MarketingSherpa Blog

Yet more Irony. Reader Catherine Nowocien of The ABC Companies just emailed over to say that our SherpaWeekly issue this morning which featured an article on how to avoid spam filters, was blocked by her own email system as, yup, spam. It is times like these you have to be grateful that you have a sense of humor. Because otherwise…

Oh now a second reader emailed in. Turns out we were filtered by Yahoo as well. Fine, dandy, arrrgh!

Because everyone on this planet reported on the OPA online content sales study when it was released last week, I did not feel the need to Blog it. I figured you guys already saw this stuff, why repeat the masses?

However, this afternoon I spent some time really looking over the numbers their research partner comScore revealed. I must
say, how come many of the numbers don’t match the numbers I hear from publishers both on and off-the-record? Here’s the weird thing: comScore’s numbers are far more positive than most publisher’s numbers. Ego-wise, you would expect the opposite. Publishers saying “We’re so successful” and reality showing a harder face.

The most unbelievable metric comScore revealed was that more than 17% of free ezine readers convert to being paid subscribers.
Whaaaat??

I would like to stress the fact that I like and respect the folks at comScore and their research methodologies are darned impressive. Millions of consumers reporting into panels. Lovely primary data. So what’s up? I’m going to call them…

[Note: Several folks involved with the study who read this Blog have already gotten back to me to set up conversations. Thanks! I’ll be sure to post all my notes here, as always.]

Link to 17-page PDF of study results:

http://www.onlinepublishers.org/opa_paid_content_report_final.pdf

Welcome to the land of Irony. In order to read an article on the PC World Web site featuring this sentence in the very first paragraph, “Online advertising is more cunning, aggressive, and infuriating than ever. More than 25 percent of top Web destinations now use some kind of in-your-face marketing tactics”, I had to battle my way past an annoying pop-up ad that one of PC World’s own advertisers placed there.

A few minutes later, and now a second PC World advertiser pop-up hits me. The fun just never ends.

Just arrived in my in-box, [caps mine] “Hello, Dan McCarthy from RankYou.com. We currently have a product that is a great fit with
your audience. The product is this: www.nopop.net. Consumers hate pop-ups. We ran a solo-mailing ad out to our Sex-E-Bits database of 1.6 million consumers, and we generated over 1,000 sales after two issues. You can promote NoPop.net with banners, Ezine ads, solo-mailings, POP-UPS, any way you want to.”

Boy oh boy, 1,000 sales out of 3.2 million emails. Think of the wealth at $5.50 commission per sale that could be mine if I sent this offer to our 12,000 name ContentBiz list.

Ann Rubin of Afghans for Afghans wrote in to say, per my Blog from last week, that she’s very interested in scanning in print versions of newspaper stories that have been written about her site because many newspapers delete or charge for older stories. Linking to the story isn’t an option anymore.

However, she asked, “If we scan the newspaper article and post it on a Web page on our site, do we need to get permission from the newspaper? Wouldn’t we otherwise be violating copyright?”

Yes, yes, yes. Such a good point! In fact you’ve got to watch copyright in three ways:

1. Ask permission before you re-use a story from any online or ezine publisher. This means you can’t copy and paste a story from someone’s site or email newsletter without explicit permission. No, the fact that a publication includes a “forward to a friend” offer does not mean you can cut and paste, or otherwise take a story out of context. You have to follow the publisher’s forwarding instructions so the rest of their content (such as copyright line, URL and possibly ads) are included as they want them to be.

2. Ask permission before you scan in a print story for your site. Or before you reprint a Web page or email newsletter for mass distribution. For example, you can’t have 250 copies made of a Web story about your company to hand out at your trade show booth if you haven’t asked the publisher first. There may often be a cost associated with it, plus the publisher generally wants to control what the story looks like (what kind of paper, placement of their logo, etc.) because it directly affects their brand.

3. Ask permission before you use any company, brand, Web site’s or publication’s logo or branded packaging on your site. (So many Webmasters forget this!) Most companies want complete control over where their logo appears. Many major brands will actually threaten you with legal action if you put their logo on your site, even if you did so in a positive manner. Yes, this includes magazines and newspapers.

If you get a mention in, say, BusinessWeek, that doesn’t mean you can stick either the BusinessWeek cover or logo on your site unless you ask first. Some marketers get around that by using a logo-sort-of-look-alike. That can be dangerous too. Be careful, why risk upsetting the media you rely on to promote you?

, VP Marketing Brooks Sports (who make high-end running shoes), took his company’s email newsletter from quarterly to monthly this Spring and he reports that it’s made a big difference in helping his opt-in list grow faster. Turns out an astonishing 45% of his newsletter subscribers forward a copy to friends (that’s higher than most marketer’s open rates, let along pass-along rates). Since there’s a big fat subscribe button at the top of the issues, plus a little text note at the bottom of each isue reading “Please remember to subscribe above if you would like to receive your own custom The Loop newsletter,” a heck of a lot of the people who get forwarded copies join the list. When he was only quarterly he only got that new subscription influx 4x a year. By going monthly it’s 12 times a year.

The newsletter itself is very rich and thick and chocolate. It’s more like a magazine for passionate runners than a marketing newsletter for a shoe company. The sample isssue he sent me had nine stories – including a highly detailed injury prevention tip (approx 800 words) and several people profiles such as a customer-of-the-month profile and a sports medical professional-of-the-month profile.

Heiser knows many recipients may not want to plow through all nine stories each month, so he’s set the subscribe form up so you can choose only to receive the types of stories that appeal to you the most. Basically you get a slightly customized issue. Which is probably one of the reasons his pass-along rate is so incredibly high. People are more likely to open, read and get enthusiastic about content that appeals directly to them.

It may also help cut down on that cut-and-paste problem I mentioned in my Blog below. If you get a newsletter with nine articles and you think your friend will only want one of the articles, I bet you’re tempted to cut and paste, thus depriving Heiser of his chance to get your friend to subscribe with his subscribe offers and other marketing materials in the letter.

Here’s my useful marketing link for the week: Online marketing expert Mark Brownlow has written a 52-page guide to how to market yourself and your company through email discussion lists. You can get a copy free here. Discussion list marketing is one of those great guerilla tactics that’s free, effective (especially in niche markets of almost any kind) and really works when you do it right. Of course, if you do it wrong, you’ll look like a huge a-hole in a fairly public place.

The report Anne referenced is no longer live. However, if you’re looking for email marketing help, you can download the free (and much more recent) MarketingSherpa Quick Guide to Email Marketing: 10 tactics to personalize your message for better results.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, I just got my copy of Aug 2002 Circulation Management Magazine with a cover story on circulation data analysis. The editors collected all of the ABC audit results for America’s top consumer magazines that are audited (magazine publishers that don’t take ads, such as Consumer Reports and Reiman Publishers are not reported here). Why should you care?

Because some of the numbers are kinda neat from a pricing standpoint for consumer online subscriptions. Rightly or wrongly I think that consumers pay for content, not packaging. Consumer magazines have spent millions price testing their brains out. These prices are to some degree more scientifically arrived at than practically any subscription Web site I know of (with the exception of AmericanGreetings.com’s ecard sites). Here’s the breakdown:

Average weekly mag sub price: $47.74 year
Average fortnightly mag sub price: $30.14 year
Average monthly and less frequent sub price: $15.01 year

Which I must say makes me think if you were to rely on sub income alone, it looks like fortnightly is the way to go. You can make
double the money than a monthly can but only pay for certain admin costs (accounting, site hosting, long publisher luncheons, etc) once. Unless your ad sales are incredible, weekly’s not worth it; ouch. Does this translate to online? Quite possibly.

Makes me remember back when everyone said you have to have fresh content daily or you won’t get traffic. Then a friend of mine made a big stink to her audience about updating her site weekly. Instead of being ho-hum expected daily, it became An Event. Her customers actually haunt her site every Thursday at noon when the site’s supposed to update. She saves money on creating and putting up new stuff daily.

BTW: If you want to read the entire Circ article yourself, I’m sure it’s for sale cheap at the magazine’s site:

http://www.circman.com

MIT’s Technology Review just announced that when they started offering e-version subscriptions in June, their site’s magazine
subscription sales rose by 25% (mainly to foreign readers who didn’t want to pay or wait for mailed copies), which equaled about 600 paid $30 annual subscriptions sold in “fewer than three days.” As of Jan 2002, the magazine had more than 300,000 paid print subscribers, so e-version sales won’t make a huge slice of
the pie anytime soon. It’s interesting nonetheless.

Instead of putting the magazine up online as password protected HTML pages, or sending people a PDF of it, MIT invested in Zinio
Systems’ digital format, which is a lot like the Newsstand format for newspapers. It looks just like print, including layout and ads, but it’s on your laptop. Plus it’s searchable.

Does this mean people are happily reading their issues online now? I’ll bet a bunch of them are hitting their “print” keys and
making do with a stack of black and white pages from their printer. At least that’s my experience with the PDF sales in our own store.

Electronic buyers tend to want it faster and without paying customs, they still read anything longer than 2-3 pages in print
no matter what. Although the press release is careful to note that this e-circ qualifies as auditable readership by ABC (Audit
Bureau of Circulations) that doesn’t mean advertisers would be thrilled at how their ads turn out on all those black and white printers.

http://www.technologyreview.com/

How wacky is this? A guy with a Mindspring account has been signing up for opt-in newsletters with the aim of giving the
publishers a deliverability heart attack.

He’s set up his email account to send auto-reply to all incoming mail that looks identical to an AOL bounce message that says in part that all of the messages you are sending to AOL are bouncing. Right down to the number of the AOL techie to call if you’ve
got questions. So it looks like AOL bounced your entire issue to all AOL accounts that signed up for it.

I’m not allowed to give away any more details, but suffice to say we’ve seen a copy of this faux message because one of the publishers affected forwarded it to us and it does look awfully real. AOL wasn’t too happy about it either.