Wow – Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge Site just gave SherpaBlog a rave review! Ok now the pressure is on to keep standards high.
Thanks to SherpaBlog reader Troy White, Internet Marketer at the American Management Association, for sending over the news and making my day.
Tough night. I’m one of the invited judges for List-Universe’s annual competition for the 10 best email newsletters on the planet. They started sending over the 20 finalists (culled from almost a thousand submissions) a few minutes ago. My personal faves so far are Betty Bowers is a Better Christian Than You and Killer Plants.
But judging is not about my skewed sense of humor. It’s about who really is the best.
Luckily contest-organizer sent over a fairly scientific list of 13 attributes to score by. It’s a great list to judge your own newsletter by as well — whether you publish one as a promotional vehicle for your company or as a business in and of itself. They are:
1. Usefulness to readers/industry
2. Design
3. Clarity of mission
4. Writing quality
5. How well can a reader figure out who else is reading the newsletter?
6. Overall originality
7. Origin of content
8. Value to readers (could be collapsed into usefulness)
9. Does this newsletter build a community?
10. Any annoyance factor?
11. Does this newsletter have a recognizable personality that distinguishes it from other newsletters offering similar information?
12. Timeliness
13. Unique subject matter
Are you trying to gather more opt-in emails or site visitor registrations? Check out the great new pop-up on iVillage.
A small, warmly-colored, pop-up box appears when you enter iVillage asking “Are you new to iVillage?” If you click on the “Yes, let us help you” button you are taken to a page entitled “Shortcuts -> Solutions for your life” where you check as many facts about yourself as you’d like — such as “I am looking for a job” and “I am planning a wedding.” There are 18 in all, but the clean two-column lay-out makes it less overwhelming than you’d expect. Also there’s a nice privacy statement so you feel safe giving your info. Then you’re invited to click on a button entitled “Show me shortcuts” …. and voila! You are taken to a newsletter opt-in form with the newsletters that are right for you already slotted in. All you have to do is enter your email address and click the subscribe button.
Aside from warmth of tone and clean design, why do I like this so much better than the average “subscribe to our newsletter” pop-up? Because it swept me into the process of making my choice without telling me beforehand it was a newsletter subscription form. It focused on the benefit rather than the end result. Which means people who typically object “oh no I get too much email already” are involved in the give and take before thay have a chance to object.
Plus anyone who knows about women, knows we LOVE answering personal quizzes such as The Cosmo Quiz.
Kudos to iVillage on this clever opt-in campaign. Now let’s all think how we can steal ideas from it!
Sales are a real problem for many companies currently. One friend told me today that his site is still getting plenty of qualified visitors who download his samples, but sales conversions have plummeted because “people just don’t have the budget right now.”
That said, I urge you to check out the KILLER COPY on the pricing info page at another site — a2zShow.com. In three deft strokes they counter prospect’s pricing fears by explaining briefly that they are 30-50% cheaper than the competition, you can afford them with “your existing budget” and you can even make more money by using them. Then they offer a link to Case Studies for “proof” of these three facts and you’re swept into an RFP form.
This is some of the best written, online lead generation copy I’ve seen for cost-conscious times. Way to go!
Can lessons from life carry over into marketing? I believe so. I believe that although marketing is “just a job” it gives each of us the chance to learn life lessons that affect both our businesses and our whole beings. It’s not just about selling something, it’s how you interact with and respect other people.
My Aunt Audrey, who was my greatest role model in life, died this week. She, an Australian WWII bride come to live in a family farmhouse in a small snowy town in New England, was a pioneer and a welcomed alien in her own community in a way that many of we Internet marketers are in our companies. She worked all kinds of crazy hours to keep a business going, especially during the busy holiday season, while juggling the demands of several children. Again, like many of us marketers today.
She was also uniquely ladylike. When people starting whining and moaning about stuff she rose above it and saw the bright side. When there were business competitors, she made respected friends with them rather than getting all nasty.
As a young marketer, I followed her example by reaching to my then-company’s biggest competitors and saying, “Hey how can we be friends and help each other grow?” I made friends that have lasted to this day almost 15 years later. I also was able to work deals — most notably mailing list swaps — that increased both sides’ profits. I learned buyers of one sort of product are more likely to buy lots of the same type of product from lots of people…. so let’s all profit together rather than prospecting alone. So being friends with competitors was smart, as long as my product had a clearly differentiated USP (unique selling proposition.)
It may sound dumb, but I don’t care. Great online marketing is about being nice. Is about being ladylike.
Biggest online wasted marketing opportunity??? Thank-you pages (aka confirmation pages.) You know, those pages after somebody has ordered something from your site, or subscribed to your newsletter, or registered…. Most folks just stick a “Thank you” and a link back to their home page in there and leave it at that.
Ally Neal, Internet marketer for Support.com, told me she uses her thank-you pages to point visitors to other high interest areas on her site. In her case she’s collecting sales leads with her campaigns, so after they fill out the form she sends them to look at online demos, white papers and the like. Another marketer I know for an online merchant who shall remain nameless, told me they get up to 20% incremental revenue from offers placed on their thank you pages!
Remember, people who see your thank you page are involved with you at that moment, and are more likely to respond favorably to another offer (product or information) than practically anyone else. It’s the same reason most cataloguers will enclose another copy of their catalog in the box they ship your order in. Something to think about……
I thought most of the awful, high tech, buzzword-laden marketing copy had gone the way of the VCs that spawned it. Guess not, according to a funny note just in from SherpaBlog subscriber Lisa Dilg of PerkettPR. She writes:
My co-worker and I went to the Detroit ITEC a few months ago and we would stop at booths and say, ok, read that company description, and tell me what they do. We almost never could. Even though so many in the press have complained, “just tell us what you actually do, don’t tell us you are a solution, next-generation, a leading XX or you do something in real-time,” companies’ boilerplates and web sites, continue to say nothing.
Today put me over the edge. I was going to the web site of a company my cousin works for to see what they do. You tell me:
‘XX is the leading provider of Total Business Integration solutions — delivering infrastructure software that lets companies seamlessly integrate every aspect of their business in real-time.’
Then I went to their PR’s web site, and found they are a perfect match:
‘XX fields multi-disciplinary teams of technology PR and marketing professionals who use the XX Lifecycle methodology to create market-specific, stage-appropriate communications programs and services.’
Whose responsibility is it to stop this? PR pros, marketing pros, the companies themselves?”
Well Lisa, my input is that the buck stops at whoever pays the bills for that bad PR — i.e. client-side. Here are two helpful sites that can help PR clients everywhere doublecheck the work that’s being done for them: buzzkiller.net and buzzwacker.com. You can pretty much bet if your press materials (or site) have words listed at these two sites, then journalists will think you look stupid and boring. ‘Nuff said.
Question of the day: If you are an email publisher, should you send “We’re on vacation this week, but you’ll get a regular issue next week” announcements to your list?
Seems like everybody does. This week Sherpa is on break. (Well, ok I’m still working, and working late I might add, but we’re not actually publishing which is a HUGE load off so it sorta feels like I’m at the beach.) When I went to send out those vacation emails to subscribers I stopped in my tracks, struck by a thought: People hate having to wade through lots of useless email. A vacation message is pretty useless… So would my subscribers feel sorta like I spammed them ’cause it’s not a regular useful issue?
And anyway, maybe those ‘vacation’ messages are more about the publisher’s ego thinking, “Oh my God they are going to miss my newsletter and worry where I am!!!” than they are about in-box clogged reality.
So this week, you’ll note (if you are a subscriber to any one of our 6 newsletters at MarketingSherpa.com) that no vacation messages are being sent unless I also have a useful news tip to make them worthwhile.
Journalist Pete Barlas who covers consumer ecommerce for Investor’s Business Daily told me he’s having a hard time finding good sources for quick quotes these days. Apparently many of the analysts he used to count on have either been told to button their lips due to the threat of stockholder lawsuits, or they’ve simply lost their jobs because many research firms and financial institutions who cover the area are cutting back. Seems to me like it’s a great time to get your name out there as an Expert.
Just be sure you’re able to respond quickly. These types of reporters often work very tight deadlines.
A source close to the CEO of Classmates.com told me today that they only use about 5 banner creatives. One Classmates.com banner has been seen 17 zillion times already and it’s still pulling click throughs. I’ve heard of direct mail packages that are similar — one for the Wall Street Journal was mailed with almost no change for more than 20 years.
So the lesson is, even though “everyone” tells you that you have to change banner creative constantly, if you’ve found something that really works, maybe you should keep on rolling it out until clicks decline. Don’t bother with change for the sake of change online.
