MarketingSherpa Blog

I always thought of sponsorships (as in the classic sense of the word such as sponsored sporting events) as being one of those niches in marketing that it would be neat to know more about, but hey who has time for everything and it’s only a niche right?

I take it back. $27.4 billion is *not* a niche. $27.4 billion spent globally in 2001 is a heck of a lot of money. Plus, it’s about the fastest growing form of advertising out there. Last year it grew by about 5%. During an average year in the past decade it grew by 10%. To put this in perspective, during the 1991 recession, regular advertising grew by -2.9%.

If you’re interested in the sponsorship scene, check out SponsorClick which tracks it in the US, Canada and Europe. Your choice of free newsletter in French or English.

If you publish a text-version of an email newsletter, and you (or youreditors) write it in Word to then transfer to your send file, here’s a great tip from John Engler at Inluminent. He says:

“I read your email newsletters on a Macintosh, and it really sucks to try and read something that’s copied from MS Word into a plain text email, because the non-ascii quotes and apostrophes don’t translate on a Mac. I’d like to recommend that you scrub all of your outgoing plain text email with TextSoap (which does a lot of manual work for you automatically) to change any curly quotes or apostrophes into straight quotes or apostophes (which are ascii stanards across platforms).
http://www.unmarked.com/textsoap_win.html ”

This software might also be useful when you get in articles from freelancers and other contributors, who in my experience always stick in stuff like tabs, auto-numbering, etc. which can be a pain when you’re on deadline to laboriously take out so you can use their story.

(Note: Mac-users will notice we didn’t use TextSoap for this issue, because hey we’ll look into it, but got 8 weeklies to put out and other stuff has priority. It’s coming soon.)

Does publicity help site traffic and/or help you grow opt-ins?? I’ve heard some site owners swear by it, especially those in niche markets that got great publicity in related niche media. I’ve heard other site owners swear it doesn’t do a thing, especially broader sites with coverage in broader media outlets. In our case, since the articles in CNET, NY Times, DM News, and elsewhere came out last week, we saw about 30% more site traffic*but* not noteably more opt-ins than usual. We grew about the same amount that we always do.

I did get emails from old friends who saw my (awful) pic in the NY Times. Which was fun, but doesn’t make a difference in business. Of course a zillion calls from vendor sales reps.
Ughh.

Most realtors these days in the US will offer to sign prospects and clients up for a daily email from the MLSMessenger service, so every morning you get a listing of the latest houses listed in the town(s) you’re looking in. The email appears to be coming directly from your broker for that nice personal touch.

Being a relentless test-it marketer, I got on several brokers’ lists for this, and recently one in particular, Edward Moy of RE/MAX of Newport, has impressed me because he’s using the system to go the extra step toward really connecting with prospects and clients in a personal way. Moy has started supplementing the daily HTML email with extra little notes sent separately now and then.

The timing is irregular. It’s about once a week but you can’t count on a particular time or day, which helps this campaign feel much more personal. After all my friends don’t send me an email every Thursday at 2 P.M. They dash off a note whenever they have something specific to tell me. The fact that Moy’s extra notes are always in text-only also makes them feel “real.”

Plus he writes them in a personal-sounding manner. One starts, “Hello Anne, On occasion I see a house that I think is worth quick investigation. 24 South Drive is one of those. I admit, I live on the same street, perhaps that is why I like this house, etc.” Another note talked briefly about a neat Web site he’d discovered that revealed the latest valuations for houses in his county. It sounded useful, I clicked right through.

None of the notes are very long, not longer than a paragraph. None include a hard sales pitch to use his service. He’s just keeping in touch. You know, sometimes I think we all get so excited about the power of email newsletters that we forget a little “personal” note now and then can also work wonders through email.

Copywriting tip for the day. Are you really, honestly using the exact same language your prospect uses?

The results from this online quiz Pop vs Soda really made me think about copywriting. If I were a copywriter creating an ad for a carbonated beverage, I’d probably use the word “soda” without thinking twice about it. However, turns out that more than 50% of Americans and Canadians habitually use the word “Pop” instead. Luckily the differences are regional so you can actually create two different ads and have your media buyer split the buy to make the campaign more effective.

Of all copywriters out there, the worst at thinking about the way prospects use words are technology marketers. Either they’ll use made-up terms they invented to describe their stuff so they can safely say they are #1 in their category, or they use highly technical terms the techies assured the copywriter the marketplace uses (never listen to techies’ wording suggestions), or they use broad terms such as “CRM solution” because the marketer isn’t actually quite sure what the tech specifically does, or they use big words that seemed to impress the VCs when they got that last round of funding. OK enough. Tech copywriting is such an easy target that it’s almost not fair to rag on about it.

Here’s a challenge, email me samples of tech marketing copywriting where the marketer used words that prospects actually do use to describe their need or product. I’d be delighted to give kudos. AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

P.S. Thanks to for the Pop versus Soda link.

My top 3 tips on picking offer expire dates:

1. Pick a day in the middle of the week, especially if you have an email or fax list to the same people so you can broadcast a 24-hour’s left alert the day before to bump response.

2. Never pick a day near the start of a month (such as Oct 1st) because everybody the month before thinks the next month is much much further away than it really is. Way more urgency to Sept 30th than Oct 1st.

3. In B2B marketing (especially events with a longer lead time) always tell them how many business days they have left because that’s much more urgent than regular days. Example:

You have just 3 business days left to save $100.00 on your ticket to the “Email Newsletter Publisher’s Profit Workshop” at http://sherpastore.com/store/page.cfm/1979

(Um, yeah that was a shameless self-promotional plug there at the end, but hey, I gave value.)

Oh gosh darn, I suck. I meant to mention Wabash & Lake’s upcoming seminar on “Creating Customer Evangelists” in SherpaWeekly this week. Then I completely forgot. It’s an event that I wish I could attend myself (I’ll be moving house that day or I would), it’s that, well I’m moving house now and seems like everything is misplaced, half-forgotten and/or crazy.

Here’s the thing, everybody I interview in the B2B world (especially agencies and consultancies of all sizes) tells me that half or more of their sales come through referrals. You could say referrals are 100% responsible for many people’s profit margins. Hardly anyone focuses on referral marketing aside from the odd “send this email to a friend” viral-thingy. We just assume referrals will take care of themselves.

As a marketer, there’s one rule I’ve learned: that every kind of marketing has rules. Marketing is absolutely more of a science than an art. It makes sense that the science of getting referrals, or customer evangelism as Wabash & Lake call it, would be a mission critical thing for us all to learn more about. In fact, probably far more important to the bottom line than most other stuff marketers spend a lot of time on. Rant over. If you are anywhere near Chicago (or can get there) see if you can go to this day-long workshop.

Well, thanks to fellow-Sparklist client Andy Sernovitz, who must have a press roladex ™ that paid flacks would give their eyeteeth for, I’ve been interviewed by the four biggies in the past 48 hours (WSJ.com, The New York Times, DMNews and CNET) about the fact that our email lists were stolen. (Our original article http://www.MarketingSherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2139)

The Times sent over a photographer to take action shots of me being an email publishing exec in my office today. About the only action that happened over the 45-minute session was their own reporter calling with more questions, and me peering intently at incoming email. The final story was slightly inaccurate. I’m not remotely a consultant and we publish 8 newsletters, not five. But the spin, anti-spammers’ lists being stolen, was interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/technology/12MAIL.html

DMNews was probably the most fun interview because my pal and sometime-competitor Ken Magill was lead guy for this one, so he got all the critical parts of the story without any explanations on my part about why email list security matters anyway. I think Ken’s story on this whole situation turned out the best of the lot. Plus we wasted valuable company time with frivolous gossip, which is always a plus.

http://www.dmnews.com (search under my last name “Holland”)

WSJ.com was neat because, hey it’s always a thrill to feel a little self-important because you’ve got the Wall Street Journal calling with questions. Their email reporter Stacy Forster is also obviously dedicated to her beat. She had good questions, and even sent a polite “thank you” email follow-up. (Heck even we don’t do that with sources.) However, there doesn’t seem to have been an actual story published yet.

Last but not least CNET won the award for swiftest coverage. (Thanks to Bob Rankin for sending the link to my attention.) The CNET article definitely quoted me accurately. It was also a good reminder to me that press reporting is a “free” form of marketing for a good reason, you don’t control the message. This guy spun the story (as was his right) to make it sound a bit like I was alone in the woods crying “problem” when there was not such a big problem.

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-957567.html

Joe Esposito over at Portable CEO, who subscribes to the hard copy edition of the New York Times at his office in LA, just wrote in regarding today’s Case Study on NYTimes Digital, “the Times has not segmented its readership; the people who are paying $600/yr for hardcopy still have to pay for access to the archives. Enough is enough! I’m all for paid online content, but at some point you just get angry.I would pay a premium to get *high-quality* content with no ads. Not that hardcopy publishers have the option, since it would be impossible to print two editions. But online? I raised this question with the Wall Street Journal, to which I subscribe to the online edition only ($60/year, as I recall). I said I would pay $250 if I could get the online version without the ads. I’m still waiting.”

On one hand, it’s probably not worth it for the WSJ.com or NYTimes.com to create an entirely ad-free service just for the very few folks who would ante up, which is why they haven’t.

On the other hand, I suspect there are some very real, very profitable opportunities for sites like this, and many, many others, if they used classic, time-tested database marketing tactics to create more new products for eager micro-niches. This is a point I’ve harped on before, especially when it comes to the big online bookstores, none of which have yet to send me a marketing campaign recognizing that as an online book buyer who spends more than $5000 a year I’m any different from the average Joe Blow who buys a book once in a blue moon.

Partially I think this stems from both the classic dot-com and newspaper backgrounds of sell a zillion people something that suits the masses’ needs and profit heaps. I come from the B2B niche publishing world of sell a few people something high priced that serves them perfectly and profit heaps, so I’m prejudiced.

http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2145

Ironic event of the week: Some spammer is forging headers to look like the email is coming from SpamCop. What’s funny is the
statement SpamCop’s posted on his site: It ain’t me, babe.
After asking not to be blocked, he explains, by way of defense, that: “Unfortunately, since we’re not responsible for sending it, there is little we can do to stop it.” Try that excuse to get un-blacklisted by SpamCop the next time you get false complaints against you.
http://www.julianhaight.com/forgery.shtml