This afternoon Lyris acquired their customer SparkLIST. (Lyris both sells email list host software to other firms, and also hosts clients themselves.) Lyris CEO John Buckman gave me a buzz to say hi. Apparently they’ll be upgrading Sparky clients to Lyris v.6 which is, according to Buckman, more glorious in many, many ways.
Also, Sparky’s tech team, Stu, Mindy and Mike are leaving the glamour of Wisconsin to move to the West Coast to work for Lyris.
Where they may be warmer in the winter, but they’ll never find houses they can afford. Life is a tradeoff.
There’s a hot discussion on one of the e-publisher lists I’m a member of about what to do when folks want to buy multiple copies
of an ebook. Here’s the answer I posted there (bear in mind I’m a publisher who’s routinely asked for and gotten print buyers of $200 reports to pay me $125 per each additional copy they made of that report on their own copier machines):
Content is *not* valued by the media it’s delivered in. If that were the case all CD ROMs and DVDs would cost the same, and all
Web sites would be the same price.
You should keep your production costs in the equation simply to know what your margins are. However, beyond that you are selling
knowledge, a better life, a better business, more satisfied employees, trust in your brand name, etc.
For perspective: in the research report sales field I used to market $15k reports that were 10 pages copied and stapled together, while my former company also gave away copies of
expensively produced glossy 4-color magazines free to qualified readers. Production values didn’t equal value.
Content did.
Trust me on this one, I’ve marketed bulk and site license subscriptions to about everything you could name in my time. The bulk discounts are the same no matter what your production price is (as long as you can afford it).
Rough-not-to-be-taken-seriously numbers
5-10 copies – 10% off
11-25 – 20% off
26-50 – 30% off
50+ – call for quote
Freakish chance, Steve Outing who does a great new media column over at Editor & Publisher just wrote an article on SpamAssassin
including the idea I brought up yesterday about having a service publishers could use to run issues past prior to mailing to make
sure they will not be filtered too badly. I guess great minds think alike.
Anyway, as always Steve’s article on the whole spam filtering and delivery problem is well-researched and well worth reading if you
are an email publisher.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/features_columns/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1570036
I hear one thing from every single email marketing expert I talk to. No matter what marketplace you’re in, there is a rule that holds true: Make your landing page (the page people click through from your email) reference your email as much as possible. The most disconnect there is between them, the lower your final conversion rate.
If your email campaign has a headline, the headline on the landing page should match it. Etc.
I was talking this over, with yet another marketer, today when I got an amazingly fabulous example of Best Practices in action in my own in-box from Old Navy. In fact it was so great, that I asked our webmistress Holly to post the email alert and the matching landing page up where you can see them here.
An additional note about this campaign (which cleverly mimics the Brady Bunch opening) is that because it mimics a TV show, it makes sense to use rich media. It’s a relief to get a campaign in my in-box that uses rich media because it enhances the creative message perfectly – not just because somebody thought it would be neat-o to add. It’s worth noting that Old Navy usually doesn’t use rich media for campaigns. This was a conscious choice rather than a rule of thumb. I’m lost in admiration.
Got ad creative in today from a sponsor that’s guaranteed to get our issue stopped at the border by spam filters because it has the word “free” in all caps, so I sent it back with some suggestions.
I also realized this means we really have to adjust our media kit to give the long list of stuff you can’t do in email these days. Which make me think, could there be an easier way?
Here’s my proposal: Somebody entrepreneurial please set up a site where publishers and advertisers can pay a monthly fee to put their proposed copy into a form, submit and have it come out the other end with stuff that might get it filtered highlighted.
Anybody up for it?
In the wake of AOL’s most recent site redesign which eliminated most ad pop-ups, iVillage has announced they are removing most advertiser pop-ups from their site as well because according to their own reader survey more than 90% of iVillage registered users really really hate pop-ups. Now their ad sales reps have to explain to advertisers who liked pop-ups’ responsiveness, “Yes, they got you lots of clicks, but do you really want clicks at the expense of negative brand awareness?”
Another one bites the dust. Yep, Mac.com’s free email service is ceasing next month. Only folks who upgrade to $99.95 year membership (which includes other benefits) will get to keep their “mac.com” mailboxes. All email publishers should probably strip off the mac.com names from their list and send at least two warning emails to those readers to say, “Hey, change your email address for your subscription if you’re not upgrading to the paid mac.com membership.”
I’m awfully glad we moved up the “manage your subscription” capability on our site’s home page to the top of the development priority list, just for stuff like this. It was always a nice-to-have app for customer satisfaction. Now it’s becoming critical for list longevity and retention.
Re: My question a few Blogs back about publishing on 9/11 this year, Rob Morrow writes, “I, personally, will be turning my site (www.1wizards.net) black on 9/11/02 with just a message stating that it’s been a year and Bin Laden is still out there somewhere. On that date, I think that no news is bad news!”
Ankesh Kothari, of MaxMailer, says, “Living in the real world, if we don’t publish a condolence note on that day, we will get lots
of hate mail; telling us in many words that we are inhuman.
Just writing a condolence note on sending it to your list won’t bring in any cash. Hardly any goodwill too; as most of the publishers and newsletter owners will be writing a similar message. My advice would be to take the middle path: Write a bit of both.
Start with a paragraph giving respect. Then you could say something like: ‘People have not lost their spirit. The best way to show Osama Bin Laden that he can’t shake us is by following our routine and showing him that we are not affected by his inhuman act.’ Then follow it with your daily newsletter.
I couldn’t wait anymore, so this afternoon we opened a GotMarketing email account and sent all Earthlink addresses on our subscription lists the following message. If you are a SparkLIST customer, you might consider doing something similar:
SUBJ: Non-routine request from Sherpa Publisher
Dear MarketingSherpa Subscriber,
You haven’t gotten any issues for about 10 days now because Earthlink is blocking the
service we use to send newsletters.
We’re working to get this sorted out, but in the
meantime, you can switch your subscription
to a different (non-Earthlink) address here: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/subscriptionManage.cfm
I’ve also made sure all our latest articles
are posted online so you can catch up with
anything you missed if you’d like to.
http://www.marketingsherpa.com <- includes links to B2BMarketingBiz, ConsumerMarketingBiz, ContentBiz, EMAILsherpa, MarketingFAME and more.
Thanks for your support,
Anne Holland
Publisher, MarketingSherpa, Inc.
AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com
P.S. We are using a special email service to get this notice to you. If you would like to unsubscribeto our list, the unsubscribe info they’ll place belowthis will *NOT* work. Instead, please unsubscribeby going to this link on our site. It is easyand quick:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/subscriptionManage.cfm
According to a story in Forbes.com today, Lands’ End’s “Ask Us” button which gives shoppers live instant (typed) chat with a customer service rep, “The company says that the average value of an order increases by 6% when a surfer uses its instant message technology. An online visitor who uses Lands’ End’s IM is 20% more likely to make a purchase than a customer who does not.”
The story doesn’t give comparative numbers on how much a shopper who calls the site’s 800 number for help (versus using the chat/IM function) is worth. I’m betting that 800 callers are worth even more. Having experienced both at the site while using a speedy DSL line, I personally got fed up waiting for the chat to happen and picked up the phone. Then maybe I’m more trigger-happy caffeinated than the average shopper. According to the story, roughly 10% of Lands End operators are trained to use phone or IM, which is somewhat indicative of demand.
