MarketingSherpa Blog

Frustration. I’m still working away at that hunt for good reporters to hire that I mentioned a week or two back. Decided to
test posting on some of the career center job lines for top journalism schools. The good news is you can post on them online now and it doesn’t cost a thing (they know how hard it is to get a good job lead in journalism these days!) The bad news is if you want to hire someone for a virtual editorial team (i.e. everyone working from home) it’s very hard because most career centers – with the notable exception of Columbia – make you plug in a state the job is located in.

This means either I had to input my job 50 times for all 50 states, or just put it in for one state and hope eager job hunters from elsewhere trip over it. This seems a little silly to me because so many editorial jobs are work-from-home these days.

Clever PotteryBarn.com. Go to their site, pop something/anything into your shopping cart (don’t worry you don’t have to actually buy it – this is just for demo purposes), then click to your shopping cart and and scroll down looking for the “check out” button. Did you notice how clever they are? Forcing you to scroll past cute thumbnails of selected items with red On Sale prices before you can check out? For online shopping this is the equivilant of sticking candy displays and People magazine right next to the check out line at the supermarket. I’ll bet you anything they get some upsales from it.

Going through my to-read pile this morning, I came across a brief article in MIN (Media Industry Newsletter) from 4/15, where This
Old House Venture President Eric Thokilsen explains the difference in their audience and purposes in the various media they publish in:

TV audience – “comes for entertainment value”
Magazine readers – “are really into renovation”
Web visitors – “for the detailed how-to information seekers once they are into renovation.”

It’s a drill-down into greater levels of passion. Passive entertainment -> genuine interest -> active involvement. Which
frankly to me says that while yeah it’s great for advertisers to be on all three media with a brand like This Old House, the fact
is that perhaps ads messaging should be different for each. Plus, maybe the ads on the Web are the most valuable for advertisers of
all, because visitors are more ready to act! (Does this mean Web CPM should be higher than TV?)

If you are a newspaper publisher selling classified through an agreement with Monster, or you are considering a Monster classified partnership, then I urge you to check out this brief but very useful E&P article which lays out the problems many newspapers have with Monster’s new partnership terms. Now that
they are one of the few online classified behemoths left after all the consolidation, they are using that power in a not-entirely-friendly way.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1476882

Matt Mickiewicz, editor of SitePoint newsletter for Webmasters, just posted a quick useful column on buying and selling existing
Web sites and ezines. His point that now is a great time to acquire content sites and ezines that are ad supported is a good one. The economy is starting to improve (in the US anyway) so great deals will not be around forever. If you have a series of ebooks, PDFs or other stuff that you’re already making good money selling to your own list, then it might be cheaper to acquire a list with a highly similar demographic than it would be to build
the list on your own.

They will not perform as well as your own home built list though. In the print world we used to assume a 30% paid conversion rate
when we bought competing subscription newsletters and merged them into our own. So 30% of the acquired subs might pay to keep
getting ours when their initial term was up, while on average 55- 65% of our own home-grown subs would renew. If these numbers hold
true online, you need to assume that acquired names may buy about half the stuff your home grown names will.

If anybody out there has actual figures on this, I would love to hear them. editor@contentbiz.com

http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/viewissue.php?id=2&issue=193&format=html

Speaking of email subject lines that express your site or ezine’s branding, I gotta admit (disclaimer) even though I rarely
visit their site, every Friday afternoon I really look forward to seeing what Nerve’s weekly email subject line will be next. The
site is famous for being youthful, sexy and witty. And despite the fact that I get about 800 (no joke, the Intern counted) emails a day, those Nerve subject lines stand out every time, clearly proclaiming their branding without ever actually saying their name. Some recent samples:

Birds Do It, Bees Do It And Now You Know How Bulls Do It!
It’s Time to Start Screwing with Your Mind
Pubic wigs are the new black mini…

You know, they don’t have to actually say “Nerve News Vol 12 Issue IX” for us to get the point. That’s true marketing communications craftsmanship.

http://WWW.NERVE.COM

Should you consider trademarking your email newsletter subject line-style? Unlike print publications and Web sites that can use
graphics and colors for immediate visual branding, email newsletter publishers only have two tiny text-only items. Your subject line and your from line.

Recipients scroll through dozens, even hundreds, of emails daily looking mainly for “what can I delete?” Establishing a brand stance in both has become imperative to open rates, readership, clicks. As we all know, many email recipients look at subject line first, and then only glance at from line if they are not sure if they should open the message.

This was brought home abruptly to me this week when a competitor to our other publications sent out an issue using a subject line
that was strikingly similar to our typical subject lines.

Examples of our recent subject lines:

CASE STUDY: 5 Email Newsletter Publishing Rules
CASE STUDY: Redesigning Your Site to Get More Sales Leads
CASE STUDY: Viral Marketing Online – Ecards, Email & Petitions CASE STUDY: Lands’ End Newsletter Results
CASE STUDY: Reach Biz Purchasing Depts Online

Notice a pattern? Yeah, it is on purpose. I figured lots of people do not look at “from,” they just glance at subject first to seen
what to delete or keep. If we started every single newsletter the same exact way, it would help our fans deal with their inboxes. Then, this week a competitor sent out an issue with the subject line:

CASE STUDY: Copy & Design Makeover Increases Site Revenues by 30
Percent

Almost immediately we began getting emails from our readers. One wanted to know if we had been bought by that competitor. One wanted to know if we were now publishing thatcompetitor. The third simply said, “Thought you should know they are trying to rip you off.” Other readers let us know they had set up filters
on their email, and anything with “CASE STUDY:” was automatically sucked off into their MarketingSherpa email folder. They were a little annoyed that something else had ended up there.

We contacted the publisher who did not share our concern about our publications being mistaken for each other. (They did not say,
“Why get your panties in a twist?” but it was implied.) Then when we contacted our lawyer who specializes in publishing
companies and who is known for being very levelheaded, we were advised that this could be a trademark violation.

Which brings me to the point. Subject lines matter. Consistent subject lines that are not boring (i.e. not “Sherpa Case Study
May 17, Vol III Issue 17),” and somehow build your brand, are critical to success in email publishing. They are, in effect, part of your logo. How long will it take the law to catch up to this? Goodness knows and I certainly do not want to be the one spending the money to create the precedent.

Thanks to an article in SiliconAlleyReporter (which, by the way, has been been putting out more and more solid editorial these days), I learned about the new Blog published by Agency.com’s team.

It’s interesting from two angles — the first is that they pop in some useful notes and comments on the online advertising scene, the second is the idea of a blog itself as a corporate communications tool. US News & World Report’s online media sales team tried a faux blog from their publisher (at least I assume it was faux) as a marketing ploy earlier this year. However, this is the first time I’ve noticed a blog written by an agency.

Makes me wonder if — trendwatch! — Blogs are going to be the hot new online B2B marketing tool now that we are all starting to get bored of receiving official company email newsletters. Instead of formally written articles, Blogs usually contain little dashed off notes with, hopefully useful, nuggets of info. Blogs are more human and personal than newsletters are. If you are running one as a PR or marketing move for your company, lemme know and maybe I’ll link to you. Thanks — AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

Yesterday, market research firm InsightExpress released the results of their latest survey revealing that (in the words of the Company’s COO Lee Smith) “publishers would be better served to cut their losses when it comes to online publications and focus on their readers’ overwhelming preference, high quality paper magazines. And any hopes of growing revenue with online magazines seem to be misguided as most readers expect online content to be free.”

Other publications covering content have begun to pick up this story with varying degrees of alarm. Here’s a cautionary note from moi — I called InsightExpress and learned something the press release didn’t mention. The results bandied about in their release, such as only 32% of Internet users read any magazines online, were based on surveying just 500 people. So, I don’t know how statistically relevant they are to the industry as a whole.

Many of the results, though, were good common sense. These 500 people still prefer to read long magazine articles in the bathroom or in bed or on the train while they commute. Well, duh.

However, this doesn’t mean there’s no way magazines can profit online. You can sell ads against, or sell subscriptions to, many things that make zero sense to read in the bathroom — such as back issue archives, instant messaged or emailed content too newsy to wait until the next printed issue, or audio/video supplements. Or heck, you can use your lovely Web site to gather new paid subscribers for your print edition (very handy now that direct mail costs are rising precipitously.)http://WWW.INSIGHTEXPRESS.COM/PRESSROOM/RELEASE_042202.ASP

The bad news is that iMarketingNews, my personal favorite daily newsletter on what’s up in online marketing, has been folded by its publisher into sibling-publication, DMNews. However, the good news is that iMarketingNews’ head of editorial, Ken Magill, who many of us in the industry respect a great deal, is staying on board to continue covering Internet marketing for the publication. He assured me today, “I’m more than ok. Many, many good things.”