MarketingSherpa Blog

I do a lot of articles on the whole online subscription-movement, and have covered many online publishers who are making that awkward switch from fee to paid. Today, in prep for an interview with a Salon.com leader, I was checking out Salon’s Table Talk section which is doing that free-to-paid transition right now.

I’m VERY impressed with the way they’re explaining the transition opening with their members online. The why’s, and hows and pricing model info is exceptionally well communicated. If you’d like to see Salon’s summary click here.

Online customer and visitor communications are a real art form. You have to write in a personal tone to the .. well, masses. Plus you have to be very, very clear because people tend to skim rather than read carefully. And you have to feel “real” enough to trust, even though you are virtual. Well done Salon!

Something everyone in B2C (and B2smallB) should think about: according to stats published on TeleChoice’s xDSL news site, just 3.33 million DSL lines are in use in America right now and only 780,000 are in use in Canada.

This means, fewer than 3% of Americans have DSL access. And only about 7% more have another kind of high speed access such as cable modem. So, although 58% of the US population with online access, just 10% can download stuff with the kind of speed most of us are used to at the office. Which means most Web designers and marketers aren’t seeing their sites load in the way to end user does, so they may not take speed into account the way they should.

Personally I was trapped for the weekend recently at a house that only had 56k, and I thought I would die or something. But it also made me think real hard about site design for the average consumer’s bandwidth. Is your site too “fat” for consumers online? Check out Byte Level Research. They measure eretail and fashion sites to see if they are losing sales by being too slow to load. Very useful info.

Ouch! I just got a copy of a corporate email newsletter for my old company. A newsletter which looks just like one I myself launched for them back in 1998. And it’s a total time warp. Very little’s apparently changed.

Some of the biggest mistakes (which every email newsletter should avoid at all costs):

– subject line reads, “PBI Media News: August Issue” — not remotely a open-me-now proposition! and they didn’t need to waste valuable subject line space on the company name because it’s already in the “from” field.

– when it opens in my Outlook preview box (so I can decide whether to open it all the way or not), they waste space on general intro information which means the table of contents is not visible. OK, quick note: the table of contents is the ONLY reason most people decide to open an email letter all the way up.

– the very first article is a promotional announcement for one of the company’s own products. Turns out, people respect you more if you give them value up front and then slam them with the marketing lower down. (Which admittedly is hard for a gung ho marketer to bring themselves to do.)

MarketingSherpa reader Dana Noonan of InfoMaven.com, sent over this handy note, “If you think that blogging is neat, you have to see wiki. Wiki is crazy. Wiki sites are totally open so anyone can edit ANY page. Anyone can add pages (and delete or change them). They make the most sense for small group projects. Most of the ones I’ve seen are very nerdy and about programming methodolgy.

A few aren’t — take a look at: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?HomePage”

Wiki sounds like what you get when you mix blogs with message boards. Possibly a useful app for copywriting with a virtual partner or editor. Virtual agency brainstorming tool?

After I got Dana’s note, I was on the phone with Gayle Hutchens Groom, a Circulation Manager at Primedia (no she’s not the one who spammed me.) She mentioned the Kansas City circulation marketing club needed a new Web site, since the free service holding their old one died. Nobody’s gotten around to it yet, because everyone’s busy and setting up a site seems like a headache. You know? I had a brainwave and said, “Hey why not whip up a blog or a Wiki? Takes less than 15 minutes.”

She’s gonna look into it – and when they go ahead she’ll email me the link so I can share it with you guys here.

Today I got two domain name renewal notices in the mail from VeriSign. And for a moment, I stopped and wondered, “Why are they sending me stuff? I don’t have an account with Verisign.”

Of course, if you’ve followed the news, you’d know that Network Solutions is now being branded as Verisign, and like millions of other domain name owners, I do have an account with them.

But it makes me think: in these days of many company names changes (either for rebranding or due to mergers & acquisitions) are marketers paying proper attention to getting that name change known by their current customers? I came very close to tossing those two notices in the waste basket after all.

In the trade publishing world, we usually take about 6 months to do a name change. It’s not one quick announcement and hope they remember. The traditional way is to have both names at the top of your publication. First the old one is bigger and it says, “Old Name becomming NewName”, and then the new one gets bigger until it says, “New Name, formerly old name.” (i.e. Salon Today formerly Hair News.) Plus you send out emails and letters about the name change, plus you tell customer service to use both names, plus BOTH names are added to emails, renewal notices, bills and any print materials for six months.

In the Internet world everyone thinks things happen so quickly that they only need that one quick notice. But your customers’ minds don’t move and remember that quickly. They still need 3-6 months to get used to a name change. Probably more if you touch them infrequently. But when was the last time you saw “formerly old name” on a site that changed its name? I think name changes are one area where old-offline world marketing tactics should still apply.

Pesach Lattin who publishes AdBumb (my fave newsletter about online media buying and selling — it’s kinda the F***ckedcompany of online media) just emailed over to say his new message boards are up at http://www.adbumb.com/bitch. Unfortunately he couldn’t migrate the stuff people had posted at the old boards over (now there’s a problem I never thought about — better pick your board tech carefully to avoid problems like that in future!)

Anyway Pesach says everybody should go post questions and rants about online media buying. I think he prefers the rants. 🙂 Especially when people reveal who isn’t paying their bills! (Yes you can post anonymously.)

In response to my blog of Aug 7th, Meg Barker VP Marketing at WidgetFinder.com (they’re still in pre-launch mode, so don’t go deluging her Web site or anything) sent over her company’s official list of dirty words.

I didn’t read the whole thing (ok I didn’t read past the first 5 words, it just got a little … yucky) but at 102 words total, it’s a pretty good start at a comprehensive list. Marketers who run any type of community (boards, email discussion groups, on-site product reviews) can use this to filter out inappropriate postings/emails. Plus, Heather Fairchild of Seattle Lab pointed out to me this afternoon that the list would also be helpful for HR folks intent on stopping potentially offensive internal employee emails. Big area for lawsuits these days.

If you’d like a copy of this list, I didn’t post it to Sherpa because I thought, well, why put stuff like this out there in the open? Struck me as potentially not fun. So if you’d like a free copy of this list, just email me and I’ll pop one off to you pronto.

My email is AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

I’m completely stunned. There’s a new company that collects and sell business executives email addresses. They are NOT collecting the emails with permission or any type of opt-in. They are simply surfing the Web and getting their hands on emails any way they can, compiling them into a database and selling it as a business development tool. It’s a typical spam play, except with the unique twist that this stuff is searchable by company.

Here’s what’s weird: they just proudly announced to the world that they closed an angel round of funding. Like spam is a legitimate business. (Not to mention the fact that nobody’s getting funded now — except a spam-enabler?)

Here’s what’s even weirder: their own privacy policy on their site is one of the best-written ones I’ve ever seen. It explains exactly what they’ll do with your email and why you should feel utterly safe giving it to them as a customer. Oh no they won’t rent or give your email to anyone else! They’ll just rent everybody else’s names to you. OK, huge giant brain disconnect. (There’s even a note next to the privacy policy saying “feel safer now?”)

Why am I carefully not giving their name away? Because I know some people will want to rush over and buy their stuff, even though it’s illegal in some states and countries to send email broadcasts to people who haven’t opted in.

Yeah, I did try to contact the company for comment, but nobody was home. In the meantime I can bet you their excuse for this sorry biz model will be, “Oh but we only intend for customers to use the email addresses for one-to-one communications — not spamming.” Thing is, their target market is sales reps. And we all know most sales reps are not exactly overly-enlightened about what’s ok and what’s not with email. I’ve been spammed many, many times by sales reps from companies whose marketers have strict anti-spam policies. Except the rep didn’t know or understand them.

Ok, end of rant. (I feel better now.)

It seems to be official – Digitrends has ceased publishing … at least for now.

I’ve been respectfully competing with Andy Batkin, Digitrends’ founder, since way back in 1994, when he launched the world’s first newsletter on Internet marketing, and I launched the second 60 days later for my former-employer Phillips Publishing. (Noteably both were print publications!)

When I decided to launch MarketingSherpa almost two years ago, I knew it would be tough because folks like ClickZ and Digitrends dominated the Internet marketing news landscape already. And we basically had no money. It was wing and a prayer, sheer persistance, and by the skin of our teeth for a long time.

Now we’re up for a Tenagra Award for best pub this year, while Digitrends is apparently dead and ClickZ is melting, melting.

Maybe I should feel happy, but it’s the opposite. I’m bummed out. There’s nothing good about seeing competitors you respect losing it. Nothing.

Tenagra awards announcement

Oh what misery pricing new subscription products is. I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent years pricing new products and invariably come up wrong. (Most infamous: the time when my 1996 price tests revealed Internet execs would be willing to spend $95 a month or $1,250 a year to be FAXED the top 10 related biz news summaries of the day. Yeah, and more than 100 of them subscribed to it!)

Over the past couple of months I couldn’t help but notice two trends in the pricing arena. The first is the plethora of free site, ezine, and discussion group publishers emailing surveys to their opt-in readers in order to ask, “What would you pay if we charged?” (And pretty much these days it seems if you’re not owned by either a trade magazine or internet.com you’ve sent out one of these surveys.) See our story below about that.

The second trend is that online B-to-B publishers are launching paid subscription offerings at rock bottom, scavenger-level prices such as $3.95 a month, $10 a quarter, $19 a year….

Enough already! Just because lots of online B-to-B content was free in the past doesn’t mean, now that we’ve all agreed to charge, that we should devalue it. If you are insecure about your new pricing model as least have the decency to cloak your maidenly fears in “special discounts” — as in Current Reader Discount, Buy Before September 1st Discount, and Co-Marketing Partner Limited-Time Discount. Lou Betancourt of BULL MARKET REPORT told me this week that he’s slowly using various offers (openly promoted as limited time discounts) to bring his paid subscribers in stages up from $129-$199 over the next year.

What’s a reasonable price point for a Web-only product? Whatever a print subscription publication, of similar editorial “value” and percent ad sales, would normally charge. Plus more ’cause you’ve probably got easy-to-search archives, minus less ’cause you are e-only. (So why not call it even?)

What’s a reasonable circulation sales rate for a paid non-ad-based product? In my experience — and this is a VAST generalization — it’s about 1/100th of the circulation you could expect as a “free” controlled circulation trade magazine or nominally priced consumer rag. (So yes, Fairchild’s reported expectations of winning thousands of $995 subscribers for its new WWD.com service are absurd.)

While there are loud and persistent rumors afloat that several major players, including NY Times Digital, are launching a new Online Publisher’s Association in 1-2 weeks, I’m actually going to refer you to an older, mainly print-world association to help you figure out subscription pricing. Yup, the NEPA – Newsletter and Electronic Publishing Association (http://www.newsletters.org) — may be your best bet for getting pricing standards for subscription print competitors in your niche. Just buy their membership directory and check pricing for yourself.

In the meantime, stop slamming your content with begging bowls and rock-bottom prices. By low-balling your price, you devalue your product. Have some pride. Gird your loins. And if you fail, look first to your content’s perceived value and your direct marketing tactics. Pricing is NOT always at fault.