December 13, 2005

Making Newsletters Work Harder

Every business seems to have a newsletter. Few have any news. And fewer still contribute to business growth. Most aren’t opened or read..

Why?

Most firms exert too little effort and have too little valuable content. Too much of the writing, design and strategy is done by rote. And while a monthly or quarterly e-mail “ping” might momentarily spark brand recognition or awareness it rarely provokes inquiries or engagement.

The premise behind creating a newsletter is still valid. A well crafted newsletter can establish a brand’s positioning; educate customers and convey thought leadership. It can also prompt and qualify leads, if and only if, best practices are applied.

Here’s the list of newsletter best practices:

Have recipients determine frequency, medium and content preference.

Track readership and serve content based on reader preference.

Customize where possible. Abandon a one size fits all approach.

Offer incentives for pass-along. Solicit ideas and input.

Accentuate your point of view, key executives or products

Aggressively seek interaction. Make it clickable and easy to respond.

Be personable. Write in real rather than corporate nonspeak – blog style

Address industry r competitive issues head on.

Make it fun.

Include a call to action. Give readers something to do in response. Think of your newsletter as an element in an on-going converesation

Dec 13, 2005 9:45:00 PM | Media

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Handicapping SEO for 2006 Getting large numbers of likely-to-buy customers at low prices using search engine optimization techniques is becoming harder each day. Harvesting clicks with a high propensity to buy requires increasingly sophisticated strategies and dynamic, real-time tactics. The market is flooded with keyword buyers that range from the most sophisticated SEO mavens managing thousands of keywords and variations with proprietary software to complete newbies with a land rush mentality eager to get in on the “ground floor” of the newest, best hyped medium. The result is higher prices, lower clickthru rates, less stable top rankings and efforts by the smart money players to find ways to separate clickers from buyers. According to the Performics division of DoubleClick, (www.doubleclick.com/us/knowledge_central/documents/RESEARCH/dc-search-0511.pdf) , the average cost per click increased from $27 to $30 from July to September 2005. Similarly keyword costs jumped from an average of $20 to $26 in the same time period. This reflects, in the opinion of Performics search strategist, “the fact that campaigns are getting bigger and growing across the board.” More marketers are buying more keywords and their variations across more sites bidding up the prices and squeezing the available inventory. Yet there might be a few bright spots according to Fathom Online (www.fathomonline.com) who reports that keyword prices have declined 11 percent when you compare November 2004 with November 2005. Yet this data reflects only the generic terms (e.g. “shoes”) which most savvy marketers have already abandoned as too expensive and too broad in favor of multi-word customer segmented phrases (e.g. girls black patent leather party pumps). B2B marketers have made a similar migration abandoning the inflated prices of broad terms like “CRM” in favor of narrower technical phrases like “marketing automation and resource management tools.” Search firms, eager to take in this bonanza, are making more inventory available as quickly as the can. Google separated Adwords from contextual ads, thereby increasing the number of and easy access to more sellable clicks and giving marketers some openings to test new tactics. Look for other leading search engines to follow suit as they slice the salami thinner and thinner in the quest to have more inventory to sell. Then look for new opportunities to place targeted ads on blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and web video. Search will remain hot for the foreseeable future and search engines will do everything they can to maximize selling opportunities and to encourage higher bidding. Just to keep it interesting, Google also re-jiggered the ranking algorithms which make it harder to get into the top positions and harder to maintain top rankings since, on Google, the highest bid does not necessarily yield the top ranking. Others are likely to follow suit because the harder it is to rank number one, the more cash is thrown at the problem. Performics observed that the proportion of keywords that maintain the top rank for an entire month is steadily declining so you can bet that marketers are already husbanding dollars and planning A and B campaigns to insure they rank above the fold, at the top of the right hand paid column or in the beloved blue bar. Two ideas are shaping the next wave in SEO experimentation and the race for competitive advantage. The first notion is to make clicks more personalized by tracking where prospects click, determining who they are and dynamically serving content or unique landing pages designed to improve the chances that they will convert to buyers. The idea is to match profiles, stored in cookies, to inbound clicks and use these profiles to trigger customized messages or offers. This is the central idea behind Amazon’s recommendation engine, which has been widely accepted by consumers without too much outcry about privacy or Big Brotherism, and has been baked into their A9 search product. MSN is developing this targeting capability based on the millions of profiles it has amassed through Hotmail, MSN Mail and other MSN features and services though we haven’t seen any real life case studies yet. In theory persistent MSN cookies, corresponding to customer segments, can trigger select messages aimed at distinct segments, maybe as discrete as segments of one, which will result in more buys per click. In practice, this kind of micro-targeting will reduce buyers’ remorse and holds out the promise of better efficiencies for well crafted SEO campaigns. A variation would be for individual sites to use cookies to track repeat visitors and use stored data to trigger unique messages. So if you’ve looked around on a particular site, then...
PREVIOUS POST
Buying Loyalty -- The Barnes & Noble Approach Loyalty marketing has become a game of bribes, rebates, points and promises which forces marketers to sell the perceived value of the reward harder than the original product or brand experience. In a world where only air miles and iPods are universally perceived as useful currency, you have to work really hard to convince skeptical customers that your formula or your bauble is worth a repeat or an upsized purchase. Enter Barnes & Noble. They don’t give me anything. They sell me, and anyone else interested, a membership card for $25 that entitles me to a 10 percent discount on every purchase and every product in every channel for a year. They get twenty-five bucks. I get as much benefit as I’m willing to purchase. But the unadvertisized multiplier lies in the way they administer the program. Your membership card is keyed to your phone number. You don’t have to present the card, which my daughter lost in her first 30 days of membership. Instead you give them the phone number at the point of purchase. The computer validates your membership and presto! Your purchase is discounted by 10%. We gave Allison a membership because she and her pals hang out at Barnes & Noble haunting the graphic novel and young adult sections. In the course of a year she’ll buy 20 manga books at an average price of $15 and another 20 books with words and type at an average price of $18 and she’s good for three $25 gift cards as birthday gifts for friends or cousins and an occasional CD, DVD or snack The net present value of this 15-year old “heavy user” is roughly $750. B&N gets this purchase level for a marketing investment of fifty bucks (the ten percent membership discount of $75 minus $25) or net 7% of her total revenues. God only knows what the margin on her purchases is. Yet because of the way the program is loosely administered and because my wife and I and her mother all end up meeting her or fetching her at the store, Barnes & Noble harvests another $500 per year in impulse, gift and gratuitous purchases. So the membership value of a family using this card is $1250 which costs B&N the same seven percent. This loyalty benefit rings up to the chain regardless of the experience we have in the store, our perceptions of the brand, the competitive set or any added promotional activity or usage stimulation marketing they undertake. Although these factors could increase or decrease the frequency of our purchases. For $25 bucks they initiate a steady stream of purchases and we walk away feeling good. Do the math. Multiply our family by 100 or 200 or 500 per store and the membership program becomes a baseline annuity which throws off not only profit but prompts continuous repeat behavior. I’m not sure it’s replicable, though I suspect that a similar plan might appeal to heavy users of a wide range of products or services. But selling memberships is certainly a cost effective way to buy “loyalty” and a revenue stream simultaneously.

Danny Flamberg

I am a veteran marketing consultant working with leading and emerging brands

The Typepad Team

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments