Solutions Showcase : The Two-Faced Marketer

E-mail's dual role as a promotion-delivery tool and revenue-generating audience-builder puts it on many publishers' priority lists. Here are some tips for shopping for the right e-mail solution.

November 2008 By Abny Santicola

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E-mail offers a way to deliver fresh content online, while driving traffic to related Web sites, maintaining customer loyalty and cross-promoting brands. In addition to serving as a marketing tool, it has the dual ability to stand on its own as a revenue-generating product in the form of an e-newsletter.

E-mail service providers (ESPs) offer toolsets with functionality ranging from search engine marketing and pay-per-click campaigns to online surveys and automatic, rapid e-mail alerts; tracking and reporting; and list management and segmentation. Using these sophisticated tools, publishers can automatically pull information from a blog into an e-newsletter or e-mail message, place content on social networks such as Facebook, or send breaking-news alerts via RSS and mobile formats, in addition to deploying e-mail campaigns.

Daniel Mandell, business development director for Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal, says a key feature of his company’s service provider—Experian CheetahMail—is a “remote content” tool that allows content to be pulled in from a hosted Web page. “This feature saves us time by allowing our developers and designers to focus on one environment,” Mandell says.

As he suggests, it’s important to select an ESP whose features meet your company’s specific needs.

Bruce Rhodes, circulation director for Harvard Business Review, which uses e-Dialog for subscription-acquisition campaigns, says a key feature of e-Dialog is its ability to construct sequenced marketing programs, where an e-mail is sent to someone on the Xth day after he signs up for a lead-generation program, then again on the Yth day, the Zth day, etc. “[It] … is specific to the timing of the individual who signed up …,” Rhodes says.

Tig Tillinghast, CEO of Watershed Publishing, which employs Bronto Software for subscription capture and newsletter deployment, says that one feature he likes about Bronto’s product is subscriber charting, which shows subscriber trends over time. “This is more important to publishers than the typical measurement bling you find on most ESPs, which tend to be geared more to e-commerce and e-mail marketing purposes,” Tillinghast says. “… I don’t need [return on investment] and transaction tracking (although, that’s nice when you’re selling subscriptions, of course), so much as ... a real audience-management tool.”