MarketingSherpa Blog

If you publish a text-version of an email newsletter, and you (or youreditors) write it in Word to then transfer to your send file, here’s a great tip from John Engler at Inluminent. He says:

“I read your email newsletters on a Macintosh, and it really sucks to try and read something that’s copied from MS Word into a plain text email, because the non-ascii quotes and apostrophes don’t translate on a Mac. I’d like to recommend that you scrub all of your outgoing plain text email with TextSoap (which does a lot of manual work for you automatically) to change any curly quotes or apostrophes into straight quotes or apostophes (which are ascii stanards across platforms).
http://www.unmarked.com/textsoap_win.html ”

This software might also be useful when you get in articles from freelancers and other contributors, who in my experience always stick in stuff like tabs, auto-numbering, etc. which can be a pain when you’re on deadline to laboriously take out so you can use their story.

(Note: Mac-users will notice we didn’t use TextSoap for this issue, because hey we’ll look into it, but got 8 weeklies to put out and other stuff has priority. It’s coming soon.)

Does publicity help site traffic and/or help you grow opt-ins?? I’ve heard some site owners swear by it, especially those in niche markets that got great publicity in related niche media. I’ve heard other site owners swear it doesn’t do a thing, especially broader sites with coverage in broader media outlets. In our case, since the articles in CNET, NY Times, DM News, and elsewhere came out last week, we saw about 30% more site traffic*but* not noteably more opt-ins than usual. We grew about the same amount that we always do.

I did get emails from old friends who saw my (awful) pic in the NY Times. Which was fun, but doesn’t make a difference in business. Of course a zillion calls from vendor sales reps.
Ughh.

My top 3 tips on picking offer expire dates:

1. Pick a day in the middle of the week, especially if you have an email or fax list to the same people so you can broadcast a 24-hour’s left alert the day before to bump response.

2. Never pick a day near the start of a month (such as Oct 1st) because everybody the month before thinks the next month is much much further away than it really is. Way more urgency to Sept 30th than Oct 1st.

3. In B2B marketing (especially events with a longer lead time) always tell them how many business days they have left because that’s much more urgent than regular days. Example:

You have just 3 business days left to save $100.00 on your ticket to the “Email Newsletter Publisher’s Profit Workshop” at http://sherpastore.com/store/page.cfm/1979

(Um, yeah that was a shameless self-promotional plug there at the end, but hey, I gave value.)

Oh gosh darn, I suck. I meant to mention Wabash & Lake’s upcoming seminar on “Creating Customer Evangelists” in SherpaWeekly this week. Then I completely forgot. It’s an event that I wish I could attend myself (I’ll be moving house that day or I would), it’s that, well I’m moving house now and seems like everything is misplaced, half-forgotten and/or crazy.

Here’s the thing, everybody I interview in the B2B world (especially agencies and consultancies of all sizes) tells me that half or more of their sales come through referrals. You could say referrals are 100% responsible for many people’s profit margins. Hardly anyone focuses on referral marketing aside from the odd “send this email to a friend” viral-thingy. We just assume referrals will take care of themselves.

As a marketer, there’s one rule I’ve learned: that every kind of marketing has rules. Marketing is absolutely more of a science than an art. It makes sense that the science of getting referrals, or customer evangelism as Wabash & Lake call it, would be a mission critical thing for us all to learn more about. In fact, probably far more important to the bottom line than most other stuff marketers spend a lot of time on. Rant over. If you are anywhere near Chicago (or can get there) see if you can go to this day-long workshop.

Well, thanks to fellow-Sparklist client Andy Sernovitz, who must have a press roladex ™ that paid flacks would give their eyeteeth for, I’ve been interviewed by the four biggies in the past 48 hours (WSJ.com, The New York Times, DMNews and CNET) about the fact that our email lists were stolen. (Our original article http://www.MarketingSherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2139)

The Times sent over a photographer to take action shots of me being an email publishing exec in my office today. About the only action that happened over the 45-minute session was their own reporter calling with more questions, and me peering intently at incoming email. The final story was slightly inaccurate. I’m not remotely a consultant and we publish 8 newsletters, not five. But the spin, anti-spammers’ lists being stolen, was interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/12/technology/12MAIL.html

DMNews was probably the most fun interview because my pal and sometime-competitor Ken Magill was lead guy for this one, so he got all the critical parts of the story without any explanations on my part about why email list security matters anyway. I think Ken’s story on this whole situation turned out the best of the lot. Plus we wasted valuable company time with frivolous gossip, which is always a plus.

http://www.dmnews.com (search under my last name “Holland”)

WSJ.com was neat because, hey it’s always a thrill to feel a little self-important because you’ve got the Wall Street Journal calling with questions. Their email reporter Stacy Forster is also obviously dedicated to her beat. She had good questions, and even sent a polite “thank you” email follow-up. (Heck even we don’t do that with sources.) However, there doesn’t seem to have been an actual story published yet.

Last but not least CNET won the award for swiftest coverage. (Thanks to Bob Rankin for sending the link to my attention.) The CNET article definitely quoted me accurately. It was also a good reminder to me that press reporting is a “free” form of marketing for a good reason, you don’t control the message. This guy spun the story (as was his right) to make it sound a bit like I was alone in the woods crying “problem” when there was not such a big problem.

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-957567.html

Joe Esposito over at Portable CEO, who subscribes to the hard copy edition of the New York Times at his office in LA, just wrote in regarding today’s Case Study on NYTimes Digital, “the Times has not segmented its readership; the people who are paying $600/yr for hardcopy still have to pay for access to the archives. Enough is enough! I’m all for paid online content, but at some point you just get angry.I would pay a premium to get *high-quality* content with no ads. Not that hardcopy publishers have the option, since it would be impossible to print two editions. But online? I raised this question with the Wall Street Journal, to which I subscribe to the online edition only ($60/year, as I recall). I said I would pay $250 if I could get the online version without the ads. I’m still waiting.”

On one hand, it’s probably not worth it for the WSJ.com or NYTimes.com to create an entirely ad-free service just for the very few folks who would ante up, which is why they haven’t.

On the other hand, I suspect there are some very real, very profitable opportunities for sites like this, and many, many others, if they used classic, time-tested database marketing tactics to create more new products for eager micro-niches. This is a point I’ve harped on before, especially when it comes to the big online bookstores, none of which have yet to send me a marketing campaign recognizing that as an online book buyer who spends more than $5000 a year I’m any different from the average Joe Blow who buys a book once in a blue moon.

Partially I think this stems from both the classic dot-com and newspaper backgrounds of sell a zillion people something that suits the masses’ needs and profit heaps. I come from the B2B niche publishing world of sell a few people something high priced that serves them perfectly and profit heaps, so I’m prejudiced.

http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2145

Our long-suffering ad sales trafficking manager is just emailed me per our media kit’s new avoid-spam-filters ad creative rules, (typos mine) “I have the ad for Thursday however, I had to send it back because it read something this: F^REE, F*REE, CLICK H^ERE … blah,blah,blah. They are revising can I get you the Ad tomorrow? Please let me know.”

I feel guilt about this, because let’s face it, ad trafficking is job-from-hell and now s*pam filters are making it even harder.

Ironic event of the week: Some spammer is forging headers to look like the email is coming from SpamCop. What’s funny is the
statement SpamCop’s posted on his site: It ain’t me, babe.
After asking not to be blocked, he explains, by way of defense, that: “Unfortunately, since we’re not responsible for sending it, there is little we can do to stop it.” Try that excuse to get un-blacklisted by SpamCop the next time you get false complaints against you.
http://www.julianhaight.com/forgery.shtml

Reader Harry Hoover of Hoover PR Ink just emailed over a list of useful free PR links online, to supplement to list of Top 25 Free Online PR Resources we published this spring:

If you are a marketer publishing an email newsletter for promotional purposes, and you have an issue due out Sept 11th, my suggestion is to move your issue to the 12th. The 10th is too close (in fact any recipients in Asia and Australia will already be “in” the 11th) and frankly you risk offending people on the 11th.

I’m personally a gung ho let’s-keep-the-economy-strong-and-rolling-as-our-first-defense person. My personal inclination would be to publish and promote on the 11th just as sort of a flag waving activity in and of itself. However, my own feelings don’t matter in this area. My readers and customers feelings are what counts. And some of them would be deeply offended if we published. I respect that entirely. We’re not publishing or doing any marketing activities on the 11th.