The Email Wars

Well not really going green, but starting a new weekly email newsletter focusing on “green” marketing and ad campaigns. It is a continuous segmentation and introduction of more email newsletters. I am not sure now how many they have but to me it is news that they could be adding into one of their existing newsletters as content instead of making an entire new newsletter. 

I share this for a few reasons. 

1. Do they have enough weekly content to justify another newsletter? From the looks of this email in this post the answer is NO. Why well look how empty the newsletter is. It looks horrible. Not really “green” to add more media vehicles to cover small news. 

2. I assume that they are just using this as many publishers do to add more ad sales inventory and drive more clicks into their site where more ads can be served and drive more page views. Fine as that is the goal, but it is not a good use of time and space for them or the subscriber. 

3. Look at the ads. Do they support the content? Are they relevant? Nope on both counts. They are just focused towards advertisers and marketers but not focused on the matching the content or possibly the subscriber base. 

All of these points are clear that this should not be another email newsletter. Why? Well many people ask me about adding more email communications to their stable and unless it is asked for, justified, and relevant it is just spending more money to get less money. I know some publishers we have worked with want to drive more ad sale inventory in email and on the web. When they ask us about this, here is what we do. 

1. Review the analytical data on their website to see what natural content is already getting the majority of the traffic. 

2. See if they are already using this content in email

3. Set up an opt in campaign on those pages to introduce the new email newsletter idea.

4. Watch to see the subscription rates and decide whether or not to build, maintain and launch it.

In one unnamed publishers case we worked with last spring, we did just this. We found content that was a primary organic traffic driver on their site. It was popular and not being leveraged. We followed our steps and in less than 90 days had over 90,000 subscribers to this newsletter. We then launched it in a weekly version that was automated using our RSS to emailROI system and reduced the person hours in producing the email. From there we did the math with them on the costs VS the opportunity with reads, clicks, click throughs, and in the end page views VS the ad sale opp. 

Win Win? Yes. Cost effective and targeted? You bet.

Start at the real opportunity and you might find the right approach.