Margie Clayman

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but e-newsletters are really quite polarizing in the world of marketing, online and off. On the one pole you have people who role their eyes and make vomit sounds when you mention e-newsletters. You might hear something like, “OMG I get like, 27 gazillion a day. The whole reason I went to the Inbox Zero conference is because I need to figure out how to get RID of the e-newsletters!” On the other pole you don’t have as much talking. It’s really more about action. These are the folks who send all of those e-newsletters. Though I cannot prove it, I would bet there is even some overlap between these two disparate groups of people.

So what is going on here? Why are we getting so many e-newsletters, all of which drive us nuts, all while we keep sending our own? I have a theory. I think that just like we see in the world of social media, the thought is that creating an e-newsletter and sending it is so cheap and so easy that there’s no earthly reason why NOT to do it. As a result, people tend to jump into the process without really thinking about it first.

I’m going to give you a little quiz at this time. Now, whether or not you tell me the results, hopefully it will get those little brain hamsters rolling a bit. Ready?

1. Have you added people to your recipients list without their knowledge or permission?

2. Do you make efforts to indicate to your recipients that you want them to talk back?

3. Do you use your e-newsletters to sell, inform, or both?

4. Do you send your e-newsletters on a regular schedule?

5. Do you have a content plan for your e-newsletters?

Now, let’s talk about each of these five things in a bit more detail.

Who is receiving your e-newsletters?

One of the reasons that e-newsletters are perceived of as being really easy is that it IS really easy to add a person to an email database, especially now that platforms like Constant Contact and MailChimp exist. You literally just type peoples’ contact information in. Pretty darned easy. There’s an important step that I fear a lot of people miss, however, and that is making sure that people opt in to your e-newsletter. In fact, best practices indicate that people should opt in twice, once to sign up for your e-newsletter and then again via an invitate to unsubscribe if they wish.

I receive at least one e-newsletter from a person whom I know. We’ve had online conversations only, never phone or skype or anything like that. I’ve never met them in person. I’ve visited their blog a few times. And yet I receive their e-newsletter. Now how did that happen? When I converse with you, am I opting in to your e-newsletter? I don’t think so.

Always remember that the people who receive your e-newsletter will feel just like you do when you receive an e-newsletter you didn’t ask for. It may make them think less of you. They may unsubscribe. They may wonder what other sneaky things you do to try to grow your business. Going through the business cards you gather at a trade show and inputting all of those e-mail addresses is NOT the way to build your e-newsletter list. Stray away from this practice.

Are you inviting your readers to talk back?

Just like anything that is done in the marketing world today, it’s important to remember that your readers are the same people who have adjusted to the realities of Web 2.0 (or are we at 3.0 now?). They want to be able to talk back to you. They want to feel like you WANT them to talk back to you. Are your e-newsletters leaving some breathing room for participation? Do you actually invite your readers to respond or reply?

Say what?

What are you using your e-newsletters for in the grand scheme of your marketing campaign? Are you using them to sell your products or services? Are they loud and filled with images? There are ways to reach out to existing and potential customers with your e-newsletters, but nobody is going to be happy to receive a yelling salesman in his or her inbox, right? Besides, spam filters are getting pretty clever (except for all of the actual spam email, which seems to always get through). Images with blatant sales messages in the headline and lots of images may not even reach your readers.

Truthfully, your e-newsletter is a chance to help you nurture relationships with existing and potential clients. Yelling and screaming, doing nothing but selling, or creating extremely aggressive messaging is a great way to make people run away. Hard to nurture relationships that way, don’t you think?

Now for your regularly scheduled programming

Like a blog site, e-newsletters can be used to build a sense of expectation. If you send daily, try to send around the same time every day. If you send weekly, try to send on the same day. And so on. Scheduling your e-newsletters not only helps your recipients know when to expect your content, it also helps you track traffic to your website more reliably to when your e-newsletter went out. If your traffic keeps spiking at the same time you send out your e-newsletter, it’s a lot easier to make that connection.

A Man, A Plan, An E-newsletter…

Ok, that’s not exactly a palindrome, but having a plan for your e-newsletter content can be a great help in integrating your content into the rest of your marketing campaign. For example, if you are going to be exhibiting at a trade show, talking about that in your e-newsletter can be useful. While the plan does not need to be rigid or highly detailed, having some idea of what you will talk about can help prevent things like last-minute ideas and repetition.

These five aspects of e-newsletter planning and sending represent only the tip of the iceberg, and we’ve just touched on each one a bit. Now, is it possible to send an e-newsletter without all of these considerations? Sure. But what are you risking? Being black-listed as a spammer. Losing your reputation as an up-and-up business person. Losing relationships with existing or potential customers. That seems like a lot to risk just because of the myth that e-newsletters are easy to create and send.

Don’t you think?

1st  image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/xiaming/50391986/ via Creative Commons

2nd image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/3593686294/ via Creative Commons

I have been really astonished that so many people have asked for #tweetdiner to come back. I think committing to every Saturday night got too hard for everyone. Hey, even I like to have a Saturday night away from my computer. But once a month isn’t so bad, right?

With that in mind, and with Valentine’s Day weekend now behind us for another year, tomorrow, February 18, is the day.

For our February chat, we’re going to talk about the power of pictures and what exactly that means. Whether it’s InstaGram, Pinterest, or Infographics, it seems like pictures, not content, are becoming king. Why is that happening? What does it mean?

Let’s talk about it, eh? Join me on Twitter at 9 PM EST Saturday, February 18, 2012. Just look for the hashtag #tweetdiner.

I’ll see you there 🙂

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brent_nashville/4155724023/ via Creative Commons

If you are a regular reader here, or even if you aren’t, I want to preface this by saying that I am not trying to attack any one company or any one person. Rather, an opportunity has presented itself to demonstrate the kinds of irresponsible advice that are openly floating about in the world of social media when it comes to marketing your business.

In this particular case, the article comes from HubSpot, a highly respected company, a company I respect a great deal. But that respect and credibility is *exactly* why I find this content so disturbing. We’ve come to expect better from them.

Let’s take this article a little bit at a time and talk about why I think this represents irresponsible advice.

So this post’s title is “Blogging Trumps Traditional Advertising in ROI Head-to-Head Case Study.” The post, near the beginning, sets the stage for what this HubSpot customer did with their super bowl ads:

The ads used a tracking phone number — which means the business knew which incoming calls were a result of the commercial — and encouraged viewers to visit the company’s homepage; other than that, there was nothing in the ad campaign integrating the offline efforts with their website or another online presence like social media.

One thing I have always said about super bowl commercials – they might be clever, they might be super funny, but quite often you don’t even know what the ad was for. They are more entertainment than anything else. The fact that this advertiser used a special phone number to track leads is interesting, but given that that was the main way to track leads, one would also assume that TV watchers were encouraged to respond via telephone. In that scenario, hyping the website or the social media presence of the company would have reduced the number of leads. Right?

Let’s move on.

The article shows a graph indicating that during the period that the ads were running…

along with several inbound leads, the customer’s blog generated twice as much traffic as its TV spots. To make matters worse, the ads resulted in no online leads, only 7 phone calls, and zero opportunities or customer conversions. Needless to say, the company was not very satisfied with the ROI of the Super Bowl ad campaign.

Now, let’s think about this really carefully.

First, the customer’s blog out-performed the TV ads. Is it possible that the TV ads generated interest, people didn’t want to call the trackable phone number, but they Googled the company and the blog site came up? It’s possible, right?

Second, we must again note that the primary call-to-action, it seems, was for people to call a special telephone number that was featured in the ad. Given that, the goal would not have been to drive website traffic, which would not have been trackable to the television ad campaign.

Third, OK, yes, 7 phone calls out of a reported 2.8 million person audience is not a great percentage. We can agree on that one. Then again, Super Bowl Sunday is still a Sunday. Do people really want to take time out of watching the big game to call about a product? Given that context, 7 calls may not be all that discouraging after all.

So, HubSpot company is not super duper pleased with the ROI of its super bowl campaign. OK. Fair enough.

Now here’s the part that really fried my friddle (and you can quote me on that).

This customer has (understandably) requested to remain anonymous, but they asked us to share this story with the marketing community as a reminder that, more often than not, outbound marketing just isn’t worth the cost. This customer has seen a much higher return at a fraction of the cost doing inbound marketing with HubSpot software.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way pronto-pup. Saying something like “more often than not” based on one case study is simply irresponsible. In fact, it’s rather laughable. What if medical scientists said that they had cured cancer based on results in one lab rat? We’d be kind of appalled, right? We should be similarly raising our eyebrows in this scenario. We don’t know what kind of company this customer is. We don’t know what else they are doing to market their products. In fact, we don’t even know what their products are. We know that they had $54,000 to spend on super bowl ads in a targeted area. One would assume they are a B2C company based on the campaign. Do we really want to offer comprehensive advice based on all of this stuff we don’t know? Well, I don’t.

Now, there’s another little red herring in here too. If you noticed a few paragraphs up, the article noted that there were no online leads. Now, I get a little hazy here, but if there were ZERO online leads, that means all of that website traffic and all of that blog traffic didn’t result in any leads either, right? So even if the inbound marketing seemed to out-perform the super bowl ads traffic-wise, no leads still equals no leads.

Also somewhat absent from this equation is how much that HubSpot software costs. The products page does not seem to list pricing. I’m guessing it isn’t free.

Let’s end by looking at this paragraph:

Marketers, if you focus on inbound marketing, you will see consistent results. It takes time, dedication, and hard work to create great content and generate inbound leads. But those who are willing to do the work (including the company referenced in this post) get to see a real return on investment. In fact, since this company started using inbound marketing with HubSpot, it’s increased its organic traffic by 567% and its overall traffic by 583% in less than a year.

The problem with this statement, of course, is that this does not prove the ROI of the HubSpot software or of inbound marketing. Increasing traffic is great, but if your sales numbers aren’t climbing (and these figures are noticeably absent from the article) you’re still in a hole, right?

To me, the article was surprisingly misleading, possibly at the peril of a lot of companies who will be swayed by the words of such a reputable and respected company. The only point that I would agree with whole-heartedly is that neither outbound or inbound marketing should work in a vacuum. Integrating tactics is the most effective way to ensure positive results.

You can read the full article here. I’d like to see if your take differs from mine. If so, why?

 

1st image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aguichard/357212691/ via Creative Commons

2nd image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ehousley/2657942647/ via Creative Commons

My pal Mark Schaefer wrote that this week is a good time to “hug a blogger.” Being a Star Wars fan, I figured an appropriate sequel would be, “The Blogger Hugs Back.”

Now, just to be clear, I’ve never really been a fan of Valentine’s Day, so that’s not *technically* why I’m doing this. It’s not just that I never got a flower on the big day in high school (sniff sniff) but it just seems so …pressure-filled for couples that really should be confident in each others’ adoration not to need a day to make it clear (well that’s my opinion, anyway). On the other hand, I am a completely sappy person. Studies have shown that I am 70% sap instead of water. So, if there is a love fest going on, for any reason, I am apt to take part.

Besides, I have a lot of reasons to spread joy.

So, here is a by no means complete list of people who make my days brighter (or at least more interesting) on an awfully regular basis. I would encourage you, just because Valentine’s Day offers up a good enough excuse, to think about the people who make a difference to you. Sometimes just telling people they are important is a lot more meaningful than a giant diamond ring (although the top ten people on this list can of course expect a package from Kay Jewelers any day now).

That’s a blatant lie.

Ehem, anyway, here we go 🙂

Gaga, Brandie, Sam, and Jeff,

Nick and Josepf plus Mitch Neff,

Cate and Gini, Lisa P,

Sean and John and Lisa D.

Lisa A and Danny Buntu,

Jack Steiner is fun to talk to,

Julien and Rufus, Geoff with Soleil,

Chris and Nancy and Olivier,

Dan Perez and Danny Brown,

Billy Delaney in my home town.

Mark and Chris and Chris and Jay,

Amber N, Amber C and Amber O,

Sumner the awesome daddy-o,

Carl and Cristian and Tom and Patrick,

Paul and Dave and Peggy Fitzpatrick,

Nic and Ian, Nickles, too,

Dawn Westerberg friended me when I was new.

Ellen and Alan and Alan and Fred,

Ann and Liz and Raul and Ted,

Stan S and Stan F and Chris Eh Young,

I could go on forever, it’d be so much fun.

And so my list goes on and on, as you can plainly see,

Lots and lots of people who make me über happy.

I’m one lucky lady to know these great folks,

Even if sometimes they pop my dreams’ yolks.

Alternating between funny and smart,

Sometimes we even talk about…tarts.

Happy Valentines to all you awesome people. I hope you have a great day, but then I’d hope that regardless. And I do.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sivinjski/4353431281/ via Creative Commons