MarketingSherpa Blog

Rick Stamberger’s company SmartBrief publishes email newsletters
for more than two dozen different marketplaces, so when I got a
chance to interview him for a Case Study this week (see below), I
asked the question we’re all dying to know these days:

“Which time of day is really the best to send email?”

His answer was it depends on when your target market is most likely
to read your message. For example, he sends email to restaurateurs
just after the lunch hour rush, to grade school teachers in the
late afternoon, and to consumer packaged goods CEOs around 10am.

His average open rates are higher than 70%, so he’s got to be doing
something right, and I bet carefully considering time of day is
part of it.

Turns out, you want to be around the top of the email pile at about
the time your audience turn on their computers to check it. Which
means sending late at night is stupid because your message will be
jumbled in the midst of a lot of other emails by the time
recipients see it (unless they are late shift workers).

It also means attaching time zone info to names on your list may be
critical for your success.

It’s incremental stuff like this that adds up over time to a better
ROI.

P.S. Link to Case Study on Rick’s Company:
http://library.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.cfm?ContentID=2240

A reader just wrote in, “My client [a print business publishing company] is planning to add an email update to their subscription service for both their weekly and monthly newsletters. Both titles deal in very time sensitive info, so the expectation is that e-updates will be a real value to subscribers. This question is, can this service be positioned as premium feature commanding a premium price, or is the better strategy to simply implement the e-updates as an added benefit without an added subscription fee?”

My answer was, “I’m not a consultant, just a lowly journalist, but in my opinion news is well, news. And no matter what niche you are in, news is considered lower-value content. People don’t pay for news anymore. So I would use the email version as a marketing tool to sell pass-along email readers on the value of a paid print subscription, and to sell ancillary products to current subscribers. That’s where the money is.”

It’s very, very, very smart to be able to offer something that helps you collect email addresses from your marketplace and gives you a valid reason to contact them frequently.

Wow. Unusually high feedback on my comments about SNAP, Weatherbug and putting content on the desktop. Here are quotes from two letters, one pro and one con:

>From Tom Baker, Founder WSJ.com, CEO Open Field Partners:

“Anyone remember Pointcast? Backweb? Plus a few other “push” companies I can’t even remember? I have scars from the painful investments of time and energy I put into those back when I did such deals. Yes, they were piggy and clunky applications. But the real issue was that people didn’t need what they did, and wouldn’t even use it for free, much less pay for it.

Let’s just say I’m a little skeptical. E-mail’s great, and there’s little consumer dissatisfaction. And adoption of odd clients and plugins is doubtful. (How many have apps not shipped with your Windows install have succeeded, besides the Real player, Acrobat, Napster/Kazaa, and the Google toolbar?)

Now, if you could push some high-value alerts to my phone or my PDA, where an e-mail client doesn’t rule the environment, maybe I’d be a little curious. But desktop push? Harumph.”

>From Harris Turner of the Frequent Travel Marketing Association:

“I agree that SNAP should have paid attention to current market offerings and as a result of their naivetŽ, their path will indeed be difficult. However, your assertion that people are reticent to download applications is just plain wrong. You surprise me in mentioning WeatherBug but not having done the homework to know that over 17 million have now downloaded that particular product. SideStep has over 2 million users. MilePro has tens of thousands. The New York Times utilizes NewsStand Scheduler and delivers their online product to the desktop of thousands via a downloaded application. And there are others too numerous to mention!

The idea of pre-loaded Internet parsing and retrieval agents is worthy of attention, but I don’t know of a single pre-loaded application that was integrated until it had already gained widespread acceptance. And these agents do a variety of tasks, so it will be challenging for computer manufacturers to determine which one(s) are primary to the majority of people.

Today’s Internet user is all about saving time, and it’s only a matter of time before the majority of people realize that for the repetitive use of dynamic information, browsers are totally inefficient. Give me products like WeatherBug, MilePro (that delivers all my frequent flyer programs via a simple desktop menu), or SideStep (that checks 100s of travel fares simultaneously), and I’ll keep my browser for Google searches.”

Me again: OK, I’m lining up an interview with the folks at Weatherbug right now to do a Case Study on this and find out what we can all learn from them. Look for it in a few weeks in ContentBiz! 🙂 Link to my original Blog about SNAP

http://contentbiz.blogspot.com/2003_01_12_contentbiz_archive.html#90179463

I had the weirdest conversation with Seth Godin on Friday. He called up to see if SherpaStore might be interested in carrying his new book Purple Cow which apparently is being featured on the cover of Fast Company magazine this week and also being sold via an offer email to Fast Company readers (you have to love that deal).

I said, well you gotta send a copy to our Reports Editor Alexis whose job it is to review outside reports and see if we should carry them. Then I said, since the Fast Company issue is coming out next week, you probably should email her a copy because if we decide to carry the book, we’ll sell more in conjunction with all the promo going on elsewhere.

Then he said, “No. I’ll fedex you a hard copy on Monday.”

Huh? He explained, “Well, I’m sure you guys are trustworthy, but you can never be entirely safe once your book has gotten out in electronic format.”

Which initially made sense to me, especially given that we don’t even publish our reports in PDF anymore because too many buyers blithely emailed copies to their friends and colleagues without realizing “hey this is breaking copyright.” (Now we publish in single-user-only HTML instead, and 90% of the very few people who complain admit the reason is because they were planning on sharing the PDF with others.)

It was only after I hung up the phone I suddenly thought: Hey didn’t Seth’s market his last book, The Idea Virus, by giving away electronic copies for free? Didn’t he tell me two years ago that it was the best book marketing tactic since sliced bread? Guess that biz model didn’t quite work. Old Seth Godin Case Study:

http://library.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.cfm?CID=648

“Print publishing is back in style,” says Charles Henderson, CEO NewsRX.com. Which is a funny quote from him because he’s always been pushing-the-tech-envelope-guy in the subscription newsletter industry. He was one of the first to have a Web site, to begin syndication sales to Web sites, to use automated engines to scoop up news from electronic/online sources and repackage as newsletters, to test selling pay-by-report sales for groups of articles, etc.

He’s still bullish on the Web. In fact last year he launched a streamed video series of coverage of health conferences (“video clips are kept to between 15 seconds and two minutes. If the video requires more than a minute or two, you’ll lose your audience”). For the first time in perhaps 5-7 years, he thinks the future, for now anyway, is still print. professionals are back subscribing to print newsletters in huge numbers.
“NewsRx is experiencing its highest renewal rates in 20 years: over 90 percent of subscribers are opting to renew print titles.”

This may have more to do with email overload and the slowing economy than anything else. I figure recipients are probably getting too much email and far less postal mail than they have in years. The little postal mail they do get, gets increased attention. Many marketers have told me in the past six months that postal direct mail response rates are up.

This isn’t a trend for forever, but it’s definitely a trend for first half 2003.

http://www.newsrx.com

Jim Hoing over at Sourcelink says they’ve got a new service in beta right now that may help publishers get around the whole email deliverability thing. It’s called SNAP (an acronymn chosen by someone who I guess had no idea that it’s already being used by the Society of National Association Publications. Hey guys, check Google prior to picking a product name next time).

Anyway, it’s one of those desktop items where when there’s news, users get a “flashing news bar on their application”. Right now about 600,000 people get weather alerts that way.

I’ve seen pitches from several companies over the past 18 months with ideas of this ilk. Forget email, we’ll stick your announcement right on the desktop, or in one case during the desktop power-on procedure. The main problem is that invariably these require a download. Average consumers hate, hate, hate downloads. They take too long, they might be viruses, their IT team yelled at them last time they downloaded something, it breaks, whatever.

Until you get your app stuck on desktops by the PC manufacturers so they ship with it installed as a default, you probably won’t make much progress.

There’s a real idea there somewhere: Weatherbug??

http://www.bellevue.com/snap/

A few weeks ago I was on the phone with someone, don’t remember who, and we were saying, “Is QPass even in business anymore?”

Mystery now solved. The Company, which as you may recall used to power big content sites pay-by-the-drink sales and had hoped to power lots of other small payment stuff online, just closed tralaa, $10,700,000 in series B funding. However, their biz model is entirely different. Instead of helping the New York Times sell archived articles, QPass helps AT&T and Cingular Wireless sell
“advanced services and content” such as Wi-Fi to J2MET.

http://www.qpass.com

Freelance writer Anastasia Ashman wrote in that she and her computer scientist husband just launched Writer’s Desk, an ASP service that other freelancers can use to organize, manage and track their article submissions, contracts, income and rights. I guess if you write a heck of a lot of articles this would be a very useful tool. It’s free for 30 days, and then it’s just $20 per year.

I’ll bet this would be useful for professional copywriters as well.

http://www.writers-desk.com

According to a study out from Ferris Research, spam will cost the US economy “over $10 billion this year” due to lost work hours.

Scott Anderson, President Shadow Marketing, emailed me, “Even if the research is flawed I’m sure some zealous politicians will
find ways to misuse it,” which made me laugh. It’s true though. Spam costs all of us a lot, but the reaction to spam may cost us email publishers and marketers even more. Think about how filters have made life hellish over the past year even for permission- based senders.

At this time last year, I wrote an article in ContentBiz saying 2002 would be the Year of the Filter. I don’t know what 2003 will
be, but I hope it’s not the-year-politicians-drove-permission-email-out-of-business.

http://www.ferris.com

In hopes of serving customers who don’t take the time to visit brick and mortar libraries anymore, the Cleveland library system
(and though it, many libraries throughout Ohio) is launching a new eBook lending program in March. Ohioans will be able to sign
up for a virtual library card and download their choice of about 1,000 titles to their PDAs to view/read during the time the title
is checked out in their name. They won’t be able to print the title out unless the publisher gives permission.

I has a conference call with one of the companies involved in this new ebook-library industry in December because they were
wondering about carrying Sherpa titles in their catalog. The business model was that each library would pay for a copy of one
of our Reports which they could then lend out to 100 patrons, after which time the copy would electronically “wear out” (mimicing a hard copy book) and they’d have to buy another.

I figured the only way this would work for us is if either we were sure the library marketplace were people who would never of
their own accord buy our reports, so we weren’t cannibalizing potential sales. Or if they were people who would buy many
reports thus turning our reports in the Library into more of a promotional vehicle for direct upsales.

For now, I’m not going ahead with it because the potential sales for niche products like ours were not big enough to make it worth
the time spent signing the deal and managing the project. I could do other stuff with that ultra-precious time resource that would
make more ROI for us. It’s worth watching for the future, and for less niche publishers.