MarketingSherpa Blog

Yeah! I’ve got another speaker lined up for our May 21st Selling Subscriptions to Internet Content Summit: the CEO of AmericanGreetings.com will be joining our free-to-fee panel to talk about the fact that they made the transition to charging for content. I’m happily astonished by the fact that they have sold a reported 1.1 million subscriptions in less than 90 days since the paid service launched amidst much press-speculation on December 4th 2001. To learn more about the other speakers presenting their Case Studies at the Summit go to the online invitation here:

http://sherpastore.com/page.cfm/1950

This morning eDiets announced their 4th quarter earnings for 2001 — profits galore — but my eye was struck by the bit which read, “Revenue growth was driven by growth in program attendance, which reached 10 million in fiscal 2001…” I contacted eDiet’s Manager Marketing Communications Merilee Kern for clarification.
Were the 10 million free registered users? Paid users? Weeks of paid membership sold?

She replied, “It was determined that at on any given week throughout the year of 2001, eDiets had an AVERAGE of 191,000 unique paid members active. So, the 10 million was derived by multiplying 191,000 average “membership weeks” by 52 weeks in the year, totaling almost 10 million (9,932,00 to be exact).”
eDiets didn’t pick this method of reporting figures to confuse us content folks, but to strike a pose in comparison to competitor WeightWatchers who publicly measure their sales the same way.

Interestingly the virtual world is catching up to the real world fast — counted by weeks of attendance eDiets is 42% of WeightWatchers’ size.
If you’re interesting in learning how eDiets did it, check out our Case Study from last August, eDiets Profitably Sells Millions of $65 Diet Counseling Subscriptions Online :

http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1793

HispanicAd.com, the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies have unveiled nine awards categories in the HispanicAd.com 2001 Media Planning Awards competition, including Best Plan Using the Internet. You have until March 15th to enter to win at http://hispanicad.com/cgi-bin/news/newsarticle.cgi?article_id=7627.

According to this morning’s issue of AdBumb, AOL version 7.0 has a default setting that automatically blocks all HTML email. AOL purportedly claims this saves users from any potentially “dangerous” HTML email. Others claim this mostly saves AOL server space (and I must say this sounds like reality to me). In the past AOL older versions didn’t allow full HTML email through anyway, so email marketers had to send stripped down versions of their campaigns to the list. The newer v. 7.0 was supposed to solve this, but unless millions of users change their default settings (ha) it won’t.

Personally I’m wondering if Yahoo and Hotmail free email versions are going to be far behind. Right now Hotmail’s been coping with HTML influx by making free mailboxes smaller, so if folks don’t clean them out frequently, email bounces.

This morning, in a fit of streamlining zeal, I unsubscribed to five daily newsletters I receive. Dictionary.com has a “Word of the Day” list, that’s nice to get, but inessential, so it made the cut list. Unsubscribing meant sending an e-mail message to the list. Imagine my surprise when I received back e-mail from Dictionary.com asking me to confirm my unsubscription! Double opt-out for Word-of-the-Day? Kind of reminds you of that creepy guy who couldn’t take the hint in high school. Unsubscribe means unsubscribe in my book.

AltaVista announced on Tuesday that they will no longer run their free email service as of March 31st. This affects about 400,000 email addresses (200k of which are “active”) ending in “@altavista.com” However, it does not affect any email addresses ending in “@altavista.net” which are owned and operated by Mail.com.

This change affects a very tiny percentage of email addresses in the US today, but still if you own an ezine and can do so without spending much money or time, it’s probably worth a shot to send out a notice or two to your subscribers with @altavista.com addresses giving them a link to a form where they can change their email for your ezine easily.

AltaVista will also be shutting down the free email accounts offered on their international sites, however, the date for the shut down isn’t set yet. About 150k email addresses would be affected. Looks like they are hoping to sell the email accounts to someone else, or sell an ad recommending their users switch to someone in particular. If nobody bites, then international accounts will get at least 30 days warning before being shut down.

How do you handle it when your Web site is so successful that your customer service email in-box is suddenly jam-packed with customer feedback? When I asked John Pasquarette, who handles Web marketing for the $400 million public company National Instruments, how much customer feedback they get about their excellent site, he laughed, “Too much, on anything and everything.” I asked him how they handle the influx. His reply is useful for anyone in the same situation:

We have a simplified workflow to handle Web feedback. Our Webmaster email address feeds into a database so we can record and assign these questions/comments to the appropriate person on the Web team (or in the rest of the company) to handle the issue. We have a person who checks the Webmaster database multiple times a day to make sure we are aware of any issues regarding the site. All internal requests for new projects, edits, or corrections also feed into this same database – so we try to train the rest of the company to use the Webmaster submission forms to get their input into the Web team. That way, we have a record to track even the simplest corrections.

We also had the new site available internally for about two weeks for all of our customer service people to get comfortable with before we rolled it out to the outside world. That was a big step in helping our employees help our customers get up to speed on the new site. We had very little problems with the new design.”

BTW: If you’d like to learn more about NI’s site, check out our Case Study from yesterday’s issue of our sister-publication B2BMarketingBiz.

A year and a half ago I interviewed the publisher partner director at AvantGo looking for a catch. She was enormously blase and rather bored with the whole conversation. They would allow almost anyone to publish on the channel. Yeah it didn’t cost anything to reach AvantGo users. Yeah some publishers saw a leap in opt-in subscriptions to their regular newsletters as a result (Michael Tchong of ICONOCAST in particular). What was the catch? She said, well they’d charge if you wanted your name to be placed in their channel listings to catch users attention and garner wireless subscribers. (You didn’t need to be listed to be carried, users could find you anyway if they knew how.) So paying them anything was purely an optional ad buy.

Now it turns out AvantGo’s policies have changed to require you pay for AvantGo readers. So loads of publishers are bailing. To learn more, check out this message board at PocketPC Thoughts. My thanks to David Lawrence of Online Tonight for this link!

Original interview:

http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1126
New AvantGo Policies

http://avantgo.com/support/mobile_support/index.html
Publisher Reaction to New Policies:

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=249

In response to my Blog of 2/14 on Google ad plagiarism, search engine marketing expert Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media wrote in:

“Another reason that marketers should ‘care’ about such plagiarism is that ad which generates the most interest (where multiple ads exist for the same keywords) rises to the top. The 3rd and 4th place ads generally get far fewer clicks, and since you pay for impressions, a good CTR is absolutely vital. In essence, Google is forcing marketers to compete with one another with copywriting pizzazz. (Some have remarked that this might actually wind up giving you lower conversion rates, since unrealistic promises or eye-grabbing copy might generate more frivolous clicks.)

On one hand, I guess that looking at the characteristics shared by “risers to the top” might be a good bit of research, if you are looking at ads written by those who aren’t your direct competition. If a direct competitor steals your copy, they’re actually negatively impacting your ROI by possibly pushing your ad down a rung or two into a slot that gets fewer clicks.”

When politics rules — Cahners Business Information has decided to change its name to Reed Business Information to make corporate parent Reed Elsevier happy, despite the fact that neither company owns the URL Reed.com, which currently houses family news from an individual named David P. Reed.

How important is an easy-to-remember URL for a B2B company in the long run? Well in a Case Study we published today at sister-site, B2BMarketingBiz, public company National Instruments admitted they anted up the cash to buy URL NI.com after discovering that folks had a hard time remembering their former URL NatInstr.com.
The Web marketing director told us that that one tiny change made perhaps the biggest impact on their traffic growth.

http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1945