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Eight Years, This Is A Long Goog-Bye!
Recently I receive an interesting email from Markus Allen, a well-known internet marketer. He was the writer of the “$10,000 Marketing Tip of the Day“, a daily email publication dedicated to bring fellow marketers top ideas about how to start, grow and manage a solid business on the Internet.
Years ago he started this newsletter based on the recommendation he saw posted everywhere by the leading
internet marketing gurus.
Guess what, nothing changes since than. Perform a search on Google for “start a newsletter” keyphrase. Open up the first 5 pages and you’ll find the same advice: a newsletter is a MUST to boots your internet profits!
“Like a patriotic soldier, I followed the advice of creating a free newsletter. These gurus drilled into our heads that offering a newsletter was a great way to build a mailing list. And once you had a mailing list, you could almost print money at will.”, says Markus.
That was back in 1997. And Markus continue:
“Ever since December 1 of 1997, I’ve been trying to sell ice to Eskimos… trying to ‘convince’ marketers that my
newsletter was the answer to their marketing problems was both naive and arrogant.”
Now let’s get back to the basics. According to the online theory, a newsletter has two purposes:
1) To build confidence with your subscribers by providing solutions to their problems.
2) Once you build confidence, it will be much easier to sell them whatever you want, no matter it is (or not!) your own product or service.
But managing a successful newsletter it isn’t such an easy task. Sure, a lot of you will not agree with me, but think
about the email troubleshooting you will have to deal down the road. Even more, will subscribers perform the action you desire?
Here’s again what Markus wrote:
“But the vast majority of my subscribers hardly (if ever) implemented any of the 1,841 ideas I’ve published. A
surprisingly high percentage didn’t even open the emails.”
Now that’s terrible! And this lead me to another big problem: the size of your (newsletter) list. Does the size
of a list matter or the “quality” of your subscribers?
Another direct marketing legend by the name Bob Serling has an interesting post on his blog: “Unsubscribes - a good or bad thing?”
“Is this good or bad if you publish an ezine? You may be surprised to learn that I look at it as a very good thing… Bottom line, I’d rather have 5,000 qualified subscribers than 50,000 ‘tire kickers’.”
In my humble opinion, Bob has 100% right. Don’t evaluate your newsletter performance only by the number of your
subscribers. Look at the shear number of sales generated and profits made.
And Markus Allen continue into his email:
“…Free stuff has virtually zero value. While the information is basically the same, the difference is striking — those who pay for stuff have a much greater respect for information than those getting it free.”
Even I do not totally agree with Markus regarding the “free stuff”, I have to admit: a customer has much more
value to your business. Not necessary because they will probably buy from you again… sometime.
But a customer has a “lifetime value”. You do not have to spend again and again your time in order to convince him
you are the solution to his problems. With a ‘tire kicker’ subscriber, the process is long and without a clear profit
ending.
Lastly, here’s Markus conclusion:
“… giving away valuable information and ideas forever is a recipe for disaster.”
In Markus case, “forever” was 8 years. This remind me of Steve MacLellan who also run a free newsletter. Four years ago he switch to a PAID newsletter. Like he said, “someone has to pay for the invaluable information I send out every month!”
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that free newsletters do not have to provide valuable information or
if they do, they have to ask for your money.
Instead, I think we all have to learn from Markus past experience. And here it is what we can do it:
1) Be a pro-active newsletter publisher.
Don’t be afraid to ask your subscriber about a lot of things. Ask them if they liked your latest issue, ask them
if they have questions regarding your content.
And don’t forget to give them your permission to use your articles into their web sites or… newsletters.
2) Survey them about how often they like to hear from you.
This is really important so pay attention. Three months ago, Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian perform a survey and ask his
subscribers if he email them to often. Subscibers spoken, and Dr. Mani reduce his number of weekly emails.
3) Build a highly responsive list.
Go after subscriber quality, not quantity. A highly responsive list of only 2,000 subscribers can outperform
bigger lists.
4) Maintain and clean-up your list.
Take your time and once a month maintain your subscriber lists. Remove duplicate addresses, remove bad formatting email addresses, remove subscribers with full mailboxes, remove people who do not open your last 3-4 emails. These are worthless subscribers…
5) Always use top resources.
If you want to be successful, always use top resources. Use a reliable hosting company for your newsletter, use a great HTML and text editors. And most important, use a top email/newsletter delivery service! Go for quality, cheap
things do not always perform best.
6) Track all your newsletter “moves”.
ALWAYS track your newsletter results. It is vitally important to know how many emails hit the right mailbox, how
many subscribers open your messages, how many follow a link, what link they follow, and how many sales/prospects/ subscribers you generate.
Without knowing these information, you’re almost “blind” and it will be very hard to evaluate your newsletter
performances.
6) Consider to build your own product/service to sell.
This is almost a no-brainer. As I already told you, a customer will buy more often from you without an extra effort.
7) Don’t get “in-love” with your own newsletter.
Analyze your newsletter results. Compare your net profits made with the resources you used to develop such a newsletter.
If you found out that your time, money, and effort to send a newsletter has a worst return on investment, perhaps you should dump it. Leave the others to “sell ice to Eskimos”.
Thank you Markus for remanding me about these things. I am sorry about the end of your daily newsletter, but… “Eight Years, This Is A Long Goog-Bye!”
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