Company newsletters - online or in print?

Has the company newsletter become a casualty of the rising tide of social media content?

B-2-B  enterprises have traditionally used a newsletter, which in some cases evolved into a company magazine, as a means of keeping in touch with customers with updates on interesting recent projects, advances in technology, new products and general helpful information about the market. Because they were a cut above the hard sell mailer and  professionally produced, they had higher  retention value and also got passed on to work colleagues. For some clients the company newsletter became a victim of budget cuts with the rising cost of postage becoming a deciding factor.  Some have switched their efforts to email contact and to social media, but there is a difference.

Looking at the trade press as an example, many have simply placed the printed magazine online using page turning technology. However people I have talked to about this find it too small to read without enlarging the article and after a while can't be bothered. Worse still clients are concerned their advertisements will not get noticed and where the publisher has opted for a magazine designed for print but only published online, they have pulled their advertising. Some have abandoned print completely and designed for reading online embracing the use of video and links and at the same time creating other display advertising opportunities. The advertising manager of one publication that continues in print as well as providing an online version, told me that there is very little overlap between the two circulation lists implying two, possibly different, audiences.

Rather than replace company newsletters and magazines by abandoning print and moving  online only, newsletters  need to evolve into an authoritative, quality publication through the use of informative and useful content that is of value to the customer. As a 'keeping in touch' communication tool they are probably going to be  more effective and more likely to be read than an online only option which relies on the customer choosing to visit.  Why not also develop and re-purpose content into an online version to attract a new readership?

And by contrast to the quick flash, short lived news bites of social media fulfilling a very different marketing need.

Should b-2-b marketing follow where consumer marketing leads?

iPhone users socialising

A commonly held view is that b-2-b marketing uses similar techniques and channels as for consumer marketing, but does so on a smaller budget - until that is social media came along.

It is not just social media of course but the platforms used and how people communicate with one another. The smart phone and in particular the iPhone is the platform of choice right now that absorbs the attention of its owners seemingly every waking minute. If that is where people, in other words potential customers, spend their time then that is a place where product and service providers need to be too, in order to promote i.e. advertise their offers. Certainly a number of consumer companies think so and have invested heavily in social media and in particular Facebook to 'converse' with the younger audience. A recent report by Piper Jaffray which asked 5,000 teenagers to name their favourite social media site showed a significant decline in support for the best known sites like Facebook. A couple of articles (click links) illustrate the findings and add their own views raising questions about the marketing value of social media.

As noted in several previous blogs, our b-2-b clients are divided on social media as being appropriate to their business. At one extreme Facebook in particular is seen at best as trivial, or worse a place where 'friends' post and tag their pictures of recent drunken excess, or even bully others. A strange surreal world where without leaving the bedroom a user can socialise with a couple of thousand 'friends' they have never met, rather than their 2 or 3 real life acquaintances. Why they ask would we want our products to be associated with this banality?  Good question. The opposite view is that engaging through social media is an important channel because that is where customers and prospects spend so much of their time. This approach seems to demand an almost continuous news stream to gain any kind of visibility amongst the sea of messages that are out there. Purely anecdotally I  have noticed amongst people I know a trend for retired former work colleagues to be quite active users of Facebook, others sign up and after a burst of enthusiasm lose interest and another category simply shun Facebook. And of course there are many other social media sites that parents and retired people have not heard of yet where young people can go. A more relevant question is where, if on any of these numerous social media channels are your customers and prospects?

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the iPhone brigade spend an inordinate amount of time interacting with the device even and particularly, when supposedly actually socialising in a restaurant, at a barbecue (see photo) or even in the cinema or theatre. Take the example of a 24 year old in our family, one who shuns Facebook incidentally who switches on TV, plugs in headphones in one ear to talk to his girl friend, manages a steady stream of text messages on his iPhone, plays a game on his iPad and simultaneously discusses his menu requests for our evening meal. Or the daughters of friends sitting side by side sending Snapchat images of each other back and forth, pictures that vanish in seconds. Maybe its the platform that really fascinates and the popularity of apps will come and go. And don't forget more people are now reading their emails on mobile devices than on desk top computers and email campaigns have a proven track record.

Is email marketing getting personal?

Are the days of one to many email campaigns to be replaced by personalised emailed messages?

Depending on source, the number of emails sent world wide each day vary, but safe to say are well in excess of 100 billion. According to royal.pingdom.com some 144 billion emails were sent each day to 2.2 billion users last year. Of these 61% were deemed non-essential, approaching 70% were spam and of these not surprisingly, half for pharmaceutical products. Interestingly mobile has over taken desk top and web as the most used platform and Mail for iOS devices at 35.6% is the most popular email client. OK - enough with the numbers, email is still a top marketing communications tool but not surprisingly  things are changing and more changes will evolve as email marketing becomes better targeted, segmented and data driven.

It should come as a surprise, but doesn't, what poor shape many company email databases are in. With the cost of postal campaigns almost prohibitive to smaller b-2-b companies once the cost of design, print, labels, envelopes and postage are added up, it is to what quite a number still refer to as an 'email blast' they now turn. Although research normally rates email as a high return on investment channel, simply blasting out thousands of emails relying on volume to return at least some enquiries doesn't cut it any more. The smarter clients have meanwhile been nurturing and fine tuning their email subscriber databases, building trust and interaction with their customers and in particular keeping the email data current and the recipients engaged.

From time to time we are asked can we or do we send out emails?  One such prospect not only had no customer email database but the company had no centralised record of their customers either. Amongst the 'email blast brigade' there is little concept of what they are going to send out either. They will have spent money in the past on designing print, but fail to extend the same approach or budget to a well designed email including a 'call to action", a campaign landing page and tracking codes etc. In fact too many still have little concept of the processes involved and factors that make the campaign a success.

Many seasoned email marketers, those who don't see the medium as a lower cost option to postal campaigns, are recognising the importance of tracking customer action and building data profiles from response to email campaigns, links followed, products evaluated and purchases made. For many b-2-b users this implies joining up system, in particular making the connection between enquiry data, web site visits and the all important purchasing record that probably only exists in the accounts department. So now not only does the b-2-b marketer have to deal with the IT people, but they might have to deal with accountants too!

The goal is to send personalised emails that have drawn on the individual's recent online research, enquiry, purchase experience and frequency to segment campaigns that present information and offers that are likely to be most relevant - it's getting personal.

Is marketing becoming an IT activity?

In the early days of email and Internet, marketing departments were often at odds with the IT department because their needs were not seen as high priority or even understood. Many still are.

A feature article published in the April issue of Database Marketing attracted my attention with the information that according to Gartner, by 2017 "marketing will spend even more on technology than the IT department itself in the USA." Interestingly it was the quick response of external technically switched on marketing agencies compared with the traditional and slow response of in-house IT departments that caused marketing to outsource. It was why we developed Virtual News Office. News is now, not when IT get finished with running payroll for Accounts. Not only did we get the news out fast, but where inter department charges operated in larger companies, it was cheaper as well. Today most marketing teams are familiar with using the technology which is not just the hardware platforms, but  also the software tools such as content management systems [CMS] for web site tweaks and social media publication tools for Facebook and Twitter. 

The article - Marketing and IT: a marriage of increasing convenience? - continues, " Marketing perceives IT to be a barrier to delivery, particularly when its requirements are time-sensitive and when IT typically push back when confronted with a vague project which needs to be completed yesterday." And here lies the problem. As we noted in our last blog, many of the current generation of marketing communications people are not good at providing a relevant and complete brief to the supplier. IT people traditionally spend ages writing RFIs and RFPs prior to developing the system specification. 

It is a bit like an iceberg where 7/8 is below the surface, so with technical marketing campaigns its all the stuff behind the scenes that too few marketers appreciate or even understand what goes on that makes for a successful outcome for a campaign. 

At Technical Marketing Ltd we are used to dealing with the enquiry " do you send out emails?" and discovering there is no email subscriber list, no email design, no landing page and no content or design in place.  And of course it needs to go out now! Not a brief to win friends in an IT department, but then that's what we do and are good at.                               

It is all in the detail - really

In the age of instant communication, it is easy for quality to be compromised.

When marketing communications channels and design processes were expensive both clients and agencies took great care to ensure that what they put out was on message, accurate, well presented and effective. Mistakes were expensive to correct in the design to print process and embarrassing to say the least if not picked up before going to print. Client briefings were thorough and got right into the details. Likewise agencies checked copy closely, examined printed proofs through magnifying glasses and got a physical sign off from the client before going to print. Clients understood the details of the process and the skills and expertise they were buying to achieve quality results.

Of course progress in software has transformed traditional processes such as photography, design for print and offered new publishing tools, to such an extent that much of the perceived value has been diluted. The Internet has accelerated this process so that instantly messages, thoughts, views and opinions can be shared with the world. Stripped of the briefing process, attention to detail and authorisation many people are soon regretting the hastiness of poorly thought out instant messages and tweets. Even formal press releases are being issued then followed up with a correction. Part of this is driven by a programme to generate more news, not just daily but hourly. Where once we worked hard to find say a couple of stories for a month that actually had news value, now because of the push to fill story quotas on Twitter and Facebook, any trivial snippet will do. Do prospective and current customers really want to be bombarded with so much information, or do they simply switch off and not bother  following companies with such prolific output?

How often too do we hear clients say, "don't bother me with the details" or " my role is to take a helicopter view, I don't get involved in details." Briefs, where they exist at all, arrive in the form of forwarded emails, some may add a note along the lines of, " here is a news story" others don't bother and leave the agency to trawl through an email trail to figure out what the story actually is about. If indeed there is a story of any merit. Some seem to think every individual sale is of wider interest. After all someone has to deal with the details in an age where instant gratification is demanded as in "don't give me any details - I want it now!"