BtoB Media Business - June 2010 - (Page 8)

FEATURE E-mail still delivers One of the oldest digital products is getting more attention—and performing better— than ever By Marie Griffin S uccessful but not sexy, the e-newsletter business ran on autopilot for many b-to-b media companies over most of the past decade. As the economy softened, though, publishers found themselves relying more than ever on e-newsletters and started paying them a lot more attention. They have been culled, tweaked and redesigned. They have become more frequent and more focused, and they are playing a more important strategic role. “Bottom line, e-newsletters are still doing great,” said Tom Cintorino, exec VP-digital media at Northstar Travel Media. It’s important to “manage the business rather than just letting it happen,” he said, noting that the trend at Northstar is away from broad-based, general-interest newsletters toward ones that are more targeted. “We constantly look at the mix of the newsletters. If one of them needs to be tweaked or even killed, we’ll do that,” Cintorino said. A better focus on fewer products has been key to improving newsletter performance at e.Republic, where the number of e-mail newsletters has been trimmed over the past 18 months. For example, Government Technology consolidated from 16 e-newsletters to six over that period. “You can get too dispersed in the newsletter world,” said Paul Harney, COO of e.Republic. “There was really no benefit for a lot of these newsletters. We were having open rates go down; we were having subscribers go down. Some topics that probably were timely a few years ago weren’t as relevant anymore. We’ve honed in to the topics people want, and we’re getting good opt-ins and click-throughs.” ic environment. “If the Web’s taught us anything, [it’s that] the more specialized you are, the better chance you’ll have of making money,” said Jack Berkowitz, senior VP at ALM. Two recent e-newsletter launches that stand out, Berkowitz said, are The Am Law Daily and The Am Law Litigation Daily, brand extensions of The American Lawyer. The Litigation Daily became a big hit so rapidly that ALM pursued a strategy that’s rare in digital media: It decided to test whether readers would pay to subscribe to it. “For a portion of the list, we said we would have to cut them off after a certain date if they did not subscribe,” Berkowitz said. “We got calls from whole law firms saying, ‘No, we have to have it.’ This wasn’t a surprise, but we expected it to take a lot longer.” After law firms started asking to buy subscriptions in bulk, ALM decided to sell site licenses, he added. The Am Law Daily, launched last year, represented a departure for The American Lawyer, a paid-subscription product online as well as in print. The AmLaw Daily not only provides frequently updated news content to complement the monthly magazine, it is also free to people who register. “I would deem The AmLaw Daily a success. It’s good for advertising. The readership likes it, and it drives a lot of traffic,” Berkowitz said, adding that ALM is considering testing a paid sub- scription model for it as well. At Canon Communications, the e-mail newsletter business “wasn’t terribly strategic,” said Jason Brown, VP-e-media. “Now we’re taking a much closer look at content and frequency. We’ve had a bunch of monthly newsletters for a while, and I’ve come to the view that that’s not frequent enough.” Canon recently rolled out a daily newsletter to drive traffic to Qmed, its online directory of prequalified medical device suppliers. In addition to building awareness of the brand, bringing traffic and providing advertising revenue, the Qmed Daily has been a boon to audience development for Canon’s entire medical device portfolio, said Stephen Corrick, VP-medical device brands. “When I came in here in September 2009, we had 222,000 names globally. We sit here in May with 293,000. We haven’t tracked how much of that has come through newsletter activity, but it’s a factor,” he said. By segmenting that audience, Canon is developing a custom business in newsletters. “Now we can go to a client and say, ‘If you want to target orthopedic engineers in the Midwest, we can serve them a newsletter once a quarter,’ ” Corrick said. Hanley Wood has grown its number of e-newsletters every year, said Andrew Reid, president of the company’s e-media and market intelligence businesses. “The most recent launch was a daily newsletter for Architectmagazine, which has had tremendous reviews and generates a lot of traffic and click-throughs,” he said. “We haven’t had a daily news-summary approach prior to this, and we may extend [the concept] across some of the other brands, too.” Too much of a good thing? Because e-mail newsletters are so effective at engaging readers and attracting advertisers, publishers can get carried away. “You have to be careful because, in some industries, audiences will get hit three, four or five times a day,” said George Fox, president of Advantage Business Media. “As soon as you start to bang away at people, you see a decline in open rates and an increase in unsubscribing.” While it can be valuable to serve vertical subsegments of markets with e-newsletters, “you have to steer away from creating new e-newsletters just because advertisers see your market in a certain way. This can snowball out of control very quickly,” Fox said. “You’ve got to create some ground rules, Focus allows growth By being largely focused on one field—legal—ALM has been able to grow its e-mail newsletter business even in a tough econom- 8 | Media Business | June 2010 | mediabusinessonline.com http://www.mediabusinessonline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BtoB Media Business - June 2010

BtoB Media Business - June 2010
Contents
ABM Conference
E-Mail Management
Content Management
Departments: Sales & Marketing
Departments: M&A
Departments: Audience Development
Departments: Events
Departments: Production
Departments: People
Departments: Benchmarks
Endnote

BtoB Media Business - June 2010