousands of actual visitor searches on their sites. These are the top search terms that aren’t company names:

Sept 2004 non-company-name terms
1. RFID
2. Outsourcing
3. VOIP
4. ERP
5. Web Services
6. Linux
7. Spam
8. sp2
9. Spyware
10. Wireless

August 2004 non-company-name terms
1. RFID
2. VOIP
3. Outsourcing
4. ERP
5. CRM
6. Linux
7. Salary Survey
8. Spam
9. Web Services
10. Wireless

July 2004 non-company-name terms
1. VOIP
2. SPAM
3. LINUX
4. Outsourcing
5. ERP
6. Wireless
7. Spyware
8. CRM
9. VPN

You can see that the concerns and interests that the mainly IT-pro population on CMP TechWeb’s sites really changes over in short periods of time. It makes me think:

- You need to be able to create white paper and webinar offers on a super-speedy schedule to get the most results as the painpoints of the marketplace alters.

- Ditto for changing ad copy and landing pages. (Luckily this is easier online than in print/DM.)

- If you’re budgeting for 2005 search ads based on 2004 key term traffic data, your numbers are gonna be off. This stuff is in flux. Mike also gave me a 90-day list of the company names most searched for, and you can see real differences here too. I bet it has more to do with who’s running heavy ad campaigns and/or product launch announcements. So, yeah, non-search PR and ads do affect search traffic.

If you are planning a big non-search promo, you should budget for your name-related search traffic to rise accordingly too. (And then email me to tell me by how much — I’m very interested in relations between campaigns.)

September top companies searched for
1. SAP
2. IBM
3. Cisco
4. Oracle
5. Peoplesoft

August top companies searched for
1. SAP
2. EDS
3. IBM
4. Peoplesoft
5. Cisco

July top companies searched for
1. Cisco
2. SAP
3. IBM
4. Oracle

Like many marketers working for venerable brick and mortars, Shane McGlaun had to pitch long and hard to get his boss at Tyler Texas’ Goods Pharmacy to let him experiment online.

After three years’ persistence, Shane got the go-ahead to launch an entirely new site to try to take the 68-year old pharmacy nationwide online. The new business, HealthyLifePharmacy.com launched this January.

30 days later, Shane had to report “miserable failure.” The site had only made one single sale despite receiving thousands of visitors from SEO and paid search efforts.

“We had an attractive site, but it just couldn’t sell anything. Visitors didn’t go any further than the page they landed on, and most pageviews didn’t last but a second.”

Instead of giving up, Shane analyzed the data, pitched his boss for a bit more time and budget, got help from expert Steve Jackson at ConversionChronicles.com, and worked long hours for two months to launch an entirely revamped site. “The color scheme is the only thing we kept.”

Now he’s getting a .8% conversion rate from visitor to sale. And, as he puts it, the battle is only started. I bet he’ll hit 2% before the end of this year. What helped?

-> Promoting the phone number more prominently.

“Probably half the orders call and ask a lot of questions. They want to make sure what they are buying is going to work for their loved one, and that they are reading the information correctly. They don’t believe the price and description, so they call to verify. It’s been an eye opener.”

-> Highlighting key words and adding white space in heavy copy areas. You need detailed text to explain many of the products properly, and Shane wants to make sure folks who don’t read everything can get to the important parts.

-> Retooling product descriptions so they describe benefits, rather than relying entirely on the manufacturers’ feature-focused descriptions.

Example: “Instead of just saying ‘It weighs four ounces’, now we add, ‘and you can carry it in your diaper bag quite easily.’ That makes more sense to moms.”

Shane also discovered that by adding a question box asking “What is your top concern?” to his newsletter sign-up form, lots of visitors would submit ideas. “You’d be amazed at what people will put in that blank — some their life stories.”

The results have helped him create a newsletter that readers find truly compelling. (Great idea – we may test that ourselves!) Shane’s a personal inspiration to me because he didn’t give up when things looked bad, and he didn’t blame the medium. I figured you might find him inspiring too….