After reading in a NY Times article that nobody surfs anymore these days, I decided to surf this evening instead of turning off the computer, and ran into this utterly lovely note on the home page of a fairly obscure Irish-based antique bed dealership, “Our sales via the Internet have gathered momentum much more quickly than we imagined. We find that our website is rapidly becoming our showroom.” Yeah, no matter what the NY Times says, the Web still rules!
I hear it repeatedly from publishers both big and small – personal voice is of massive importance in winning over and keeping readers in the incredibly competitive online and email publishing field. Personally, I’ve been struggling with this as a business model issue for some time now as we’ve grown.
When I co-founded ContentBiz’s parent company, MarketingSherpa (which publishes a range of newsletters and reports in addition to ContentBiz stuff), we assumed I’d be in charge of marketing because it’s my background. Then I found myself pinch-hitting for the highly professional journalists we had on staff, whenever one took vacation or needed to be replaced for some reason. Our ad sales guy was the one who noticed, “Anne whenever you do an issue, our pass-alongs and opt-ins go up.”
I’m not a ‘professional’ journalist, but I guess people liked my ‘voice’ despite (or maybe because of) that. So when we had to cut back on editorial staff due to the recession, guess who got drafted into the main editorial role?
Now that the economy is righting itself (yeah!) and we’ve been hiring editors again, I’ve come up against the whole question: If you want to grow beyond being a small publisher, but your personal “voice” is to some extent responsible for your success so far, what do you do? Fred Langa of LangaList gave me this advice this afternoon:
“It’s very easy with a small staff or a very large staff, but tougher in-between. If you’re larger you can have a copyeditor who ensures the voice of the publication is consistent across artices, time or different publications. It’s very hard to do this with a disparate group of people who work more or less independently with no one overseeing them. You’ll have a constellation of different publications rather than a single voice.
The Windows Watcher newsletter editor did a very good job of handling this [problem] when he hired staff. Each issue still started with an introduction in his own voice from him. Stories were written by somebody else but readers felt he was still involved and these were his selections. He didn’t have to write the whole long article, just the intro to it.”
http://www.langalist.com
Kudos, kudos, kudos to Lands’ End for their fabulous “April Fools” promotion currently underway at their site. This is some of the best online copywriting I’ve seen from a cataloguer because it combines the timeliness, irreverance, and personality of great personal Web sites, with solid sales points.
Sample copy: Snowman Print Flannel Pants
Colorful Snowman Bottoms that had about the same effect on sales as the sun did on ol’ Frosty. While the season may be long past, the flannel is still pretty soft. And heck, you sleep with the lights out, right? 100% cotton. Machine wash. Imported.
[Note: How exciting! Thom Pharmakis the copywriter responsible for this Land’s End promotion just emailed over “You made my day!” Well, he totally deserved it.:-)]
I’m loving John Kremer’s Book Marketing Tip ezine and Web site.
His free newsletter features an inspirational story each week of an author who did something clever to market their book. Then it lists loads of contacts for various journalists who often interview authors. It is a must-read for anyone publicizing a book.
http://www.bookmarket.com
Oh boy, the massive influx of spam is creating a sea-change in consumers’ attitudes about email. Even a year ago you could put a “get our free newsletter” offer up and people would check the box to sign up. But these days consumers are getting incredibly wary of opt-in offers.
Last night my friend David (who gets an average of more than 60 spam emails in his work in-box between the time he goes home at night and the time he gets in every workday morning) took me out to dinner to BD’s Mongolian Barbeque. MarketingSherpa published a Case Study on their great email loyalty program last week, and David thought it would be fun for me to get out from behind my desk and see waiters collecting email opt-ins in real life.
Much to our surprise our waiter didn’t mention the email offer at all. Nor was there a sign up card on the table. We looked around — David finally spotted some cards in a little basket by the bar. He called over the waiter to ask about this (I was stunned with embarrassment). The waiter said, “Our customers hated being asked for email. It didn’t go over well. So we stuck them on the bar and we get some filled out sometimes.” Then he added, “But when they do sign up, it works really, really well. We gets lots and lots of people coming back in with print outs of their email coupons. It’s great!”
There you have it. The next big email marketing challenge is not how to stick video or audio in your email. It’s how to get your spam-weary customers to trust you enough to sign up for anything at all.
Most email newsletter publishers ask “Text or HTML?” on their opt-in forms. But you know I’ve wondered for a long time if we aren’t all too close to this issue to know if that’s even the right question. Do the civilians we’re signing up know what the difference is? David Goudge Sr VP Marketing at Boise Office told me he has decided they will ask their (hundreds and hundreds of thousands) of potential readers to sign up for his company’s new ezines using different questions: “Do you want us to send you pictures, or do you want just text?”
Sherpa reader Barbara Kaplowitz writes in, “A print ad Electrasol caught my eye. The ad containing the discount coupon offered a “Free box of Electrasol” simply for going to the Web site. Imagine my dismay, when I clicked on the ‘Print and SAVE’ area of the Web site, to find that I had to give out my name, zip code and answer a truly annoying 6-question questionnaire. It just ain’t worth it for a $3 box of something. Think this is more a case study for how NOT to handle consumer goods traffic you’ve driven to your Web site.”
Fact is most of our Case Studies show that if you offer something of value, and ask less than 10 fairly easy non-intrusive questions, most consumers will fill out your online form — and the ones who don’t bother are probably not good sales prospect for you. So I checked out the Electrasol offer online myself. They do several things right:
– Make the coupon offer online look like a clip-out coupon in print, which catches the eye nicely
– Ask less than 10 questions
– Don’t ask anything too personally intrusive
– Keep it all to one page
– Have a visible privacy policy on the page
– Have a separate check box to join their email list
But they also made a few of mistakes which might have hurt them:
– Privacy policy isn’t on same area of screen as request for email address. You have to scroll way down to see it. Which means you don’t get that reassurance you need before you decide to give your email address away.
– Using drop down boxes for all multiple choice questions instead of radio buttons — people hate drop downs in general. In fact many average consumers can’t figure out how to use them. Others won’t bother.
– No offer reminder. The top of the form says coldly, “Step 1 – Complete Survey Please complete ALL the information below and click continue.”
Hey guys, just because you got the click to the form doesn’t mean you sold them on filling it out. You have to keep on enticing them to get them to fill the form out all the way. I’ll bet if there was a nice headline saying “For your $3 coupon, please fill out this form!” they would have done better. With a picture of a bottle or a coupon, they would have done even better.
When I heard that BeerNet Online launched a new subscription site today, I couldn’t help but look it over. This traditional B2B print subscription email publisher focuses on beer businesspeople and distributors. When you click on the links to learn about their regular product subscriptions, the copy is excellently written – powerful benefits, strong quotes — you can’t imagine how a beer exec would be able to say anything but “sign me up!”
This sales copy is also pretty obviously lifted from traditional direct mail packages that have worked for the publisher in print.
They look a little funny online, but work ok.
I expected to see similarly strongly-written sales copy when I clicked on story headline links on the site’s home page, which I assumed lead to paid site members-only materials. Yup, up popped that grey box asking for user name and password, but then when I didn’t have one, instead of sales copy, I got a nasty page that slapped me in the face with:
Authorization Required
This server could not verify that you are authorized to access the document requested. Either you supplied the wrong credentials (e.g., bad password), or your browser doesn’t understand how to supply the credentials required. Apache/1.3.19 Server at www.beernet.com Port 80
http://www.bearnet.com
http://www.beernet.com/dpl.htm (example good DM copy)
If you’re in the financial content or newswire business, you might want to check out an interview published today at eFinanceInsider, where the head of 10kWizard (an EdgarOnline
competitor) briefly describes why they switched entirely from free to 100% paid. 10kWizard says they about 6,000 paying subscribers now, although they don’t reveal how much each pays.
http://www.efinanceinsider.com/email32202.htm
With permission from their US marketing dept, I just had our Webmaster post a copy of Liquidation.com’s French division’s email newsletter. For we provincial Americans there’s a fun factor in seeing stuff online in another language. But beyond that I think this newsletter does something very clever we can learn from — its main goal is to entice readers to search Liquidation’s site for merchandise. Instead of putting a “Chercher” (search) in just one prominent location, they stick it at the top of both the right and left columns. One search is for one of their databases, the other for a different database.
Which makes me wonder, is this something other folks should try? If you’re trying to grow your list, should you put your subscribe box on both sides, or your “send to a friend” box in many places??? Anyway, fun sample.
