MarketingSherpa Blog

Having published hundreds of articles about HTML email, I have to admit that I had *no idea* how hard doing it ourselves would be.

The design was the fun part.

First I picked a simple color palatte because it would help our brand stand out in a colorful marketplace.

Plus, fewer colors means “high value” at a gut level to many businesspeople. (Think about it, no-cost or low-cost trade magazines are colorful while valuable research reports are often black and white.)

Next I trolled the Web looking for design ideas to steal. My faves: DWR.com’s newsletter, Barry Parr’s MediaSavvy.com blog, and the interior pages of UnitedWayToronto.com. You guys rock.

After hours of tweaking with our Web designer Ryan Manville, I handed the HTML layout over to our email broadcast vendor.

Then the hard part began. Turns out great Web page design from style-sheet perspective is often too heavy for great email design. Oops. Also turns out folks using Compuserve or Netscape got a horrible-looking version of our HTML. Oops.

The good news is, SherpaStore sales are up roughly 70% since we made the switch last Friday. That will probably stabilize to a lot lower once people get over the novelty factor, but it’s still a happy thing.

Next time I have to pound it into my head! Test much more prior to launch!

Having published hundreds of articles about HTML email, I have to admit that I had *no idea* how hard doing it ourselves would be.

The design was the fun part.

First I picked a simple color palatte because it would help our brand stand out in a colorful marketplace.

Plus, fewer colors means “high value” at a gut level to many businesspeople. (Think about it, no-cost or low-cost trade magazines are colorful while valuable research reports are often black and white.)

Next I trolled the Web looking for design ideas to steal. My faves: DWR.com’s newsletter, Barry Parr’s MediaSavvy.com blog, and the interior pages of UnitedWayToronto.com. You guys rock.

After hours of tweaking with our Web designer Ryan Manville, I handed the HTML layout over to our email broadcast vendor.

Then the hard part began. Turns out great Web page design from style-sheet perspective is often too heavy for great email design. Oops. Also turns out folks using Compuserve or Netscape got a horrible-looking version of our HTML. Oops.

The good news is, SherpaStore sales are up roughly 70% since we made the switch last Friday. That will probably stabilize to a lot lower once people get over the novelty factor, but it’s still a happy thing.

Next time I have to pound it into my head! Test much more prior to launch!

Bruce Rogers VP Marketing over at Forbes phoned me up about my Blog (see below) on their new streamed headlines to desktop
offering. Turns out they launched this as a limited test about 60 days ago, only a portion of the 4.8 million monthly visitors to
Forbes.com get the pop-up offering them the feed.

So far 50,000 people have accepted the offer and downloaded the feed to their desktop. Bruce couldn’t give me exact data on what
sort of clickthrough rate these headlines get, but he’s “happy.” I asked him to see if it’s very different from clicks on story links in Forbes email newsletters and he said he’d look into it.

Forbes’ ad sales team have been bugging him to see if they can sell text links through the system, but Rogers says he’s keeping
it very non-commercial for now. “I want it to be as non-promotional as possible; the whole point is our currency is page views at the end of the day.”

However, I bet this may change in time because I keep hearing media buyers rave about text links as the hot ad unit now. I’ve heard other sites, such as SportingNews.com, are
considering selling sponsor links in their desktop headline feeds.

Anyway, desktop apps are turning into the BIG content trend for the second half of 2003. Bigger, I think ultimately, from a potential revenue standpoint than Blogs and contextual PPC ads (Adsense etc.). Bruce says, “Desktop apps are the gotta-have this week. The real trial is, is it worth the effort to add incremental traffic?”

He also notes, this is no ordinary incremental traffic. The people who download your app are the true believers, the inner core, the brand evangelists. Each one may be worth dozens of
hundreds of clicks from a relative stranger. As sites get beyond commodity ad sales by proving their audience is “better” than
competitors’, this loyal core may make a difference.

Bruce says be prepared for some customer service problems. “I got an I Hate You note today. It’s a small percent, but nevertheless
very loud.” Turns out a handful of people forgot they downloaded the app and now think Forbes is desktop-app-spamming them. Also,
some people will blame your app for other people’s pop-unders.

BTW: Forbes is using a Trigger News to power this test.

http://www.triggernews.com

Really enjoyable story in Editor & Publisher on a day-in-the-life of a syndicated content sales rep, and why she visits customers’ offices personally instead of relying 100% on email and phone.

The one-to-one pitch and meeting is becoming more prevalent these days, as travel budgets loosen up a tad.
See the story here.

I just went to sign up at KeepMedia’s site so I can check out their sub sales conversion materials. What’s interesting about their
pitch is the whole “We don’t ask for your credit card upfront” copywriting.

It’s something I’ve seen on several new sub sites recently, gaining traction now that most sub site trials do request a card.
Of course you’ve got to be awfully, awfully good at converting freebies to paids to run things this way, because everyone I know
who’s tested it has found the cc upfront always winds up with more subs in the end, even if the raw number of sign ups is slightly lowered on the intake.

Anyway I’ll post notes on how good KeepMedia’s conversion process is. To begin with after I signed up, they should have asked me
to fill out a new member profile that would help me find articles of interest to me, instead of just pointing me toward a list of
topics in their archives. People like filling out quizzes and getting “personal” responses. Witness eDiets’ and RealAge’s
success.

http://www.keepmedia.com

According to this story in OJR, newspapers are having a very hard time getting younger readers to visit their Web sites. Youth, who
don’t bother with the print edition anyway, bypass the online local brand in favor of a national brand such as Yahoo. It’s like
they wanna shop at The Gap instead of an increasingly marginalized local boutique.

Our Managing Editor of Reports, Laura Higgins, has two teen daughters so I asked her to verify this. They said, “Yup.” But
then they added that grownups vastly overestimate how important email and Web sites are. All that really matters, apparently, is
instant messaging.

They firmly told me that our article this week on how to email teens definitely had the wrong focus. IM is where it’s at.

Maybe local newspapers should get together with the ActivBuddy folks and create a LocalNews Buddy.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/business/1059602230.php
http://www.activebuddy.com/

CafePress is launching its self-publishing and selling platform for book authors sometime this week. (It’s in beta now here, where it says the launch is July 28…)
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/books.aspx

The price is higher than it would cost you to print books or reports at a standard print shop (or Kinkos), but that’s because it includes all the online sales backend stuff you need too — such as a Web page to sell from, a shopping cart, shipping services, and customer service.

Might make sense for anyone who wants to test a book or report sale without investing in building all the backend first. If sales go well enough, then you get serious and move to your own systems….

Mark Zeibarth, who heads up Bongarde Holdings the parent company that owns SafetySmartOnline, told me they’ve just done a successful first test of a sub sales tactic to organizations. It’s kinda clever…

SafetySmartOnline’s sales team cold call prospects with the following offer:

– Try out the $900/year site for 72 hours (3 days) for free

– If you like it, continue as a trial subscriber for just $399 for six months

– If you don’t, cancel during the first 72 hours and you owe nothing. Cancelling is easy and can be done on the phone or via email.

Because many prospects don’t have corporate credit cards, nor the authorization to use them for such an amount without permission,
Zeibarth’s sales reps don’t ask for a card. Instead they tell the prospect they will send a bill, as soon as the 72 hours are over.

If the prospect says ok, the rep then emails them their trial access password while they are on the phone together. Then 72 hours later the formal invoice is faxed and postal mailed to the now-customer.

Zeibarth says that so far roughly half of trials bail either during the 72 hours or immediately after when they get the bill.

However, the other half pay-up. These numbers are based on a small test though and may change. Plus he has no data yet on how these accounts will convert to the $900/yr site membership when their 6 month trial is over.

He said one other thing I found interesting, which was that although the SafetySmartOnline site is pretty good now, he’s carefully planning out the next 3-5 years enhancements already. It’s not enough to keep a good service going, you have to add on every year to keep subscribers happy and involved …. “even if you don’t raise your prices.”

Zeibarth compares subs sites to Microsoft Office. Each new reversion has more add-ons and improvements, but the price remains
roughly the same.

Thank you to the Little Bird who just flew in to tell me that AOL discontinued its InfoGate services on July first. These included paid subscription newsfeed offerings from CNN and USA Today.

Apparently there were lots of calls and emails from upset subscribers who adored the services, but not enough to make a difference in the decision (kind of like fans trying to save a doomed national TV show.)

However all is not lost, AOL is running its own beta test of a push-service to members now. You can sign up as a Beta tester by going to AOL keyword ACBeta.

“It was under the news radar,” Cliff Boro former head of Infogate just told me why very few press picked up on the fact that AOL
bought the company in March.

Cliff spoke to me from his cell phone while standing on the deck of his sail boat moored outside Provincetown Mass. He’s on his
way up to Maine for August (as soon as the dense fog covering the Northeast blows over.)

“When I pull up and people ask me what I’m doing this summer, and I say, ‘I sold my company to AOL after nine years, so I’m taking
the summer off,’ they think I’m rich,” he laughs. “I explain this is a bear market, when you sell in a bear market that means your
sailboat is still heavily mortgaged.”

Cliff and I are having drinks when he comes back down this way in late August, and he promises to let me know what he’s planning to
do next then so I can blog it. In the meantime, Paul Love is the sole business-side guy left working for Infogate at AOL. AOL also
kept about 20 techies on board.

Infogate, in part originally Pointcast, is the tech company that powers the subscription push-style streamed content offerings
from LATimes, CNN and USAToday, among others. AOL’s acquisition, especially in the midst of the email wars, could be another big
step forward for push content in the US.

One weird thing – check out Infogate.com — why didn’t anybody put some info or a redirect on the site?