MarketingSherpa Blog

eFinance Insider has published a fascinating in-depth interview with ON24’s former Chief Content Officer Mitch Ratcliffe. If you are remotely interested or involved in broadband content online, I suggest you read it.

Ratcliffe shares his insights into how Web surfers use broadband, how lowering delivery costs change the playing field, what content he thinks will sell the most subscriptions online, and what he’s learned as an advisor to other companies such as Audible, Web-X and Match.com. Plus, his picks for the most exciting trends for online content going forward. (Yeah, Blogging wins again.)

http://www.efinanceinsider.com/email9402.htm

NEPA (Newsletter & Electronic Publisher’s Assn) is about to publish their new member directory and just announced they’ve seen some interesting trends in subscription print newsletter pricing over the past couple of years. Here are a few insights from their recent newsletter:

One third of NEPA member newsletters increased prices in the past year, which is just half the number who’d raised prices the year before. Also, the amount they raised prices was much smaller, just 7.96% raise on average vs. nearly 14% the year before.

Nearly 60% of newsletters have prices ending in “9” or “5.” The next biggest chunk is almost 20% with prices ending in “7.” Just 10% end in “0.” Other numbers are low single digits.

They also reported trends in total price (the most popular price overall was $150-199 with 12% of the pack) however I withhold further comments on this because they didn’t break out B2B versus B2C and since pricing is so incredibly different in the two fields, I don’t think you can look at trends when they are mixed into the same pot.

http://www.newsletters.org

The bad news first: I’ve heard from a few research publishers that INT Media
(Internet.com) has told them that it is ceasing to sell third party reports through its CyberAtlas and AllNetResearch services this month in order to concentrate on its own Jupiter reports. This wasn’t a big income stream for anybody I know, but those little incremental sales can add up over time.

The good news: A new Ireland-based firm, Research And Markets, just launched. They’re interested in selling B2B publications including “premium” newsletters, management reports, syndicated market research, conference proceedings, CD ROMs, audiotapes, technical guidebooks, etc. from all countries (especially the US) into the European market. Their deal is 50/50 split with publishers, which is fairly standard.

Unlike MarketResearch.com their standard contract does *not* ask that you allow your content be split and sold in smaller pieces on demand (I’ve always been against this, because many research reports are sold to buyers who just want that one chart for their presentation. I’ve found if you say, “Too bad buddy you want the chart, buy the whole report.” they will usually ante up).

Mike Bell at Research and Markets tells me, “My personal target is to get 750 of the content sources signed by Christmas, which so far seems realistic.” He asks that everyone with business, trade or technical content to sell on a non-exclusive basis through his service email publishers@researchandmarkets.com.
You’ll get an authorization letter that lets you upload your own reports so you can start selling within 24 hours.

Bell says the firm sells via telesales, its own email newsletters, Web marketing, direct mail and fax. He also noted that the firm is moving into offices next to the Guinness Brewery this week, which has got to be a portent of great things to come!

http://www.researchandmarkets.com

It’s been tech hell week for us. A big part of the hell hasn’t been so much the fact that technology breaks, as much as it is how awful tech companies are to deal with. Alexis says that’s because tech companies think of themselves as just that: People who make and fix technology. They don’t think of themselves as being in the service industry. As in serving customers’ needs.

Two big tech companies who make our business possible had huge nasty problems this week. In one case we couldn’t send out any of our email issues. In the other case, our merchant account processing stopped working so customers got errors when they tried to buy at our store.

Both of these companies did something I consider unthinkable. Instead of reaching out to customers like us to let us know us know what was up, and what an estimated fix time was, and perhaps offering alternate suggestions so we could keep our business going while waiting for their fixes… they turned inward and presented their backs to the world. In one case the help phone line held a recorded message saying, “We’re too busy to help you.” In another case the phone line held a recorded message saying “Leave a message at our general mailbox.” In neither case did we get emailed alerts during the crisis, nor did we get personal emails returned.

I finally reached a PR rep at one of the companies. When asked why they didn’t at least issue bulletins to customers who were depending on their service, he said, “Because people don’t read email.” Yeah.

Here’s a message to all tech companies. When you have breakdowns, it’s ok as long as you keep customers in the loop continuously. Customers understand breakdowns. Customers don’t understand being ignored.

Excellent! Today just as I was complaining to one of our reporters on the phone that the term “CRM” has been so over-used, abused and confused that it’s basically meaningless, Bob Thompson who heads up CRMGuru.com emailed everyone saying he’s changing the name of his newsletter (which more than 100,000 business execs get) to “CustomerThink” because in the end that’s what really matters.

It may be a made up word, but as far as I’m concerned it’s my word for the day.

Which would you rather have to change, your email address or your credit card account?

In today’s MarketingSherpa, we pointed out that the list of opt-in email addresses that you have collected from site visitors is most vulnerable when it is sitting on your list host’s (or your own) server.

I’ve given this a bit more thought, and it occurs to me that while most merchants encrypt the credit cards of the customers who make purchases from them (if you’re not, you should be), none that I know of encrypt the email addresses of customers. An encrypted field makes the database far less valuable to a hacker, and protects your customers even from an employee who is in a position to take a backup of your database home with him.

Yet, upon further reflection, it’s obvious to me that (at least in the United States), most email users who have had their email addresses for more than a year and are in the addressbooks of other professionals *at that address* would be far more willing to have to get a new credit card number (and update any companies that directly debit their accounts) than get a new email address, and try to reach everyone who might have contacted them at their current email addresses. Yes, I know there are services that will handle email forwarding, but between finding an infinite number of people from whom I *want* to hear via email, and contacting the handful of companies that charge my credit card monthly, it’s a no-brainer. I AM my email address in a way that I am not my credit card account.

Then, why is it that email vendors (A.K.A. List Hosts) don’t generally encrypt email addresses of subscribers on their servers?

What, you know of someone who does? Please tell us and we’ll blog it here.

In the meantime, we’d like you to take our very brief survey about your answer to my first question above and your perception of list security in general. Click here (only 5 brief multiple-choice questions).

Best emailed press release of the year (so far) just arrived in my email from the Talented agency in Scotland who obviously understand journalists’ reality. It begins:

“Hi Anne

Yer tea’s oot…

Wahoo! We nailed down the last of the 14 speakers and at long last the line-up for our long-awaited ContentBiz Email Newsletter Publisher’s Summit is up at the Summit site. Note the very cute “ticket” graphic by our Web guy Ryan.
http://sherpastore.com/store/page.cfm/1979

You’ll also probably be able to tell from the description of the show, that I was feeling annoyed when I wrote it. My frustration stems from the fact that loads of people lump email newsletter publishing all together into one pile no matter whether the newsletter is published as a business, or if it’s published as a marketing ploy by a non-media company. In fact, about half the people who nominated themselves initially to be speakers were on the marketing end. They wanted to do speeches about stuff like, ‘How to use an email newsletter to market your company.’

I culled through those and just invited the speakers who were experts on business issues if the newsletter itself IS your company! You know, stuff like how to sell ads, how to sell subscriptions, how to sell content-related ancillaries (ebooks, teleseminars, etc.).

Why do I care about this so passionately? Well partly because I get tired of being asked, ‘Well what does MarketingSherpa do?” by people who read our newsletters. “We’re a media company with 8 newsletters.” I say. They reply, “Yes, but what business are you really in?” Um, that would be publishing.

Approximately three weeks ago, some of our publisher MarketingSherpa’s email lists were compromised. We’re working with a group of our readers (those who track their email by using a special address unique to their opt-in with us, such as MarketingSherpa@) to determine the extent of the damage.

I didn’t mention it publicly because at first we weren’t sure it really happened. The techies assured me that there are several reasons why a spammer might get a hold of a particular email (for example by random-name-generation spamming programs), and it might not be that someone stole our lists and was now using them for nefarious purposes. Then I held off still longer because a new owner had taken over our list hosting firm and I wanted to give them a chance to rectify the situation.

They are working on it, putting new security measures in place, etc. (Our tech editor Alexis Gutzman will detail now-required security for lists in an upcoming column in our MarketingSherpa ezine at http://www.MarketingSherpa.com.)

However, as time went by the word got out. Two different email discussion groups have mentioned our plight in the past 24 hours.
Our reputation is very much at stake. One poster even suggested we were sending the spam ourselves and trying to cover up by lying about a hacker. (Yeah, like we’d risk the entire company we’ve spent three years of blood, sweat and no sleep building in order to send you a few porn messages.)

Unfortunately, the list theft problem has not been limited to us.
I know of five other publishers whose lists were also compromised by what appears to be the same hacker/spammer at roughly the same time. I won’t publish their names here because I don’t have permission to do so, and they shared their info with me as a fellow-publisher rather than as a reporter. However, they are very well known permission-based publishers, and between all of us upwards of a million opt-in subscriber addresses may have been stolen.

I want to thank those publishers for reaching out and sharing their info with me during this crisis. It has made a great deal of difference.

According to BusinessMedia’s email newsletter (join the list by sending a blank email to join-BusinessMedia@titan.sparklist.com ) Penton Media Inc has been notified by the NYSE that it’s in danger of being de-listed if it can’t yank its stock price up within six months. The company’s been hit by the B2B ad sales slump that according to the latest CMR ad revenue study have slashed average trade mag sales by 20.8% in the first half of 2002 vs. first-half 2001 (which itself was no bed of roses).

The only good news is that Penton’s Internet ad revenues fell by less than 5%. Even though the Company’s Net sales as a whole were a teeny 4.8% slice of the total online/offline rev pie, this success must be awfully pleasant for the Net team there who, like the rest of us, have suffered the slings and arrows of dot-com doom-predictors for the past two years.