Rebirth of Newsletters

From the Desk of John Kumpunen:

Good Old Newsletters as
Targeted Marketing Tools

In February, we started a newsletter for a manufacturer selling to distributors. He had a nice plant, good products but could do a heck of a lot better in sales — not even close to his production capacity. I wrote the newsletter funny, draw cartoons, featured one of the distributors every month (with photos, their background, and how they can help their customers), included lots of jokes, free classifieds for pre-owned equipment sales — after the second issue, people started calling the plant when the next issue would be out.

By Christmas that year, his sales were up 230%. The owner, Pat, was an old Italian “don’t gimme me your sh**” type of guy, never even greeted me (I worked with his daughter on the newsletter), but that Christmas, Pat took me out for lunch and confessed that this is the first year in their seven-year business history they’re actually making a profit. For every $1 he spent on us, he was getting $81 back in sales. Not bad.

Is the future of newsletters in online versions? I don’t think so. Here’s the problem, you collect your email addresses, you do a double opt-in, and you pump out your good stuff — track the opening of your newsletters, and you’ll discover how many are blocked by ISPs (you need to get whitelisted, bonded and be in good standing with ISPs to avoid the spamming rules). But here’s the real problem: the majority of the newsletters are never opened (guesstimate: 60-70%), they are deleted — you can track all of this.

Does the volume of easy mailing make up for wasted stuff? Probably does, but don’t discount actual printed newsletters. They ain’t dead yet. Sometimes it’s good to stand still when everyone else is jumping up and down. Honestly, how many PRINTED newsletters did you receive this week? And how many ezine, email pitches did you get?

There are still millions and millions of people out there who don’t know how to use computers. There are millions and millions of more people who think reading text onscreen is hard on their eyes, then there are the html formatted ones that just don’t parse properly, and the long text ones.
Here’s the second problem: if you are active on the internet, you’ll probably get 100-200 emails a day. Some are newsletters from well-intending folks, but out of the hundred that I get, I quickly scan 2 of them, the rest I just don’t have the time to open. You probably do the same — most newsletters are just a waste of time.

Content is King: I think it is Jay Abraham who preaches, the better you know your customer, the better your chances of giving them meaningful, useful information. Go straight to the point, don’t use multiple paragraphs to warm up the people. Give good content — content that can’t found anywhere else.

Printed newsletters can work a lot better than flyers (about 2%). A wine newsletter (targeted audience, new-product announcements) pulls 30%.
Work Arounds: We’re doing video newsletters — saves on reading tiny text on screen and they’re a bit different still to stand out.

Doing your printed version of a newsletter does not preclude an electronic version, of course. Have both. Ask people which they prefer. Online version can include active hyperlinks, flash, music, movies and narration drawing attention to key points. Here’s sample of Rose-Anne’s thing that seems to work well.

“Be Excellent to Each Other”: Cost saving strategy: Talk to your fellow business owners who target the same audience. Establish a 4- or 8-page newsletter where each participant gets a page. Do it on sheet-fed print, one or two-color on good quality paper (like Plainfield Brightwhite 70lbs. or something like that). Everyone writes their own stuff, and you split the cost of printing and mailing. Do an unaddressed business-only-run with your post office, your mailing rate is much cheaper. If it is addressed, talk to your local UPS store about list management and stuffing, etc. Talk to your local postal folks about getting a “publisher’s discount” on mailing.
Many of the magazine empires have started from simple newsletters.

We can help you with newsletters: We can help you with layout, writing, illustrations, cartoons, etc. for printed and online versions.
It’s a good thing, Martha.

From the Desk of John Kumpunen:

Good Old Newsletters as
Targeted Marketing Tools

Aaah, yes — return of sanity. When you’re looking to pay $3-5 per click on your Google pay per click account and the average retail conversion hovers around 2.6%, you gotta be slapping your knee and thinking, there’s gotta be a better way.

One way to capture new clients is with a combination of black and white newsletter and create multimedia extension content on the web. See the red dots on the graphic — they are numbers that direct the newsletter reader to additional information on the website — downloadable PDFs, movies, flash presentations, slideshows, mp3 files they can download.

The beauty of this system is that it captures the readers with a whole bunch of teaser stories and gives them more substantial information on the web — in any format you deem necessary.

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