MarketingSherpa Blog

Yeah! According to a story posted today at Online Publishing News, UpMyStreet, the UK’s leading online local information publisher, is having so much success signing co-branding content syndication deals that they expect their 3rd quarter revenues to rise by as much as 50%. It’s very nice to hear some good news after all these months of syndication sales doldrums worldwide.

http://www.onlinepublishingnews.com/htm/n20020419.294672.htm

I almost never link to white papers about online or email marketing because hey, they should pay us to advertise in our newsletter. But this time, even if it undercuts our profits I can’t help myself. This one is so good.

Catching Chameleons with Email, authored by MindArrow’s new head of marketing Jeanniey Mullen (formerly VP and GM of Grey Advertising), is a nine-page white paper that features some really useful metrics based on Jeanniey’s years of experience in email marketing for many clients. She describes what your open rate and click rates should be. Plus, she also gives hard numbers on how screwing up your email campaign can hurt your brand. Read it and feel fear!

Last night, freakishly, I took the night off from work and lolled about on my velvet sofa reading a novel instead. Bad me. Well at least it was a novel about the publishing world. In it, one of the characters, herself a novelist, says, “Why don’t more authors get their friends to post glowing reviews of their books at online bookstores?” Which indeed made me wonder, why not?

These days when I’m considering buying a book at Amazon, the first thing I look for are reviews. If there are none posted, then I scroll up to check the book’s publication date – is pre- Amazon old? Is it not out yet? If it’s been published in the last few years, without having accrued one single review, well then I assume it must not be any good.

Guilty before proven innocent.

In a recent interview in Online Community Report, the CEO of message board provider ezboard explains their switch from free to paid services, “We’ve had over 24,000 community subscriptions, 19,000 user subscriptions and 45,000 user donations over that time. This currently translates into monthly revenue in the low six figures, growing steadily at 5% per month.” Sounds great; who wouldn’t want six figure monthly online subscription revenues? (Aside from Yahoo who need much, much more than that.) But, you must bear in mind, ezboard had to boil these down from 8 million free registered users.

http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/features/nguyen2

PDF download hell. Our sister site SherpaWeekly just launched it’s first big promotion to get more opt-in subscribers.

We stole some ideas for the copy, which is unusually long for Web campaigns, from the copy for Web Position’s newsletter. They have more than 400,000 opt-ins so we figured they must be doing something right on their landing page! We also included not one but four opt-in boxes because old-fashioned direct mail rules say the more you ask for the order, the more orders you’ll get.

Then I wrote a little Publisher’s Note to our current subscribers to tell them about the offer (I figured it’s not fair to offer newbies a free offer that old-timers didn’t get, plus you never know how many pass-alongs are reading an issue too).

To encourage viral pass-alongs we also rewrote our new subscriber welcome letter almost completely. The subject line now says, “Free offer for your marketing buddies” instead of “Welcome.”

The body copy briefly welcomes them, but then immediately segues into a pass-along offer “Here’s a free offer for your marketing
buddies: (Please pass it on)

Your friends who are marketing, advertising and PR professionals are invited to receive their own copy of our new 44-page Report:

“Top 10 Online & Email Marketing Mistakes”

It includes notes on how you can avoid the most common marketing mistakes (almost everyone makes at least one of them). Plus 40 marketers, including Seth Godin and Oracle’s Mark Jarvis admit their own mistakes.

Please tell your friends to click here for their free copy:

http://www.marketingfame.com/topten.cfm

The results? I felt like a marketer at Victoria’s Secret during their live webcast runway model show. We kept slowing and crashing. Loads of emails from people saying, “Hey I got partway through but then I crashed.” “Hey I tried to download 3 x but it was so slow I crashed.” You get the picture. PDF Hell. So now we’re negotiating with our PDF web host; how much do they want to guarantee they won’t slow or stop requests when a zillion people all want the same PDF at once.

You know, in the old days, a successful marketing campaign was much more fun. The order entry department whined a bit, but I’d glance over the piles of order forms and smile with glee. The Internet? Bah humbug!

http://www.webposition.com/newsletter.htm

According to news posted today at The End of Free, American Express is discontinuing its free email service just as About.com and Altavista have recently.

While I don’t expect this to affect any ContentBiz readers’ opt-in lists much (I don’t think there were so many eager Amex mailbox users that it’s gonna take a discernable slice out of your hide), it’s a fascinating juxtaposition to the Case Study our sister publication ConsumerMarketingBiz published today on Care2.com (the portal for “light green” consumers).

You see Care2.com offers both free email boxes and free ecards (among other things). This past holiday season when major ecard sites such as BlueMountain shifted to a mostly paid subscription basis, Care2.com saw a directly-related 50% rise in their free ecard business.

So, duh, I can spot an email backlash coming too. Pretty soon anyone NOT charging for email boxes will be the exception and will benefit from it. Especially if they can guarantee to filter spam (hey, they’ll be gods walking on earth if they can do that).

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2005

One of the biggest problems with business sites (as I’ve said many a time before) is they often present lots of information, but never ASK FOR THE LEAD. Hence, my favorite site of the day is Bigdough, a site that offers high-priced information services to investor relations officers and investment bankers.

They’ve stuck a big red star on every single page of the site that says “Free Trial, Click here or Call…” And I mean every single page, the privacy policy page, the Help page, the about us, the home page, you name it, that star is there. When you are ready to act, no matter where on the site you are, their action button is right there in front of you.

ContentBlog reader Linda Nelson of Custom Craftworks writes in, “As a Yahoo user for personal emails, I am pleased to know that you have decided not to exclude us “free account” users. I started using Yahoo! when I was a marketing student in college (I didn’t want to pay for the software, or a dial-up account). I still use it for personal email emails at home because it is just too much trouble to change it with everyone (I also like how it screens out bulk mail for me to review and then delete).

Currently I am using my work email for the newsletters I receive from MarketingSherpa, but I live and work in recession-hit Oregon. Lots of jobs exactly like mine were downsized last fall and I had always thought I could have these newsletters sent to my Yahoo address if I were laid-off. I do receive newsletters at that address, and if I truly opted-in for them, they get read. I always unsubscribe to alleviate the clutter of unwanted or unsolicited information.”

It’s a good point; most people do have a free (or AOL) email address they keep for years just because it’s more trouble than it’s worth to keep telling all your contacts to change your address. I remember the days in 1995 when we used to throw out the sales leads, we got from the site I worked for, that used AOL email because they “must be consumers with no real money to buy our stuff.” We would never make that assumption now.

[Ha! About an hour after I posted this Blog, I went to get the mail. Guess what? The latest issue of Business2.0 Magazine had arrived, and polybagged inside it was a CD ROM to sign up for AOL. Weird but true.]

Great online journalism is just like Peggy Fleming’s skating. She
makes it look simple. Which again points to the hiring problem
for online publishers. You can get experts to spew out columns, and yeah you can get professional journalists to contribute lengthy articles. How about finding a contributor for the shorter readable-online-bit that’s deceptively simple?
Harder to find than even I realized.

I know this fact deeply, intimately, personally because for the past month I’ve been sifting through resumes and writing samples looking for more freelancers and full-time writers for our newsletters. There are some really great people out there. The ones who can hit the mark for us are… well let’s just say few.

Interestingly, the best writing samples are coming from journalists with backgrounds in print newsletters. Not magazines.
Not Web sites, not ezines, paid subscription print newsletters.
Because, I guess, they are used to writing really tight stories (to fit in a little 8-page newsletter) that are so useful that people will pay more money per year for them than they would for glossy magazines on the same topic with much more content.

Were navigation bars invented by lefties? Usability experts are always complaining about the fact that left-side navigation bars have become the ubiquitious standard across the web, because the hand (most) of us use to click our mouse with is on the right. So you have to slide awkwardly to get to stuff to click on.

With that in mind, as we redesign our own site (a seemingly endless project – arrgh!) I have tried to keep stuff I want people to click on to the right side.

This morning I noticed SRI.com also does this on their home page, where everything they want you to click on or use (search, newsletter opt-in, links to articles, etc.) is on the right, and their big picture and mission statement stuff is on the left. Check it out for yourself and see if it’s really easier, or more tempting to use.