MarketingSherpa Blog

Made a flying visit (in and out of DC in under 6 hours) to the NEPA show(www.newsletters.org) yesterday. Wish I could have stayed longer, but an insane editorial schedule here precluded that. Quick notes:

– Email is finally on the table for the print newsletter publishers, mostly as a marketing tactic. I spoke with half a dozen publishers who were mailing hundreds of thousands of emails per month to their usually-very niche markets. The real success seems to be on the ancillary products front. You can sell free email subs reports, videos, event tickets, audio conferences, etc. The subscription sales front is a harder pitch than a one-off to a free list.

– Everyone at the editorial roundtable I attended seemed to be focusing on how to get more from a tight editorial team when you can’t hire more people and the content bar is constantly rising.
When I said, “Oh my problem is hiring people who can write solid, detailed business how-to content quickly and concisely for online publication, I’m looking for several and I’m in hiring hell.” Everyone started sputtering.

The editors around the table definitely thought I was a clueless jerk. “There are so many good people looking for work! I turn them away!” said one. “I find the problem isn’t with the writers, it’s with the training the publication gives them,” noted another.

Afterwards though, a few people on the publisher-end came up to me individually to say, “You are right, you know. It’s almost impossible to find really good newsletter writers. There are lots of would-bes, but few home runs.” I felt a lot better.

– Entrepreneurs are on the rise again. I met about eight people who had quite their jobs and were busy working on a print subscription newsletter launch scheduled for this summer. They were all very niche, and deeply passionate about their topic.
Often from the expert or editorial end of things, rarely do print newsletter founders come from the marketing/management end of things.

– We definitely need a group who can talk about company management issues for successful independent publishers at the 3- 6-year mark with $500k-$3 mill sales. Several of us agreed the problem is less what to do about marketing or editorial, and more about managing cash flow, legal, admin, launches, etc. In other words, running a growing company.

I’m talking to folks about founding some sort of “Successful Sophmores” group of publishers, let me know if you’re interested.

aholland@marketingsherpa.com

Nancy Beckman just let me know she’s launched CPA Tipline, a no-cost newsletter for publishers and advertisers who want to connect about CPA advertising. I think it’s a great idea, especially if she can help publishers weed through the cruddy offers from slimy operators and find the good ones that are worth investing a test in.

http://www.cpatipline.com

According to this quick article in Editor & Publisher, the New York Times Digital ceased sending breaking news version of it’s emailed News Tracker service several months ago because “of technical delays resulting from having more than 1 million users.”

On this Wednesday they plan to tell the 500,000 regular News Tracker email recipients that the service will not be free anymore. The service will cost $19.95 year starting June 13th and go up to $29.95 sometime later (which allows NYT marketers to plug a $10.00 off offer for a while now).

This news underlines one harsh fact: Email isn’t no-cost to send. It may be cheaper than postal mail, but it’s not free.

When I joined a NEPA roundtable on the economics of publishing yesterday, the moderator said, “Oh here’s Anne who doesn’t have to worry about spending money on fulfillment.” I immediately objected, “Hey I spend a lot on email list hosting and on email production staff, not to mention building the back-end database and Web design and hosting. Online publishing isn’t cheap or free.” Everyone looked startled. Well, welcome to reality.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jspvnu_content_id=1898063

eDiets, the leading subscription site in the weight-loss category, has been a pretty closely held private company, until
now. They are presenting at the upcoming RedChip San Francisco Investor Conference Wednesday, June 4 2003, at 9:30 A.M. PT.

David Humble, CEO, Robert Hamilton, CFO, and Alison Tanner, Chief Strategist, will discuss the Company’s business strategy, recent
developments and outlook. The Company’s presentation will be Web cast live for investors and will be avail for replay following the conference at:

http://www.firstcallevents.com/service/ajwz382678364gf12.html

I have preached in the past that marketers with common sense
would stick some important links on the right-hand side of Web
pages because people read English left-to-right and most people
click using their right hand.

It seemed like a “duh.”

Then I learned that a usability lab in NYC has repeatedly tested
this for loads of prominent sites … and found consumers ignore
the right-hand column almost completely because it’s a spot that
so often contains advertising.

Seems that Web surfers’ eyes have been trained to stop looking at
all places on pages that routinely carry advertising — even if
the site they are on is ad-free.

Whoa.

So last weekend our Web designer Ryan took time out from his
heavy barbeque schedule to begin switching all the links on
MarketingSherpa sites from the right side to the left side.

Now we’ll begin to track to see if it makes a difference or not
in clicks and conversions.

In the meantime, I’m wondering does this rule apply for HTML
email newsletter design too?? If you know, contact me.

I have preached in the past that marketers with common sense
would stick some important links on the right-hand side of Web
pages because people read English left-to-right and most people
click using their right hand.

It seemed like a “duh.”

Then I learned that a usability lab in NYC has repeatedly tested
this for loads of prominent sites, and found consumers ignore
the right-hand column almost completely because it’s a spot that
so often contains advertising.

It seems that Web surfers’ eyes have been trained to stop looking at
all places on pages that routinely carry advertising, even if
the site they are on is ad-free.

Whoa.

Last weekend our Web designer Ryan took time out from his
heavy barbeque schedule to begin switching all the links on
MarketingSherpa sites from the right side to the left side.

Now we’ll begin to track to see if it makes a difference or not
in clicks and conversions.

In the meantime, I’m wondering does this rule apply for HTML
email newsletter design too? If you know, contact me.

15 minutes ago I got a call from my Dad.

“I don’t want to bother you at work,” he said, “but you should
know the email you sent me this morning about getting a trainer
for your dog was flagged by my ISP as ‘Maybe Spam’.”

I flipped open my ‘sent mail’ folder and reviewed the note I’d
written him. Even with all of Sherpa’s research on how filters
work, there was nothing, nada, zilch, I could see that would make
any filter system think my little note was evil.

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed the same thing
happening to much of your sent email – whether it’s bulk mail or
just individual notes.

Over-zealous filters are stopping a heck of a lot of non-junk
mail.

So, when AOL and MSN both announced this week that 80% of the
email their users are getting is unwanted junk, it made me wonder
what part of that 80% is misidentified good stuff – like my note
to Dad.

In the filter world they call it “false positives” and no one
admits how many of those they stop from getting to email users.

In reaction to this, I held a Sherpa-wide staff meeting this week
to announce a new Company policy: if a communication to anyone is
really important, always, always, always follow-up with a phone
call. Never assume email got through.

It so often doesn’t.

15 minutes ago I got a call from my Dad.

“I don’t want to bother you at work,” he said, “but you should
know the email you sent me this morning about getting a trainer
for your dog was flagged by my ISP as ‘Maybe Spam.'”

I flipped open my ‘sent mail’ folder and reviewed the note I’d
written him. Even with all of Sherpa’s research on how filters
work, there was nothing, nada, zilch, I could see that would make
any filter system think my little note was evil.

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed the same thing
happening to much of your sent email, whether it’s bulk mail or
just individual notes.

Over-zealous filters are stopping a heck of a lot of non-junk
mail.

Wen AOL and MSN both announced this week that 80% of the
email their users are getting is unwanted junk, it made me wonder
what part of that 80% is misidentified good stuff, like my note
to Dad.

In the filter world they call it “false positives” and no one
admits how many of those they stop from getting to email users.

In reaction to this, I held a Sherpa-wide staff meeting this week
to announce a new Company policy: If a communication to anyone is
really important, always, always, always follow-up with a phone
call. Never assume email got through.

It so often doesn’t.

“What’s next now that email isn’t going to work much longer?” was
a question I saw posted on a marketing message board last week.

Everyone is fretting, fretting, fretting about whether bulk mail
overload will cause their lists to stop responding.

In the meantime whenever I talk to marketers one-on-one, I always
ask, “Are your response rates plunging?” “Well no,” they
invariably tell me.

After 350 Case Studies, many of them on email campaigns, I can
tell you that the death of email is vastly overstated. Marketers
have gotten so much smarter about their messages, list selection,
segmentation, etc., that it balances out the worst of the email
overload.

A good campaign or newsletter will still work wonders.

Just found a very informative two-part article by Tim Archambault, New Media Coordinator at Bangor Daily News/Bangornews.com. He explains why they decided to require reader registration at their site, and how it affected things.

He notes, “An approximate 12 percent drop in page views occurred during the first month, but the number of pages quickly recovered
to its previous level during the second month. There was no extraordinary marketing efforts to increase our page views.”

Also, although the newspaper’s registration count of 90,000 is bigger than its print circ count of 63,000 circ for the print daily, just 10% of online registered users are subscribers to the print version. To get this fairly high registration rate, they did a promo with a sweeps for $50 worth of lobsters.

Archambault also noted that requiring registration means your customer service will rise dramatically. 66% of customer service
queries in the month of March were due to online reg queries, mostly people having trouble with passwords.

http://www.digitaledge.org/DigArtPage.cfm?AID=4693