MarketingSherpa Blog

Go to your site right now. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Look at the copyright date. Does it still say 2001? If you’re anything like the sites I’ve been surfing, there’s a 60% chance you haven’t updated that line to say 2002 yet.

If you absolutely must do a Flash intro, check out the way the
Effie Awards site does theirs. Why? Because visitors aren’t forced into an either/or situation. The home page’s top half features a light-hearted Flash cartoon with amusing audio, while the bottom half is a nice plain HTML page with navigation links to the stuff visitors want to access.

Instead of loathing the site for forcing me to waaaaait through their Flash intro (or click on “skip intro” and waaaaait for it to work), I got the best of both worlds. A fun little movie and the links I needed to act on. Funny thing — I actually sat there and enjoyed the movie before clicking on to the information I orginally came to the site to get. If they’d forced me to see it, I would have sat there and fumed. Instead I sat there, voluntarily watching, and enjoyed myself. Way to go Effies!

I’m very impressed with the April 2002 cover story for eContent Magazine. The story, “Look into the Future of Content Management,”
is a useful four-page overview of the whole landscape of CM software and packages you can buy to manage your site and/or intranet. This is a hideously confusing field because it seems like every day some company is announcing a new system. Also prices for various systems are all over the map, as are staffing and training requirements. It’s an industry in upheaval.

This story isn’t online yet, but you can contact the magazine’s offices to get a copy of it at 203-761-1466.

Autoresponders have long been a staple of entrepreneurial content marketers, but hardly anyone in the mainstream has done much autoresponder testing yet. After running a few tests myself, and chatting with a bunch of people who’ve tested them, I’ve come up with a few guidelines for success:

1. Day & hour timing — Just as with regular email campaigns, the time of day sent and day of week sent can make a big difference in response rates.

Unfortunately most autoresponder ASPs don’t let you control timing beyond the number of days between each send. A responder that can skip weekends on demand, and only send during designated hours (either a preset time-of-day you determine, or at the hour that the original start request came in) is probably going to do better for you.

2. Staggering timing — Most marketers begin testing either a single message per day for a set number of days, or a message per week for a set number of weeks. However, just like good renewal series, staggered timing may work even better with messages building to a crescendo of urgency around a particular event (such as a discount expiration date).

3. Supporting renewals early on — I’ve heard of and personally witnessed many test results in B2B and B2C publishing where special attention during the first 30 days of subscriptions made a profound difference to renewal rates months later.

Makes sense — your new subscribers pay extra attention to your content and open email at a higher rate during the first 30-60 days, so it’s a great time to make a good impression for a longer lifetime account value. (It’s a lot harder to get them to love you again once that thrill of being a new subscriber has worn
off.)

Stuff you can send includes a new reader satisfaction survey, a list of links to your Top 10 Best articles ever, a special “one month anniversary” gift PDF, and a quick personal note from the editor (“Here’s my direct contact info if you have tips, comments or story suggestions”).

Also if your frequency is less than daily, you might want to load up the latest issue in the autoresponder whenever you publish so newbies get something with more content value than just a welcome letter.

4. Cross-selling other products — if someone’s bought PDF ‘X’ in your online store, you can use an autoresponder discount coupon to market related product ‘Y’ to them a week or so later.

5. Change your offers. If you’re doing an autoresponder series that goes for 5-7 days (such as a free ecourse to support sales of a book more substantially than a single sample chapter download would) it’s awfully tempting to paste in the same offer at the end of each message. “If you enjoyed this lesson, click here to buy the whole book…”

However, varying your offer or the way you express your offer will probably pay off, just as it does with an old fashioned renewal series in the print world (step one: discount offer, step two: time limit on discount, step 3: free report offer, step 4: free report offer over, step 5: personal plea from editor, step 6: time’s almost up notices….etc.).

HTML newsletter lay-out tip — does it print out? If the person designing your email newsletter is more used to Web sites than newsletters, they may make the mistake of designing your letter for screen readability versus printed readability. The thing is, many, many people print your newsletter out either to read it, or to file it, or to pass it on to someone who prefers printed copies. One problem I see occasionally is that newsletters (and web pages too) with a left hand navigation column so wide that when you print them out, the right side is cut off. There’s nothing more annoying than printing off a letter to read later, and then finding that the last two words at the end of each line are cut off.

I actually delayed posting this news yesterday because it was April Fools Day and I thought it must be a joke. Joke’s on me.

Yesterday, on the same day that US and Canadian law officials announced they were about to get tough on spam, Yahoo decided to loosen up. No they are not relaxing their guard to let anymore spam into Yahoo mail users’ mailboxes from the outside. However, they are going to be allowing a heck of a lot more bulk email from Yahoo advertisers in.

What they did was add a new opt-out “Marketing Preferences” section to every mail users account (enter your Yahoo email account, click on “Privacy” and then click again on the “Marketing Preferences” link in tiny letters in the left column.) This section lists no fewer than 17 different lists that you are now automatically placed on to get broadcast email, snail mail and even telemarketing calls from, UNLESS you make a point of going over to click the “no” button for each and every one of them. Yahoo is alerting mail users of this new system by sending them email about it over the next 60 days.

I understand that Yahoo needs to make money, just like any other business, and I support that. But forcibly putting my name on 17 different marketing lists unless I plead otherwise doesn’t seem like a very permission-friendly tactic from the company that spawned the likes of Seth Godin. Is insisting on opt-in (vs. opt-out) permission marketing too-naive-to-bear these days? I dunno, but it’s the end of an era, that’s for sure.

Here’s your chance to help the Web become safer for business:

This January when the trade magazine that journalist Charlotte Wolter worked for went under, she decided to launch the email
newsletter she’d been daydreaming about starting for years.

However, when she went to buy her dream domain name, NewTelephony.com, it was already taken by squatters who buy up 100s of names and then resell them. She notes, “The price they
asked was about half of what they asked two years before.” After a bit of dickering, they settled and tossed in NewTelephony.net for another $200.

That’s when the trouble started. Charlotte’s credit card was double charged. Suddenly nobody would respond to her emails, faxes or phone calls. Although, after much pressure she got the “.com” name she wanted, the former owners didn’t hand over the “.net” version she had paid extra for.

The company claimed to have offices in Miami, so Charlotte (who’s based in California) called the Miami police. Miami Dade Police
Detective Michael Perez is now her personal hero. “He understood completely and immediately why a URL is important. It’s your
storefront, your whole reason to exist. He went after these guys.”

After personally investigating several locations, including misleading mail drops at a warehouse and an office the company had claimed were their own, he was able to track the culprits down and get Charlotte’s .net address assigned to her as it should have been from the start.

According to Charlotte, Perez would like to continue fighting the real-world fight against Internet-related crimes, but his superiors are not so sure it’s really important to spend limited tax-payers dollars this way. If you’d like to support Detective Perez’s cause, you can write a postal mail letter to his superior
officer at:

Major Robert Munecas
Miami Dade Police, Doral Station
9101 NW 20th Street
Miami FL 33172

According to a post today at the Online Ads email discussion group from expert Steve Harrison of Pay Per Master, As of March 26th Overture started “blocking” all ads placed using bid management tools – with the exception of seven particular tools. For more info, see an article by Steve at his site.

After reading in a NY Times article that nobody surfs anymore these days, I decided to surf this evening instead of turning off the computer, and ran into this utterly lovely note on the home page of a fairly obscure Irish-based antique bed dealership, “Our sales via the Internet have gathered momentum much more quickly than we imagined. We find that our website is rapidly becoming our showroom.” Yeah, no matter what the NY Times says, the Web still rules!

I hear it repeatedly from publishers both big and small – personal voice is of massive importance in winning over and keeping readers in the incredibly competitive online and email publishing field. Personally, I’ve been struggling with this as a business model issue for some time now as we’ve grown.

When I co-founded ContentBiz’s parent company, MarketingSherpa (which publishes a range of newsletters and reports in addition to ContentBiz stuff), we assumed I’d be in charge of marketing because it’s my background. Then I found myself pinch-hitting for the highly professional journalists we had on staff, whenever one took vacation or needed to be replaced for some reason. Our ad sales guy was the one who noticed, “Anne whenever you do an issue, our pass-alongs and opt-ins go up.”

I’m not a ‘professional’ journalist, but I guess people liked my ‘voice’ despite (or maybe because of) that. So when we had to cut back on editorial staff due to the recession, guess who got drafted into the main editorial role?

Now that the economy is righting itself (yeah!) and we’ve been hiring editors again, I’ve come up against the whole question: If you want to grow beyond being a small publisher, but your personal “voice” is to some extent responsible for your success so far, what do you do? Fred Langa of LangaList gave me this advice this afternoon:

“It’s very easy with a small staff or a very large staff, but tougher in-between. If you’re larger you can have a copyeditor who ensures the voice of the publication is consistent across artices, time or different publications. It’s very hard to do this with a disparate group of people who work more or less independently with no one overseeing them. You’ll have a constellation of different publications rather than a single voice.

The Windows Watcher newsletter editor did a very good job of handling this [problem] when he hired staff. Each issue still started with an introduction in his own voice from him. Stories were written by somebody else but readers felt he was still involved and these were his selections. He didn’t have to write the whole long article, just the intro to it.”

http://www.langalist.com