8 Ways to Extend Your Print or eNewsletter’s Reach Far Beyond Its Core Subscribers

When you publish a monthly print or electronic newsletter that targets an important audience segment,  you probably invest heavily in generating the content that will make this newsletter relevant and valuable to its readers.  That is obviously critical.  But you can do much more to make that newsletter and its content work harder for your organization. How? Easy. Think outside the newsletter.

After all, the newsletter has a relatively finite reach, even online.  Think beyond this single content product.  You can dramatically increase the impact of your content marketing by thoughtful repurposing of the information and resources you developed in order to create the newsletter itself.

Here are 8 ways to extend the reach of your content far beyond the circulation of that print publication.  None of these require significant incremental expense. But they will consistently deliver dramatic increases in the reach of your content to prospective customers—and the impact it has on them.

1. Be certain that each newsletter story links to a dedicated page on your website or blog. You want your readers to find their way easily to your online home so they can discover lots more about your company, its products, and its people.  Your hyperlinked newsletter articles make the natural content connection.  In addition, try to link to more related stories on your site or blog from the original article.

2. Record audio and video of interviews for your newsletter for later repurposing. Post videos of interviews to YouTube and other targeted video portals specific to your industry. Upload audio to your website and blog.  Research podcast directories that may be relevant to your industry. Many of us would rather watch or listen to critical content.

3. Develop a news release schedule before your newsletter comes out. Target three or four key topics that affect your customers and the industry (based on the newsletter content). The release link should take them to the newsletter subscription page. Consider offering a free whitepaper or report as an incentive.

4. Discuss the newsletter and its content on your business blog. Post some of the key findings/issues. If you don’t have a blog, it’s high time you started one to connect to your customers.

5. Send out news releases through a keyword-optimized service such as PRWeb. Make sure that they really are newsworthy. You’ll be surprised at your reach beyond your static newsletter readership. You’ll be picked up in the blogosphere and even by traditional reporters who are always looking for news stories.
Remember, news releases are for much more than getting press; they are for building key links and for helping bloggers and influencers find your site. Industry bloggers will be key to extending the reach and impact of your newsletter.

5. Continue the news release program after your newsletter is released, pushing the audience to  videos, an eBook, or key articles.  Your newsletter content can still be the foundation for newsworthy stories weeks or sometimes months after it hits the virtual street.

6. Be sure to make RSS feeds available for your newsletter and for all of your web content. This is an easy and free way of syndicating your news stories that will extend your newsletter subscriber base dramatically.

7. Be sure each article integrates social media sharing capabilities so that enthusiastic readers can tell your stories to their colleagues and friends on Facebook and Twitter.  If you’re lucky, a great article may go viral and be spread across the web by enthusiasts who value and want to share your content.

8. Provide something remarkable and different on your website or blog for download. This does two things:
1) continues the conversation with your current customers
2) gives you information on prospects so you can begin a conversation with them.
Something remarkable may be a free eBook about the 10 trends in your industry, or a free white paper on a new, cutting-edge technology. Eliminate the sales pitch. Seek only to educate at this point.

Don’t settle for a lonely newsletter. Go above and beyond to get the content marketing results you need.

Content Marketers Can Deliver Great Information Products to a Targeted Customer Base

Fortune 500 companies have long had the technological resources and investment capital required to build sophisticated content marketing solutions—and to manage huge amounts of demographic data relating to their prospects and customer bases. Many of these firms, such as Best Buy, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, probably know more about us than some of our relatives do. They also do a terrific job of delivering relevant and compelling content to different segments of their prospect bases.

Smaller companies, however, have had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers . This has certainly been true with print publications and, until  recently, online as well. Affordable technology is now changing all of the rules.

Just a few years ago, it would have been laughable to imagine that a very small organization could create and maintain a Web site that could be updated daily—and that would allow visitors to interact and even buy products and services. Today, this is not only possible but pervasive. In fact, a 10-person company may be able to outmarket a 10,000-person company in a carefully chosen niche.

There are four core components underlying the shift in the technological balance of power away from media giants and toward companies of all sizes:

• The ability to create sophisticated online publications such as Web sites, digital magazines, and e-newsletters
• The ability to manage huge amounts of data relating to current and future customers
• The ability to leverage social media to engage targeted customers
• The ability to do each of these simply and inexpensively

A sophisticated Web site that would have cost $500,000 in 2001 can be replicated today for $5,000.  Even solopreneurs with a modest amount of talent and training can put WordPress to use to build a blog-powered website. Ann Porter with KitchAnn Style : Unique Design for Distinctive Living delivers a simple but image rich website/blog that illustrates her design knowledge and visual sense. She did this on her own at no cost.

The same is true with the online equivalent of circulation development and management. Print publications must still invest enormous amounts of money in acquiring and retaining subscribers. But, online, mailing list and eNewsletter software that integrates with social media costs less than $100/month even for a sizeable mailing list of 10,000 or more. Constant Contact powers the NextBus monthly newsletter which reaches 1000s of transportation executives at a cost of less than $50/month. This technology powerhouse delivers sophisticated transit solutions that benefit millions of bus and rail passengers. And, their small staff and modest marketing budget can achieve results that outshine much larger organizations. They also use WordPress to power their news site.

Social media may be the ultimate leveling force as small company content marketers can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ to build an interactive community of customers and prospects. Often, as with George Bowers Grocery in Staunton, VA, they can outcompete Kroger on Facebook in the local market. Click here to read more about their creative approach to social media. In fact, they have increased their Facebook fans/likes by almost 40% since we first wrote about them in January 2011.

Low-cost, easy-to-use Web technology and the emergence of business-friendly social media solutions now enables medium-sized manufacturers, small companies, or one-person service firms to build online content solutions that are more sophisticated than what most media companies were putting online just a few years ago.

In fact, with focus, creativity, and a little outside help, these smaller organizations often do a better job of providing targeted content that fully engages their best customers than do some of their billion-dollar competitors.

What Am I Marketing Chopped Liver?

If you are one of the millions of iTunes fans, you appreciate the brilliant work they do in aggregating music creatively.  But, they squander the opportunity to connect with me by focusing on what their database knows about the music I buy and that lives within my iTunes account.

Normally, I now just delete without reading, but this week’s eNewsletter was so off target I had to write about it.

iTunes Does It Right. But Their Marketing Does Me Wrong.

Not only does iTunes enable you to do infinite organizing of your music, the iTunes store takes it many steps further. The store includes pre-constructed sets of music from different eras, different artists or different styles in the iTunes store. With iTunes itself, I particularly love the ‘Genius Bar’ which enables you to create new playlists from your stored music or to discover new tunes that you’re likely to love based on a song that you have chosen from your own iTunes collection.

The iTunes folks excel at enabling you to choose,to organize, and to discover all sorts of music that you love.  Of course, you’ve probably bought quite a few more iTunes selections than you should have thanks to their terrifically targeted musical content. iTunes is brilliant at offering you what you didn’t even know you wanted.

That’s why I’m astonished at how far off the mark they are with their weekly eNewsletter that tosses me a hodgepodge of music that ignores my obvious preferences.

Their eNewsletter throws targeted content marketing right out the window.

The iTunes content machine should know exactly what I like because they have assessed what I have bought and what I have loaded on my computer.  My musical taste is eclectic and wide-ranging. It includes everything from Bach to Benny Goodman, from Asleep at the Wheel to Andre Watts,. and from Meatloaf to Mozart. Nonetheless, each week they send me a newsletter about music in which I have either no knowledge, no interest or both.

Here’s a sampling from this week’s iTunes eNewsletter featuring artists I hate or don’t want to know more about:

• Foo Fighters (at least, I know them by name)
• Nine Types of Light by TV on the Radio (or is there TV that’s on the radio?)
• Who You are by Jesse J (who is she?)
• Don’t Turn Out the Lights by NKOTBSB ( I guess the initials stand for something, but I don’t have time to spend figuring it out
• Make Some Noise by the Beastie Boys (well, noise is what it sounds like to me)
• Loverboy by Brett Dennen
• Rihanna & Britanny Spears ( Please!)
• So Beautiful or So What by Paul Simon (OK, this might be worth a listen)

Of course, you may love all this music.  Then, you would have appreciated the eNewsletter.  But, for me, the new music eNewsletter is a nuisance. With all their marketing money, they could have and should have done much better in segmenting the recipients of their weekly outreach to customers.

The #1 Content Marketing Rule That Apple Forgot: Understand What Is Most Important to Your Audience! And Then Deliver Just The Right Content Based on That Understanding

You may have a limited marketing budget that would amount to a rounding error for Apple.  Nonetheless, you can do a better job of targeting your eNewsletter by understanding what is most important to your customers and providing truly relevant information in each newsletter edition. 

You may not have the sophisticated technology tools that iTunes can bring to bear, but you can probably create two or three different iterations of your outbound content that matches the differing information needs of your customers.

The misguided iTunes eNewsletter makes me feel as unappreciated as the hero of the classic country lament by David Allen Coe, “You don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’.  You don’t even have to call me by my name.”

Come to think of it. They didn’t even call me by my name.

Or Maybe I’m on a special list of empty-headed business people.

But I’m hit by way too many email marketing campaigns that must assume that I’m exceptionally gullible. Perhaps I’m the only person that hates this stuff, but I’m going to share the agonizingly long text of an intelligence-insulting promotional email so you can judge for yourself.

Several normal emails kicked off the campaign promoting an online workshop. That was fine. I’m interested in the topic and am ok getting marketing missives.  But, then came the first ‘oops’ email follow up with a lame ‘I goofed’ message. And then the pathetic ‘boo boo mistake’ attempt that you see below in appropriate scarlet letters sneaked into my in box.  Does this woman really think I will fall for this?

Please marketers. I’m begging you. Write great copy. Be persuasive. Show me value. Share your wisdom. Ask for the order. All that is fine. Just don’t take me for an idiot with this kind of tripe which they must teach in ‘Take Your Customers for Chumps Online Marketing School’:

Am I the only one that hates this stuff?

Hi Newt,

I made a big boo boo mistake this afternoon.

Just as my team and I were getting ready to close down
registration for the Website Creation Workshop, I
accidentally sent an email out to the wrong list.

Now let me explain….

I got started a bit late in the promotion cycle with one
of my partners and we didn’t do our preview
interview call until just yesterday.

Since the call that was to introduce me to her readers was
only a day before the registration deadline, we talked and
we both agreed,  that extending the deadline by a couple of
days was the right thing to do.

I really would rather have not done this, but its my own
fault for scheduling a teleseminar the day before the deadline.

Because as I said in a post on the blog earlier today,
[Link removed to protect the innocent]
I need to finish getting the Workshop ready. And in particular
my team needs time to get the remaining Student Project
websites setup.

So today as I was sending out the email to the sublist
of people who were "Friends of Lynn" only, I
accidentally included a whole bunch of other email
sublists that I actually wanted to *exclude*. Aaggh!

Now a whole bunch of people got this "deadline extended"
email that probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Here is what I am doing then. I am extending the deadline
for you too until 11:00am Eastern Time, Saturday morning,
March 25th.

[Link removed to protect the innocent]

I really do need the time to finish getting ready for the
Workshop, but I feel it is only fair that you get this
extension now too. I and some of my staff will just have to
work more this weekend.

We’ll get over it though. And after you register we will
have your Student Website ready as soon as we can.

Here is the link for you to register…

[Link removed to protect the innocent]

This Taking Us for Idiots Email Marketing May Work, But I hate it All the Same

I guess this must work often enough to keep annoying me with it. On the other hand, it might explain why email marketing too often deserves a dubious reputation.

Blase Ciabaton, The DirectMail Man, Teaches a New Way to Do Some Real One-to-One Content Marketing

In order to generate measurable marketing response, you may well continue to rely on direct mail.  Although it may be less effective than in pre-Internet days, direct marketing does work with the right targeted message to the right audience. 

You can optimize your efforts by using a tool suggested by Blase Ciabaton. It’s all about PURLs that let you get personal with your prospects.

As a content marketer, you can target prospects individually with the use of PURLs, which are ‘personalized URLs.’  Thus, a 10,000 person direct marketing campaign would generate 10,000 PURLs which serve as individualized landing pages and can even greet the direct mail recipient by name.

This approach also enables the sender to track activities driven from that landing page precisely because it is attached to a unique individual.

According to Blase, here’s why this approach is so valuable:

“PURLs represent the future of direct mail marketing.  For those already using direct mail successfully, PURLs are very likely increase the response rate.  For anyone who’s avoided direct mail because of the difficulty in measuring response rate, then PURLs are the ideal way to leverage direct mail and have an accurate understanding of response.”

If you are still wondering how you might use this approach, Blase provides the example of a university prospecting for its new Freshman class:

A local college sends out a targeted direct mail campaign to attract rising high school seniors to apply.  Interested students enter their personal URL from the mail piece, and are welcomed by name to their custom landing page.  A very brief survey that’s on the landing page asks the students to select from a list of possible degrees or majors, and then asks for their preferred method of contact while collecting this additional contact info (cell phone @, e-mail address, etc.).

Direct marketing lives on. It fits well within our content marketing universe when the messages we send and the PURLs to which we send our prospects accurately reflect our understanding of their individuality.

You can learn much more about how to put PURLs to work by checking out what Blase has to say at TheDirectMailMan

A Sadly Wasted Effort for a Mystery Event That Might Even Have Been Worth Attending

I just received an email promotion that was so wrong-headed that it makes a perfect negative case study.  As always we can learn from what is terrific or, in this case, not so terrific.

Here are 4 Major Email Promo Mistakes that You Should Avoid:

• The header: This is the email header I saw in my inbox: “invitation for March 17”.  It doesn’t tell me what is happening on that date or why I should care. Since I, like all of you, receive way too many emails, I have no earthly reason to open it. 
  Your header must entice the recipient to open your email by showing quickly that your reader will benefit. It plays the critical role of a headline in a news story or an advertisement and is even more important because it’s the only thing your recipients may see in their crowded in box.

• The sender: The sender was Pearl Collier, but I neither know her nor can determine who she works for by looking at the sender name. That makes me nervous. If I take the trouble to cursor over the name, I can figure out that her email address seems to come from a large local R.E. developer. But, I bothered to do that only because I was motivated to write this article.
  Your send address mustn’t be mysterious. Unless you are mass mailing to folks who are inclined to open something from you because they know or respect you, you should use inexpensive software such as Constant Contact or MailChimp that lets you show a company name as sender in order to give you credibility.
• The message body: This tells me nothing other than the fact that an unspecified event is happening in an unspecified location at an unspecified time for an unspecified reason. I can see that the sender is connected to ‘Verandah’ but I don’t necessary know what Verandah is or what on earth the event is all about.
  Your message body should include everything your target needs to know to motivate them to take the next step whether it’s to attend an event, visit your website, get a free report, etc., etc. Make it obvious and enticing.
• The attachment: Since I don’t know this person and am paranoid about viruses and evil spyware demons, I will not open something that might wreck havoc on my PC.  Even if I knew the sender, she hasn’t given me enough explanation about why I would benefit to justify opening it.
  Your attachments should be rare or non-existent in promotional mailings. Put what you need to communicate in the body of the message. Make it super easy for your recipients to do what you want them to do.

A Sadly Missed Content Marketing Opportunity

What’s really unfortunate about this promotional mailing is that it is almost certainly promoting an event that is important for the company, expensive to produce, and most likely enjoyable to attend.  But, few recipients are likely get past the marketing hurdles that make it hard for them to justify taking action.

Don’t let this happen to you. Make sure that your header and your message body provide relevant and compelling content that motivates your prospects to take the next step toward becoming your customers.

  It’s been a very good year for content marketing. In fact, visitors searching our site for the phrase “content marketing” increased by 85% in 2009 over 2008.

Social media certainly loomed larger in the past 12 months but interest in content marketing strategy accounted for the majority of the most popular posts.

Here is the Cliff’s Notes bullet point version with more detail and links to the full articles following:

• How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
• 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
• 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
• Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
• 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
• Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
• 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
• Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
• 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business

A more detailed look at the top 10 with links to each complete article is just below.  Kick back and enjoy.

1. How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
   It is so hard, but so important to explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But so concisely that it can be communicated in less time than it takes an elevator to go up a few floors. And, so compellingly that your listener will remember and repeat it to others. Click to read more.

2. 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
   Of course, I’m assuming that you already have a website and are probably doing some business blogging.  You may also do a regular eNewsletter to inform your customers and prospects about the great content you have created recently online.  Your next step is to create an e-book that targets your ideal customers. Click here to read more.

3. 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
   You may be wondering why something as seemingly simple as Twitter causes so much confusion and consternation among business people.
   Perhaps, it best likened to a tool like a hammer which is simultaneously simple and powerful.  After all, a hammer can be used to put up a basic bookshelf or to build an entire home that will house a family for a lifetime. Click here to read more.

4. Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
   Think of yourself as the ultimate knowledge resource like those concierges serving fine hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons—But Available 24/7. Click here to read more.
5. Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
   How to go from clueless to compelling to transform prospects into buyers
   In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest Florida, few owners had websites, let alone an online marketing strategy.
   In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,’ has gone from obscure to fashionable. When I say fashionable, I mean that the usage of the phrase has skyrocketed in the past two years. For example, the number of visitors to our website who arrived because they had done a search for ‘content marketing,’ has increased by a factor of 10. Click here to read more.
6. 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
   It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers–Twitter and Facebook
   Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal. Click here to read more.
7. Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
   Inspiration from ‘Visual Blogger’ Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Marketing
   It’s hard to make things easy. And, it’s even harder to be amusing at the same time.
   But the very best visuals take a complex idea or series of connected ideas and make them instantly understandable. Just the right visuals make those ideas even more memorable when they are funny as well. In the case of the Intersection Marketing blog from Mark Smiciklas, he manages to do both consistently. Click here to read more.
8. 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
   Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad. But,  most small to medium-sized businesses have yet to participate fully and enthusiastically.
   We have just written about a powerful new research study that paints a picture of how thousands of smart companies are already benefiting from the inclusion of social media.  What’s clear from that research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.
   Social media marketing is here to stay.  Because you want your organization to be here for the long haul as well, you need to move now.  Not next week. Not next month. But now. Click here to read more.
9. Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
   This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth:  Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great  content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks.
   Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget.  Click here to read more.
10. 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business
    Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool
    Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online.
    But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.   In that spirit we’re happy to can share with you six terrific tips for using video successfully from talented Southwest Florida professional, Kathy Saenz. Click here to read more.

Thanks to everyone for their support in 2009!

Miss Lucy’s House of Holidays understands how to segment its customers and deliver targeted messages as part of a consistent content marketing campaign.

Like many small retailers, Miss Lucy’s has a limited marketing budget. Unlike many small retailers, they have a very clear understanding of their ideal target customer and know how to conduct carefully segmented e-mail marketing.

Their elegant shop focuses on high-end product lines and unique gifts which are centered around a holiday theme. Throughout the year, and for a wide variety of holidays, they continually redecorate and refocus the design of their store. Among their collections are Swarovski Crystal, Waterford Crystal Crabtree & Evelyn and Christopher Radko.  They complement their retail efforts with exquisite holiday decorating of homes for affluent customers. This side of the business is so popular that they are booked two years ahead.

Since their founding in October 2006, they have experimented with a variety of marketing that included print advertising, TV advertising, radio advertising, direct mail–and most persistently and effectively e-mail marketing. Today, they do almost no traditional marketing.  They have instead focused their efforts on e-mail marketing.

Here’s why that works so well for them:

• They understand their ideal target customer: a 45-year-old+ woman with a household income of $500,000 plus.
• They assiduously capture e-mail addresses from customers and prospects.
• They make it easy and comfortable for customers to provide information by encouraging them to put information in an elegant looking guestbook that you might find in a four-star hotel.  They let the customer do this privately rather than forcing them to fill something out at the cash register.
• They have created a detailed database which shows exactly what each customer has purchased down to the detail of specific product lines and price points.  They understand exactly what each customer likes; they can observe seasonal purchase patterns, and they even know when a husband needs help selecting the right gift for his wife.
• They maintain a consistent e-mail marketing campaign throughout the year that is customized for specific holidays, targeted customer interests, and special product offers.
• They use an off-the-shelf software tool, QuickBooks POS Pro, to capture all their CRM data and to handle their e-mail marketing. They have taken the time to customize it for their marketing needs.
• They track the specific results of their e-mail efforts so they know exactly how well each effort is working. They can assign specific dollar returns to the time and effort they put into the program.

As an example of how creative Miss Lucy’s team can be with their e-mail marketing, they make note of husbands who need help remembering an important event or holiday–and who would otherwise be clueless about their wives specific collections. Therefore, if there is a birthday or major holiday coming up for a customer who has particular Waterford Crystal collection, they will send out a reminder to the husband in which they make specific suggestions about a particular item with images and pricing included. In other words, they make it very easy for every husband to be a household hero.  That makes for a host of happy customer households.

Miss Lucy’s e-mail marketing matches in both creativity and execution what you might expect from a much larger company. But it is driven by the three people who own and run the company.  Their secret boils down to an in-depth understanding of their customers and how to keep those customers for life by proving that understanding again and again.

A tips eNewsletter can work for a free trial or an actual purchase.

Whether or not you are actually sending out regular eNewsletters to customers and prospects, you should consider creating a special ‘tips’ eNewsletter for new users and/or testers.

As it frequently does, the Avongate blog inspired me with a post that was specific to software companies that need to convert free trial users into paying customers. Guest blogger, Jason Cohen, CEO of Smart Bear Software, emphasizes that you need to do something with your captured customer info, because you will be wasting data otherwise. But, he also suggested that the typical "thanks and hope you’re enjoying our software " was not much better than doing nothing.

Instead, he recommends that you do a special-purpose series of three eNewsletters that are filled with tips about how to make best use of the product that prospects are testing. 

However, you must make sure that your content is genuinely customer-centric rather than a poorly disguised sales pitch. As Jason notes, "The Tips Newsletter leads with something valuable to the user: A tip that really does help the user’s life. That’s completely different than an email that pretends to be helpful but is really a self-serving sales-ping."

The key is to make it really obvious in a gently persistent way that your users will benefit from using the software they are already committed to trying. If you do this right, you are much more likely to convert them into paying customers. What’s great about this idea is that you only have to develop a three-part series one time because you will use it again and again with new prospects.

Create a Special-Purpose Customer Acquisition/Retention Content Marketing ENewsletter Campaign for Any B2 B Product

I love Jason’s idea and believe it can be applied much more broadly to any of us who want new customers to become delighted users of our products.  We can probably all relate to buying a product that would be really useful if only we could get past a stiff, initial learning curve. Too often, that never happens because we have too little time and are easily distracted by everything else on our plate.

A special-purpose tips eNewsletter can make it much easier for our new customers to go from hopeless novices to productive users quickly. The key is to determine which elements of the products we are selling can deliver immediate and obvious benefits as soon as our users can master them.

The tips eNewsletters might be one of your most effective customer retention tools. Moreover, by making your new users quickly productive, you may well inspire them to start talking about what a wonderful product they have just bought.

This focused bit of content marketing can take your products from bottom of the drawer to top of mind for a big chunk of your new customer base.  And, as with Jason’s software example, once you have created the tips series you can use them over and over again.

How To Put the Brakes on Their Five Major Marketing Mistakes

[Please note that I have made a few changes to the initial post based on constructive feedback, particularly to clarify that this is a dealer enewsletter,not a BMW corporate effort ]

If you were to imagine an eNewsletter from your local BMW dealer, you would probably expect it to lead off with a picture something like the one to the right.

As a BMW owner, you tend to be a certain kind of person.  The folks at BMW have understood your persona well over decades in the United States.  That’s why I’m mystified at the June 2009 eNewsletter from Germain BMW of Naples.

I love my BMW.  I think Germain BMW is a terrific dealership. But, I hate their eNewsletter. Why? Because it has almost nothing to do with the BMW brand promise: BMW—The Ultimate Driving Machine.

Call me crazy but when I get an eNewsletter that has something to do with BMW, I expect that it would deliver on that ‘ultimate driving machine’ brand promise.  Instead here’s what the eNewsletter delivers by way of core content after stripping away the header and some dealer specific webpage links:

What hits you in the face like a big wet fish are a big bunch of misguided elements which are made even worse when you add items from their table of contents:

• A giant RV–incase you’re tired of driving your BMW
• A big picture of watermelons that relates to keeping cool in Florida but has no car connection
• A treetop adventure story that doesn’t appear to involve any driving
• A feature on adopt a cat month(my baseless hunch is that BMW owners are dog people)
• More from the TOC
  • Lessons in longevity for the oldster demographic that BMW targets
  • Make your garden green–for the typical tree hugger BMW owner
  • A story on ice cream–who doesn’t associate BMWs and ice cream cones?

What was the BMW dealer thinking? Who were they targeting? What were they trying to accomplish? How could they go this far off track?  I don’t know.

Vital Content Marketing Lessons to Learn from BMW’s Five Major Missteps

• Make sure that your regular communications with your target customers match your brand promise.  Don’t wander off the ranch like this enewsletter did.
• Make it clear to your target readers that you understand what is really important to them as it relates to the products and services you offer.
• Don’t squeeze so much content into an eNewsletter that nobody is likely to find the time to read it.
• If you feel that you want to combine both precisely targeted content with information that is less targeted, at least lead off with the stuff that aims directly at your ideal customers.
• If you have a strong local presence, don’t let your parent organization overwhelm what could be great local content with unfocused generic material.

Effective marketing can be challenging. But, you don’t have to be a marketing rocket scientist to see how BMW went so far wrong—and how to learn from their goofs.

[I have just received a very polite and thoughtful email from the folks who manage these newsletters for a number of BMW dealers. They will be sharing their perspective with me soon and I will share it with you soon after. Dialogue is good.]