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A Look INSIDE My Newsletters
By Robert Skrob | March 31, 2010
For 6 years, select information marketers have been “by-invitation-only” subscribers to Dan Kennedy’s Information Marketing Special Reports and Info-Marketing Letters. Now, for a limited time, Dan has opened his vault to make these available to you.
If you’d like to find out more about the archives, visit www.DKArchive.com. Here is an excerpt from Volume V, Number 5 of the archives. I’m sure you’ll find it valuable and enlightening.
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A WARNING FOR ONLINE MARKETERS. One of the leading research publications I subscribe to recently carried this little “rant” from its editor, Ellen Neuborne, excerpted here: “I’ve been a member of a professional organization for the last eight years. Among the benefits is a monthly newsletter. It used to come in the mail, until last year … then it came via e-mail. Then that was updated so that I received an e-mail alert and a link to a downloadable PDF. And just recently I got the news that delivery would now take place via RSS. Forget for a minute that RSS is a technology most consumers can’t define. My complaint is: why is my organization spending my membership dues on new ways to deliver my newsletter? … clearly, my organization, like many others has been bitten by “Web 2.0 fever.”
Obama is making an interesting mistake. May not be costly enough. But the demographic he already owns is 30 and under, the demo he has trouble with is 50+; yet he’s doing a lot—including VP announcement—with texting; online; Twitter; etc.
Ellen points out that web “stuff” is particularly appealing to marketers targeting women, who like the community activities and blogging, statistically, more than men—but that busy women resent having to play fetch for info, and women of certain age or affluence resent e-delivery of material they pay for. In the past two years five different newsletters have, combined, lost nearly $9,000.00 of revenue from me and lost me forever as a reader ’cuz I will NOT play fetch and fire up my own home printing press to get their stuff—I’ve replaced them.
Now, I see a number of info-marketers worst and fastest hit by recession have this in common: little or no offline deliverables and communication with leads or customers, and extreme to total reliance on online. Why is their suffering so swift and great? Like Obama’s youthful crowd around him, they hang around with people who love being Fully Wired, develop disdain for those who aren’t, and grossly underestimate the sheer numbers, the higher responsiveness quality and higher affluence of those who prefer paper. Further and thus, these stricken info-marketers ignored the basic of this business; it isn’t really about products, services, deliverables; it’s about Relationship.
Call me a dinosaur all you like, but make a big enough wager and we’ll sit down and compare all your stats (customer retention, customer value, % of base attending events, show up vs. cancel, you name it) with the Glazer-Kennedy statistics and see who’s right about this.
I get a lot of questions about my newsletters, the newsletter business, writing a newsletter, etc., so I decided to try and answer them all in this one report.
Background
I have been publishing newsletters for profit, and using newsletters as promotional vehicles, since 1979. Actually, even before that; the very first thing I did when I got my first and only “job,” as a sales rep for a book publishing company with an impossible five state territory, was create and send out a monthly newsletter to the most distance and smallest accounts I knew I’d never call on personally—and it generated more orders by mail and phone than the predecessor in my job had been producing in total!
Anyway, my first ‘real’ newsletter was titled MARKETING YOUR SERVICES, and it was for, and sold to professional speakers, mostly National Speakers Association members. I think it was either $149 or $179 a year (remember—in 1979!), and quickly hit, and stalled at, about 300 paid subscribers.* From 1983 to 1987, in conjunction with my SuccessTrak seminar business for chiropractors and dentists, I put out a monthly newsletter. And, over the years, I’ve published several others at different times, including ‘The Business Secrets Letter’ and apolitical newsletter, ‘Perilous Times.’ I even briefly published a magazine, ‘Philosophy of Success.’ The NO B.S. MARKETING LETTER began in 1993, and is now in its 11th year. It became the foundation of my entire business, and is one of the cornerstones of my wealth.
As you know, in 2003, I sold the NO B.S. MARKETING LETTER and Silver, Gold and Gold+ Membership levels to Bill Glazer. Last year, with a different partner, Pete Lillo, I created the No B.S. Info-Marketing Letter, and the Look Over My Shoulder Program. And I am in discussions regarding a No B.S. Practice Marketing Letter for health care professionals, possibly with multiple JV partners.
The NO B.S. MARKETING LETTER has had as many as 8,000 paid subscribers, and will very shortly surpass that number again. Currently, few are Silver, most are Gold, and a significant percentage are Gold+. If you are curious, you can easily estimate the gross revenues solely from subscription/membership fees, although that represents only a fraction of the total revenue of the business.
My overall business model “locked in” on the newsletter right around 1993: (a) do everything possible to funnel every customer acquired by any means into membership. Consequently, after every speech or seminar, those product buyers were aggressively marketed, with a sequence of sales letters. Every inquiry for anything—product, speech, consulting—got the newsletter pitches. Every book I wrote included offers and coupons to generate leads for the newsletter. And every critique coupon redemption prompted a newsletter pitch. I also front-end marketed subscriptions from time to time, using paid advertising in card decks, and direct-mail to rented lists. (b) Use the newsletter as THE means of building and sustaining a strong relationship with a group of customers who would be responsible to additional products, services, seminars and boot camps, teleseminars, etc. After I sold my products business to Michael Kimble in 1999, the newsletter and its back-end income sources became my only business.
Why You Should Make a Major Commitment to Putting Out a Top-Flight, Paid Subscription Newsletter
Simply put, the newsletter is the glue that holds an info-business together, and supports everything else you do with your customers.
I have had clients who got lazy about this, putting out a very good newsletter early in the development of their info-businesses, but then tiring of it and delegating too much, letting its quality decline. The adverse effects take time to manifest so visibly they cannot be ignored. But they always do. The omission of a strong newsletter in an info-business is a mistake.
Here is a summary of the main reasons why and opportunities afforded you with your newsletter:
1. On-going conversation with your customers, akin to writing a personal letter each month.
2. Opportunities to promote your products, services and seminars.
3. Opportunities to promote others’ products, services and seminars.
4. Getting what you send actually read.
5. Means of giving recognition to customers.
6. Continuous documentation of your customers’ successes.
7. Convenient means of updating/upgrading information previously provided.
8. Compilation of recyclable, resaleable content.
9. Media to barter.
10. Press credentials.
11. Tax benefits.
4: This is THE most compelling benefit, misunderstood by so many info-marketers who refuse to put priority on their newsletter—it is THE only thing you can send to your customers with certainty it will be read by the majority of them. Most info-marketers foolishly like believing their customers read whatever they send them, but that is NOT the case at all. And good info-marketers are often fortunate to pull (only) a 2% to 5% response on a good offer to their house list, their own customers. Why would 98% say no? They wouldn’t. The vast majority never read the mail, e-mail, etc. Some years ago, I worked with a client with nearly 50,000 customers. On a solo mailing with a good offer, he typically made 250 sales of whatever: ½ of 1%. I convinced him to start putting out a really good newsletter and investing heavily in selling as many of those customers as possible into its subscription. Two years later he had 11,000 paid subscribers. We dusted off an offer he’d once sent to all 50,000, and made 263 sales, sent it to the 11,000, in a sealed envelope, in with their newsletter, and made 489 sales.
If you enjoyed this excerpt, you may want to review the entire Dan Kennedy archive. It is available for a limited time at www.DKArchive.com. Every one of the 72 issues is packed with advanced, specialized, experience-tested insights into what it takes to succeed within the info-marketing business. Visit www.DKArchive.com to reserve your copy.
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