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Book Review
CALL-OUT
Katz gets one thing dead right: “An e-newsletter…grows your
business by... solidifying relationships with your clients and
prospects over the long term, not on hard sales and quick promotions.”
Marcia Yudkin, Editor
MarketingSherpa, Inc., Portsmouth RI, 2002
E-book (HTML format), 180 pages, $149.00 ($159 for printed version)
E-Newsletters That Work
Blue Penguin Development, Inc., Hopkinton MA, 2002
E-book (PDF format), 80 Pages, $34.95
Reviewed by David M. Freedman
About the reviewer
In the introduction to Best Practices in Marketing with Email Newsletters, the author Marcia Yudkin says that considering the advantages of e-newsletters, “it’s difficult to imagine an enterprise with a Web presence that should not also have an e-mail newsletter.”
Michael Katz, the author of E-Newsletters That Work, says in his introduction, “E-Newsletters…are the best marketing tool to come along in a long time for a small business. They have no variable cost, and once set up, they have almost no fixed cost either.”
Well, well. They’re wonderful and they’re practically free. If you have a website, you’re a fool if you don’t also have an e-newsletter.
Maybe you can forgive the authors for this outlandish hype, since they’re in the marketing communications business. The question is, will you find some credible and valuable information, advice, strategies, and techniques in these books?
The answer is yes, you will, if you’re savvy enough to separate the hype and promo from the substance.
Between the two books, MarketingSherpa’s Best Practices is more valuable by a long shot. Skip its first two chapters, though. The author presents loads of biased and out-of-context data, as well as specious claims, to inflate the need for, and value of, e-newsletters.
Also, on the subject of e-newsletter strategy, this book serves up some bad advice. For example, it implies that your newsletter may achieve “multiple” primary goals -- and then some ancillary goals too. In my experience, a newsletter has a chance of succeeding if it accomplishes one clearly defined primary goal.
Best Practices lists 16 possible primary goals, at least three of which do not belong here. Strong primary goals include (in the author’s words):
- Establishing your company as an expert so that when the subscribers are ready to buy, they come to you
- Educating owners of your product or users of your service on how to use the product or service more fully
- Building long-term relationships with prospects for long-sales-cycle products and services
- Driving traffic to your website
These should not be considered primary goals, despite their inclusion on the author’s list:
- Generating direct sales (that would make it a sales letter, not a newsletter)
- Informing the press about news at your company (that’s the job of news releases and media alerts)
- Entertaining the audience (wonderful as a secondary goal)
In fact, the author repeatedly pollutes the text with examples that do not qualify as newsletters -- they’re sales literature (some consist primarily of coupons) sent by e-mail. For example:
- “Your email newsletter can inspire immediate sales by blurring the line between content and ads.” Call me a purist, but this isn’t newsletter journalism.
- “The entire newsletter consists of a sales pitch for…products or services. Overstock.com uses this model through seasonal theme sales, such as ‘Back to School’…specials.”
- “MarthaStewart (sic) sends sales pitches that readers are happy to receive.” Yes, but they’re not newsletters.
The author twice pushes the idea of publishing your e-newsletter monthly, at least, to build recognition and good will. This is marketing-driven (not audience-driven) advice. Frequency should depend on the nature of subject matter, the needs (and tolerance) of the audience, and your relationship with your readers.
Okay, this book has lots of flaws, particularly in the first two chapters. But once you reach the third chapter, “Newsletter Format, Length, Frequency and Timing,” you’re on more solid ground. Much of the advice in this chapter is excellent, especially the section on formatting options: text, HTML, AOL, “sniffers,” etc. There are excellent layout guidelines for each of the two main formatting options, text and HTML. For example:
How difficult could it be to lay out something in plain text? Well, there are some tricks that help ensure that your text message gets across readably and as you intended it to look….Don’t rely on your tech team to just strip the HTML [code] and graphics from your HTML newsletter. Instead, create a layout for your text version….
The author explains that you can’t “embed” hyperlinks in a text file, so you have to remember to provide the entire hypertext link, starting with http://www. Also, a hypertext link that is longer than 60 characters will likely wrap, and may not be clickable -- there are ways to abbreviate the links without losing their click-through ability. (Try SnipURL, for example.)
The author points out that you should always assume the readers will print the newsletter to read it, and sometimes copy and paste in order to forward it to another reader. Lay out your page to accommodate all these kinds of usage.
The author provides excellent guidance on the choice between headlines-and-links versus full-text newsletters. That is, should your e-newsletter comprise (a) headlines, summaries, and links to the full text on a website, or (b) self-contained features within the body of the e-mail?
The fourth chapter on content is very good. Some of the advice is quite sophisticated, such as the guidelines for writing news analysis, employing case studies, and using syndicated material.
Chapters 5 and 6, on managing circulation, are excellent. They’re easily the best thing I’ve ever read on the subject of “growing subscribers” as it applies to e-newsletters.
The last chapter on measuring performance is also very good, thorough but concise. Like I said, skip the first two chapters -- or perhaps skim through them -- and read critically, and you’ll learn a lot from this book.
One thing dead right
E-Newsletter that Work is nominally 80 pages long, but since many
of its pages are only half-filled with content, this book has the
equivalent of something like 60 or 65 pages.
Katz gets one thing dead right, though: “An e-newsletter…grows your business by focusing on solidifying relationships with your clients and prospects over the long term, not on hard sales and quick promotions.” Bravo!
Unfortunately, most of this book is superficial. Like a true copywriter, Katz underestimates e-newsletter expenses and boosts its benefits. His book is also poorly edited -- numerous punctuation errors distract the reader.
However, if you read critically you can pick out some great advice, some of which you won’t find in the more professionally edited Best Practices in Marketing with E-mail Newsletters.
About the editor/author
Marcia Yudkin is a veteran journalist and marketing communications professional based in Massachusetts. She is the author of Internet Marketing for Less Than $500/Year (Maximum Press) and Six Steps to Free Publicity (Plume/Penguin). She publishes a weekly newsletter,
The Marketing Minute, which spun out of a TV show seen throughout New England. (www.yudkin.com/marketing.htm)Michael J. Katz is the founder and principal of Boston-based Blue Penguin Development, Inc. (
www.bluepenguindevelopment.com), which focuses on e-newsletters and relationship marketing. He has 20 years of experience in marketing and training.About the reviewer
David M. Freedman