BtoB Media Business - October 2008 - (Page 8)

COVER STORY Energize your e-mail Just because your e-newsletters are making money doesn’t mean they’re reaching their full potential By Mary E. Morrison I t’s little wonder that publishers love e-mail newsletters: At their best, e-newsletters can be powerful generators of sponsorship revenue and Web site traffic, communicating with highly targeted, highly engaged audiences that have opted in to receive must-have information. The challenge, however, is to provide that information while battling rendering issues, avoiding list fatigue and rising above noise from competing e-newsletters and an ever-growing number of new media options. ¶ Complicating matters is the fact that many media companies erroneously believe that because enewsletters are relatively easy and cost-effective to publish, they don’t LESS IS MORE require much care and feeding. “So many times in this business we’re out looking for the cool new thing, and there’s so much money left on the table from the things that are very well-known and well-accepted but just aren’t being done well,” said Jeff DeBalko, chief Internet officer of Reed Business Information. “Newsletters definitely fall into that category.” E-newsletters have something of a hangover, said Scott Vaughan, VP-marketing at United Business Media’s TechWeb, because many publishers rely too heavily on automated systems to pull and prioritize content. While such systems have their place and are necessary in some cases, said Tom Smith, VP-Web analytics at TechWeb, it’s much more effective to actively manage content and monitor feedback. “Some companies have tried to monetize these newsletters to such an extent that one brand might have 40 or 50 newsletters when they don’t have any business having that many newsletters,” he said. “And in order to run all of those, they have to automate them and their quality gets really watered down.” By contrast, successful e-newsletters provide context and analysis for readers, Vaughan said. “With so much information out there targeting b-to-b decision-makers from so many sources, if we can filter and contextualize that information on topics they’ve selected, that’s very powerful,” he said. “That e-newsletter becomes so important as a way to do that because it’s on their terms and their time.” read, said Alex Kam, VP-digital media. “The reality is we’re facing a lot of competition,” he said. “People subscribe to a lot of newsletters. So we’re focusing [for instance] on making sure the subject line is very impactful. You need to cut through all the clutter, and we want to make sure we offer immediate value to readers and to advertisers.” Kam said Incisive is also looking for ways to increase engagement and interactivity in e-newsletters by including items such as polls. Eric Shanfelt, exec VP-online media for Aspire Media, reports a trend toward more columnlike e-newsletters—for instance, an e-mail that features an opinion piece by one columnist, rather than a digest of news stories. “People are looking for more opinion and analysis,” he said. “I can get headlines anywhere I need to, but I want to know what they mean. What’s the analysis? It has to be substantive; it can’t be fluff.” E-newsletters that highlight stories from a publisher’s blogs are also becoming more popular. TechWeb earlier this year launched a newsletter that features content from its blogs, leading with the most compelling blog post of the day, Smith said. “We’ve seen very high performance of that newsletter, very high uptake and very high open and click-through rates,” he said. THE NEW NEWSLETTERS In an effort to capitalize on e-newsletters’ potential, business media companies are showing a renewed focus on their e-mail products, redefining what constitutes valuable content and reconsidering what makes a targeted list. Incisive Media is fine-tuning its editorial model to give e-newsletter recipients a quick Media companies assessing their enewsletter programs are doing so with a much more critical eye, eliminating content areas that don’t generate revenue or refocusing their efforts on niche areas that will offer readers and advertisers very targeted opportunities. Reed recently conducted a comprehensive analysis of its portfolio to determine which e-newsletters were profitable and, of those that weren’t, which were worth fixing. The company was surprised to learn that of its more than 200 e-newsletters, about a third were unprofitable or just breaking even, DeBalko said. “Like a lot of aspects of online [media], there are tremendous hidden costs, mostly around labor,” he said. “The personhours that go into creating these, in addition to the hard costs of distribution and that sort of thing, just get hidden. We tried to really carve those out and attach a number to them.” As a result of the analysis, he said, Reed 8 | Media Business | October 2008 | mediabusinessonline.com http://www.mediabusinessonline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BtoB Media Business - October 2008

BtoB Media Business - October 2008
Contents
Upfront
Cover Story
Webinars
Sales & Marketing
M&A
Online
Events
Circulation
People
Benchmarks
Endnote

BtoB Media Business - October 2008