MarketingSherpa Blog

A big round of applause to Lowry’s Reports Inc. President Paul Desmond who took his case to the courts after discovering three of their $700 per year subscribers to a daily stock market commentary email newsletter were breaking copyright by redistributing it to thousands of co-workers at financial services firm Legg Mason. Lowry’s won a judgment of $20 mill yesterday.

It takes big guts to pursue a case like this – especially when you are a relatively small publisher. You’re dealing with legal fees, time and energy spent, and of course the fears that other subscribers may side with their peers, the infringers, instead of the publisher trying to make an honest buck from content.

Interestingly, in my experience of these cases, both publicly and privately-settled ones, the worst infringers have invariably been software and media companies that rely on copyright themselves for their own income.

Anyway, if you’re concerned about nfringement, one way to handle things is to simply run a note every quarter or so in your issues explaining clearly what your copyright policy is.

One publisher I worked for used to run a boxed letter reading something like “Are you reading someone else’s copy of this newsletter? Was it copied or forwarded to you, or perhaps posted to your intranet? Please contact our customer service department right away and we’ll help you get your own subscription. Yes, discounted group rates are available. Plus, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re not breaking copyright law any longer. Thank you.”

Did it work? Oh yeah. Lots of whistle blowers in corporate America, all ready to pucker up and blow. Then our sales team would get in touch with the company in question and sell a group sub. Only very occasionally did lawyers have to get involved.

Last week, more than 800 execs from big retail Web sites got together in NYC at the Shop.org show. Here are my quick notes:

– Key demographic trend: although most people think the economy is getting better, 43% of Americans are scared they’ll lose their jobs in the next year.

– Search engine optimization is making a comeback as a tactic to invest more in. Everyone’s still buying paid search ads, but “organic” listings you don’t pay directly for were the big talking point. (And, yes you can measure their effectiveness.)

– Most Web site-display PCs in retail stores are “gathering dust.” REI’s Joan Broughton drew a shocked gasp from the crowd when she said hers are popular. (She incents the stores by giving them credit for any resulting sales.)

– Retailers are testing adding live chat in some new places, including the cart check-out process to see if it stops abandonment.

– Multi-channel marketing is an operations nightmare most people haven’t come close to solving. “How many people have a master campaign calendar that tracks everything being sent in every channel?” A pitifully small show of hands.

– Best idea? One speaker said she gifted her company’s overworked IT department with a few bottles of champagne to get them to move her metrics reports to the top of their dev list. “Without numbers, you’re nothing.”

According to a Gartner study press release today, Only 27 Percent of Print Publishers See Online Advertising As a Means to Increase
Revenue.

“Currently, the majority of publishers lack registration systems, which are required to support targeted advertising and
personalized content. Fewer that half of publishing conglomerates and syndicates bundle print and online together, thereby losing
cross-selling and marketing opportunities. Fewer than half of all publishing companies employ a unified strategy for print and
online ad sales, which also leads to missed opportunities and a duplication of effort.”

http://www.gartnerg2.com/pr/pr-2003-10-01.asp

Although we normally write all our articles in-house, this Monday I saw such a useful piece in the Media Buying Academy’s newsletter that I phoned up President Lee White Morrow and asked for her permission to run it here.

Yes, I think it absolutely applies to online – in fact it matches data in some of our past Case Studies of online and ezine ads:

“To throw one message out there, and expect a response is ludicrous.

Frequency is required in order to create a need or a desire for the consumer to buy. Studies over the years have shown that, in broadcast advertising:

The first time someone sees or hears an advertising message, it goes in one ear and out the other. People say to themselves, “So what!”

The second time someone sees or hears an advertising message in a week, they say to themselves, “Oh yeah. I’ve seen or heard that before.” There is an air of familiarity about the message.

The third time someone hears or sees that same advertising message in a week, they say to themselves, “Do I have a need or desire to buy that product or service?”

Every exposure after the third exposure in a week, is considered to be a repeat of the third up to the 10th exposure. Each time, the viewer or listener is asking themselves, “Do I have a need or desire to buy that product or service?”

During the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th exposure, in a week, the prospect is no longer asking themselves, “Do I have a need or a desire to buy that product or service?” They have, in their own minds, already addressed that question and have answered it. In essence, the advertising is null and void. It results in no conscious action being taken on the part of the prospect.

The ad dollars are essentially wasted.

Once the prospect has been subjected to the 15th exposure in a week, the prospect has crossed over into “the irritant zone.” By now, the advertising is creating an adverse effect, becoming annoying, and obnoxious to the viewer or listener.

15 or more exposures to a prospect during a one week period of time is considered a “danger zone.” This annoyance can become so bothersome, the prospective consumer can develop a “dislike” or a “hatred” for the product or service, and the advertiser can count on not getting them as a customer – ever!”

Note – if you’d like to learn more about Media Buying Academy, go to
http://www.mediabuyingacademy.com

On August 6th 2003, Google launched a beta-test of a brand new service — emailed news alerts.

You can bet that in the past month loads of people have signed up (although Google as usual can’t confirm any exact numbers.) I called over there this morning to get some info on how this will affect you:

– Nope, Google is currently not planning on running ads in the email. Knowing the cost of email publishing, I can tell you that’s bound to change sooner or later. But for now, the alerts have no ads.

– Yes, the newsfeed does include press releases that you send via PR Newswire and BusinessWire. In fact, my newsfeed email this morning for an email-related keyword had five items in it and the top four were press releases.

So, this makes your press releases in wire services much valuable.

One thing to note: you don’t have to buy full national distribution from the wire services to get your feed into Google News. It’s my understanding that both main wire services toss in Internet distribution as a bonus even if you only buy a local or regional distribution.

So, you can pay less and just tell them to distribute your news to one city, and it will still show up online. (I’ve been saving money on MarketingSherpa press releases for years now this way.)

Or try out PRWeb’s service for just $20.

Also, be sure to add a hotlink in the first paragraph of your press release instead of just at the very bottom. Assume that many more online readers will click through if you stick that link higher up.

And, obviously, make it trackable.

Gosh darn. According to the Quris consumer email preferences study just released “independent media outlet newsletters (examples: from a newspaper media site or individual writer) “rank extremely low on consumers’ lists of email they like. Just 15% said they really like independent media email.

In comparison, 22% said they really liked scheduled email newsletters from corporations.

Great – so media now fall behind corporate marketing pieces. Makes me think media are not trying hard enough to give the public what they want.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.cfm?currentID=2450

RSS Feeds are the sexy online topic du jour, but is anyone making money with them? Is anyone tracking their clicks (especially compared to headlines sent out via email?) Is anyone tracking any sort of value or metric for RSS Feed recipients/readers vs content distributed any other way? I can’t find anyone to say anything besides, “Well it probably drives some traffic.”

So when I heard a text-ad was spotted in a Moreover RSS feed last week I was excited – at last somebody making money!

Unfortunately, Jim Pitkow Moreover’s President was as surprised as I was to hear there was an ad in their feed, because they’re not doing it. Turns out it was a feed that somebody else creates from one of Moreover’s newsletters. The ad was a text-link in headline format nestled in with the regular headlines, so the RSS-ing person must have picked it up and sent it without realizing.

Pitkow says the 100-or-so headline listings newsletters are an experiment someone launched a couple of years ago and the text ad was a “what the heck” test last week. Moreover didn’t sell the ad themselves – an ad-network partner Pitkow can’t name sold it for them.

Moreover isn’t focusing on newsletters or ads anyway (and in fact doesn’t even accept new subscribers now) because the Company’s biz model is currently focused on syndicating its headline feeds into corporate America and into major online portals (for example, Moreover feeds Yahoo News, MSN News, and Ask Jeeves News.)

Customers have tripled in the past year. “It’s been a very fun year,” says Pitkow.

He sees his edge vs the Factivas of the world (who dominate the aggregated-content-to-corporations marketplace) to be the fact that Moreover picks up MANY more feeds including loads of Web-only publishers who Factiva distains because it’s not worth Factiva’s while to do the work to aggregate them. Also, on the profit side, unlike Factiva, Moreover doesn’t share any revenue with publishers, just clicks.

Coolest news – Moreover is now including more than 500 “highly influential” blogs in its headline feeds. How do they know which blogs are good and which are, well, not? “You have to have humans in the room,” says Pitkow.

Do I detect a little slap to Google’s news service? Pitkow laughed but said diplomatically, “Consumer requirements are much less stringent than industry-grade solutions.” Meow.

Moreover – http://www.moreover.com

Dear Barnes & Noble.com Affiliate,

As of September 9, 2003, Barnes & Noble.com will no longer sell eBooks. Please remove all links to the eBooks Page or any individual eBooks from your site. Any links from your site to our eBooks area that are not taken down will be redirected to the Barnes & Noble.com home page.

If you have any questions please email
affiliatehelp@barnesandnoble.com

Sincerely,
The Barnes & Noble.com Affiliate Team

I don’t know who to believe anymore, and I just don’t care. I just want my email to go out. Today we had four newsletters scheduled to go out to various lists. Only one made it – and that’s because it was sent by a partner of ours using their list host.

Our list host has been down all day. At first we just couldn’t get into the server. Then we could get in, but the issue we sent through it never arrived anywhere. MIA. When I got through to a our host on the phone, they told me there was a massive Internet outage today – that as much as 59% of email in the US wasn’t being delivered due to a “level 3” problem.

I hurriedly blogged it right here figuring that news affected everyone. Then I called a few other list hosting firms for quotes on how they were handling the crisis. They said, “What crisis?” I said, “Check with your techies.” Their techies said, “What crisis?”

So I took the Blog down. In the meantime, reader Rich Miller at CarrierHotels.com emailed in that he had seen the Blog and done his own investigation. He said, “I run a site that covers Internet infrastructure, so today’s post got my attention. We cover Level 3, the company [your list host] is publicly saying is responsible for their problems. I called Level 3’s spokesperson, and they say they are having no problems with their network, and that [your list host] is wrong.

Not sure what to believe here. Internet Traffic Report shows problems, but another “live” measurement tool
(http://www.internethealthreport.com/) tells a completely different story, saying everything is fine.”

Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. Tech, arrrgh!

http://www.internethealthreport.com/
http://www.internettrafficreport.com

“Everyone talks in general about text vs HTML, but hardly anyone has specific test data they can share on it,” Joanne Blatte, the editor of our upcoming Email Metrics Guide 2nd Edition, complained to me last week.

I was about to email about 50,000 of our readers a survey to gather data for our media kit, so I figured, why not toss a test cell into it? Heck, why not toss in two?

Here’s how the test worked and what I learned:

We randomly generated three cells (I prefer this to slicing the list into parts so there’s less chance of skewing results.)

Group A were sent a text-only note with a link to the survey form online.

Group B were sent an identical note with link, except a graphic of our logo was at the very top which meant the message was HTML.

Group C were sent a virtually identical note with our logo at the top, but they also received the actual survey form in the body of their email. If the form worked in their email system (Lotus Notes, some versions of Eudora and others can’t use forms), they could submit their answers immediately instead of clicking to reach a survey.

If the form didn’t work, they also had a link to click to get to the survey online.

Every test cell received the same “from” and “subject” line, however the size of messages were obviously different. They surveys were also all identical. (And to my shame, rather badly written — my fault, never copywrite a survey when you are tired late at night.)

Our list is professionals at work – fewer than 10% are
Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL addresses. I culled newbies because
I didn’t feel it was the right stage in our relationship to
ask loads of demographic questions, so every name sent to
had been on our house file for at least 30 days and
received at least four newsletters from us (most many more
than that.)

My expectations were: A low 20% or so open rate due to the fact that it was the week before Labor Day (and also a bank holiday in the UK). I also expected the HTML “lite” to win overall for no good reason beyond gut.

Actual results were:

Group A text-only:
Opens – can’t tell with text
% click on link – 8.5%
% of sent completed survey – 7.5%

Group B HTML lite:
Opens – 35%
% click on link – 8%
% of sent completed survey – 7%

Group C HTML form:
Opens – 35.4%
% clicked link to use form online – 1%
% of sent completed survey – 7.2%

Color me completely stunned. Never in a million years did I dream the tests would be so similar.

If the list was not regular readers, I suspect there would
have been more profound differences. Perhaps if people have a strong enough relationship with your brand, your
email format doesn’t affect response as much as it would a
newbie?

Anyway, if you’ve ever conducted a text vs HTML test,
please do let me know what you learned at
aholland@marketingsherpa.com. Thanks