MarketingSherpa Blog

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?

Weird press release of the day: Patrick Spain, CEO Alacritude whose business is based on reselling content aggregated by a separate company, just had his PR people send me a pitch asking if I’d like to interview him on how stupid his new competitors are. It’s not only ungentlemanly, it’s also kinda dumb because it draws my attention to said competitors and gets them ink.

Anyway, here’s the quote the PR folks suggest I use if I don’t have time to interview Spain personally:

Said Spain: “The KeepMedia business model is flawed. I know because I bought a company _ eLibrary _with the same business model and we are changing it as quickly as we can…. We have some 40,000 subscribers who access an archive of 17 million articles from consumer, business and industry publications. If we weren’t developing new products, we would be a nice, profitable little company with limited growth prospects.”

People, including us, who focus their long-term online business on selling a selection of content will fail. What people want is single point of access to all online content, whether free or paid, utilizing compelling tools to turn that content into useful and actionable answers for their personal or business needs.”

I guess nobody ever told Spain about the guy who runs Pipefitters.com — over $1 million per year sold of a tightly niched selection of content.

Thing is, some content buyers prefer to buy from boutique specialists, even if it is all available at a megastore elsewhere. And boutiques can be very profitable because you can focus marketing spend.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in notes this weekend about my Blog on Amazon’s weirdly disjointed new product postings. David
Gewirtz of ZATZ summed it up nicely, “We have our ebooks distributed through Amazon as well, and when I first set up the
distribution ONIX file, I went nuts trying to figure out why some images showed, some descriptions did, but others didn’t and so
on. Basically, it just takes time (assuming your file is formatted right). After about six weeks, everything was all nice ‘n stuff.”

And some publishers (who declined to be named here) said I should just be glad I wasn’t trying to sell printed copies. Apparently
these can take even longer to work their way through “the system” from the day the warehouse signs for delivery and the day they
show up “in stock” online, even if there is a pre-existing sales page.

However I can’t whine too much, because that’s tempting fate to slam me with horrible slow processes as we grow our own bookstore
online. Don’t want people blogging about how awful it is to work with SherpaStore someday!

http://www.zatz.com/

Weirdest spam of the weekend:

For the first time in 20 years, America is going to witness the launch of a new nationwide newspaper. “THE USA TIMES” will launch on Jan. 1 2004, and the promotion is on now. You can join for free and bring other members into the program to get a great residual income for life.

They are promoting it through MLM and paying on 5 levels, Everybody reads the newspaper. You could earn thousands of dollars in residual income for life!

But it made me wonder — now that many newspapers’ circulation departments are freaking because the new Do Not Call list includes them (in many states they had thought they could use local laws to get around it) they’re gonna have to find a marketing tactic to replace the average 39% of print paper subs sold by telemarketing. So that crazy spam may actually forecast future tests.

Note: this article in Editor & Publisher on this topic has a generalized statement that “telemarketing: It has the worst retention rate of all the methods the NAA measured.”

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1937713

An affiliate of the New York Times (print) just spammed me with what appears to be an authorized mailing.

As I’ve noted in our MarketingSherpa List of Shame repeatedly – print subscription sellers are among the absolute worst as an industry when it comes to allowing spammers to mail their offers. I assume they put out the offer on a CPA basis and then don’t care who sends it or what list they send to — just pay for positive results an figure the bad can’t hurt them because the spammers IP server will be shut down or black-listed, not the circulation marketer’s.

This reveals an almost complete disconnect between the direct response-driven (genumbers now) headset of mag circulation marketers, and the ultra-image-sensitive headset of the brand marketers who place ads in magazines.

Every time a major CPG or other big consumer brand has shown up on the List of Shame, their agency and often their internal brand managers have been all over us in a matter of minutes to find out where the bad mail came from and stop it.

Only a couple of the magazines who’ve shown up on our list have fretted over it. From the rest – silence.

I’m sitting here waiting for my best friend Anthony to call me from his cell phone and tell me he’s lost somewhere on the way to my house.

We first met more than 10 years ago when he called me up from a direct competitor to ask if we could swap publication buyer mailing lists. I said, “Heck yes.”

That’s because people in the offline paid publishing world all know that aside from their in-house list, direct competitor’s buyer lists are the most profitable lists you can mail. It’s well proven that information buyers tend to buy more information on the same topic — as long as the title appears to just different enough from the stuff they already bought to also be useful.

The differences don’t have to be that big. For example, if a competitor told me he was doing a report on “Advanced subscription sales tactics” or “Selling subscriptions to
consumers” and he wanted to swap lists with the buyers of my general “How to sell subscriptions” report, I’d say ok. We’re both going to grow our businesses easily that way. It’s a happy thing.

Which explains why many print paid publishers are not only close friends with direct competitors, but also they are careful to develop complimentary products rather than identical head-to-head twins.

With complimentary products everyone makes more money because they can cross-promote. With head-to-head, it’s a waste unless the market is a giant boomtown that can sustain almost anything *and* you intend to never ask competitors to swap lists for other products in the future. (Because no one will swap with someone who might cross-sell a head-to-head.)

I suspect in the online world, competitor-who-will-swap-lists relations are even more invaluable than they are offline, simply because there are so few online-content-buyer lists on the rental market. Swapping may be your only chance at getting your hands on good lists.

If you view the competition as “the enemy we must beat”, you’re going to lose. If you view them as “our best marketing partner who we treat as well as possible”, you’re going to win.

Thanks to all of you who wrote me in response to last week’s
SherpaBlog. Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve learned from
you:

– Pages must print:

If you decide to switch right-hand links to the left-side of
pages based on the usability-lab research I mentioned last week,
make sure users can print pages without losing any information
off the right edge.

I had our Web guy Ryan add a “print this story” button to the top
and bottom of every article on our site to help with this
problem.

– SEO is unaffected:

For those of you who were concerned that your search engine
optimization might be affected by moving links from the right to
the left, I asked expert Jill Whalen of HighRanks.com for advice.

Jill said, “Either way of having the links makes absolutely no
difference to the search engines. Unless your HTML page is over
110K (not including graphics), the spiders will index *all* the
content and follow *all* the links.”

– For ecommerce keep your buy button right-side:

Click analysis researcher, David Niu of NetConversions told me
based on his data, “A retail best-practice that we’ve observed is
that call-to-action should be placed on the right-hand side and
most cross sell and up sell opportunities are also best placed
there or under the product.”

– In email, right-side links not always visible:

Loads of you wrote in to note that when it comes to email
newsletters, you don’t always open your window all the way to
read. Smaller windows = right-hand columns being cut off.

So if a newsletter (or other mailer) wants clicks, don’t put
critical stuff over on the far right.

Steve Reitmeister who heads up Zacks.com (who do online subscription sales for a lot of print newsletters on personal investing – see link to my case study on their tactics below), just gave me permission to share this note with you:

Too often all of us “Online Savvy” marketers rely so heavily on email because it is so cheap, so fast and has such great ROI. All this is true. But given the tremendous rise in email, many people are becoming “detached” from the medium.

What’s my point? We are starting to re-introduce a little bit of direct mail back into the mix as we are finding that it stands out more in this world of email overload. Here is my best example:

We recently tested sending direct mail pieces to current subscribers [originally sold via online] to entice them to upgrade to the annual subscription. The notion being that a commitment to annual subscription of $200 right now instead of $20 per month deserves more umph! on our part. And direct mail being more “REAL” gave us that extra umph.

Unfortunately we did not do a split test, but know from previous efforts that the response was superior. Here are the basic #s:

In the past we have emailed customers to upgrade to annual from monthly. We generally get a 1% conversion rate. But when we did the direct mail we got a 3% conversion rate. So lets say we were talking 1000 messages each.

1000 emails = cost of $0
1% conversion
10 new annual subscribers.
@ $200 per
$2000 in revenue
$2000 in profit

1000 direct mail pieces = cost of $500 (simple 2 page letter, stuffed in envelope @ 50 cents per)
3% conversion
30 new annual subscribers
@ $200 per
$6000 in revenue
$5500 in profit

For those who do ROI on % basis I guess the $2000 looks great against cost of zero. But I will take the latter any day of the week. Given the success of this I am also having my B2B group do more initial solicitation of prospects via direct mail with handwritten envelopes. I believe it will stand out more than the 100 solicitation mails they get on a daily basis.

Too early to say success rate, but my gut tells me it will be hard to go wrong.”

My note: Based on the Case Study I did on B2B subscription seller HCPro recently where they revealed DM gets subs that renew better than email sales, I would say Steve is onto a good idea.

Zach’s Case Study:
http://www.contentbiz.com/barrier.cfm?ContentID=2313

HCPro Case Study:
http://www.contentbiz.com/barrier.cfm?currentID=2376

Irony of the day — this one made me laugh hard: The launch issue of Primedia’s new email newsletter “Chief Marketer” just showed up in my email box featuring a Big Honking Banner Ad from a vendor that read:

“The Do Not Call List is growing by the minute…
Over 30 states have passed email regulations…
Isn’t it time to start leveraging direct mail again?”

Yup, sell old media with an ad in new media explaining that new media is dying.