Newsletters continue to serve as an effective way for businesses, from retailers to B2B services, to stay in touch with their customers. In my last column, I shared the simple but powerful technique of using point-of-action assurances to convert more visitors into taking the actions you want them to take – such as using the words “we value your privacy” anywhere you want someone to provide you with their e-mail address. Here are some other tips you can use to increase and retain newsletter subscribers:

1. Provide a sample: Add a link that opens up a sample newsletter like CafePress.com. It’s a great way of setting expectations of what your subscribers will receive.
   
2. Acquire subscribers at seducible moments: One of the best times to capture that newsletter opt-in is immediately after your visitor has taken an action they found valuable. Too few retailers use their “Thank You for Ordering” page to acquire subscribers. Instead, many retailers add it as an option in the shopping cart; that adds friction and one more decision in the checkout process that can give visitors pause. By the way, ensure you test variations of this call to action.
3. Offer a bribe: Don’t just ask them to subscribe; give them a valuable reason why. Offer them a free white paper, a super coupon, an exclusive invitation, etc. Make sure you establish the value of this offer as well. Notice how my friend Larry Chase offers you his Social Media Marketing Guide and established a $29.95 value for it.



4. Remember, segmentation and relationships are key: One newsletter rarely fits all. Your visitors have different interests, different threshold requirements for taking action, and different moments in their buying process. You probably shouldn’t send your previous customers the same newsletter you send people who have never bought from you. You must nurture relationships and provide key content and offers at the right times in the visitor life cycle. One easy segmentation for existing customers is to use RFM analysis to send out different offers. You can also offer different newsletters related to different product categories or business roles. You can see how ClickZ offers several different options here. Although, for your business you may want to test capturing the e-mail address first and then offer them the segmentation to a separate newsletter on the next step.
5. Ensure your e-mail preview is engaging: If you want to retain your visitors, you must ensure they open and read your newsletters. An easy approach is to make sure your e-mail template is formatted well for preview in the various e-mail clients. If your e-mail looks like a bunch of empty boxes with red Xs, fewer people will open it and read it. In the one to two seconds that a person scans an e-mail, if she can’t figure out the value she’ll delete it. Compare the two e-mails from my inbox below and decide which one you are more likely to allow the download of images.



6. It’s not all about offers; it’s about great content: Want the secret to keeping thousands of subscribers for years on end? Look for those that have successful mailings. You must think like a publisher, whether you are a retailer or a B2B (define) service or a technology provider. Newsletters like ClickZ, Ralph Wilson’s Web Digest for Marketers, or Larry Chase’s WDFM are newsletters that I’ve maintained my subscriptions to since the mid to late ’90s. Why? Since they focus on providing excellent relevant content, they have changed formats over time and they allow me to get the content in the way I want to get it. I don’t need to remind you of the expression that “content is king.” But keep in mind: If you provide me content related to a topic I am interested in, I am more likely to open your newsletter on a regular basis than if you only send me offers that I will open only when I am in the market for your product.
7. If a subscriber opts out, offer to change frequency: There will come a time when your subscriber has had enough of your mailings. Make it easy for her to unsubscribe, but when she arrives at your unsubscribe page offer her the ability to change the frequency from a weekly mailing to a monthly mailing. Offer her to opt in to a more “select” or segmented newsletter. Give one last chance to stay engaged.

Use these seven simple tips to increase your newsletter subscribers, keep producing valuable content, and find ways to engage people where they are in their buying process and building long-term relationships instead of focusing on your sales and one-off offers. You’ll build a newsletter list to rival your competitors. Remember, the money is always in the list!

In the space of a few weeks I’ve had my material “ripped off” twice. One instance was OK by me, but one instance was not. The differences open up important questions at the forefront of the new rules involving content, sharing, social media, and copyrights.

Today, ideas spread quickly. Volumes of great information are shared through Webinars, e-books, and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and SlideShare. Tracing an idea, insight, or fact back to its original source can be challenging. This is an even bigger issue when these exchanges are occurring among marketing professionals, especially because creating and sharing content has become practically the go-to strategy for driving business and lead generations for many companies. Take creative professionals who make their living from their ideas and content, give them an incentive to share that content openly, and you have a near perfect environment for undue influence and sticky copyright issues.

Like me, I’m sure you have your sphere of influencers. I’ve been fortunate to surround myself with people much smarter than me to nourish my brain. Being influenced by others is a good thing and it’s the reason my peers and I have been sharing our thoughts through (in my case) 300+ columns like these, presentations, and countless conversations. So far, the benefits have far outweighed any dangers or concerns. But as I mentioned, recent events have got me pondering the best ways to manage my future content sharing strategies.

The first instance happened when a student of mine asked me what I thought of their brainstorming session for banner ad ideas. When I saw the list, I asked my student if they were aware of where these ideas came from – or what influenced their ideas. As soon as I asked, they were embarrassed because it was a collection of disjointed ideas grabbed from past and future presentations and concepts I had written about in past columns and had shared with them in conversations we’d had together.

My students felt as though they’d ripped me off and I assured them that they hadn’t. What they had done is something our brains do naturally as we take in, process, and assimilate ideas. I shared with them this fabulous video of Derren Brown and his use of “Subliminal Advertising” to influence the kind of logo and branding advertising execs would come up with for a business he was starting. By manipulating barely conscious cues he provided ad execs, he predicted precisely the kind of logo they came up with. As soon as my students watched the video, they understood how their assembly of my ideas was unconsciously done and felt better about the situation. In turn, I explained how flattered I was, as my goal for the last decade has been to inspire others by sharing my ideas.

Influence Gone Bad

The next instance was not as comfortable for either me or a friend who I “influenced.” Here’s what occurred: This friend shared a presentation on March 1 titled, “15 Secrets of High Converting Websites.” (Follow along and you’ll see why the presentation has since been removed.)

When I saw this presentation, I immediately asked my Twitter and Facebook friends: “What would you do if someone you thought was a friend ripped off one of your presentations without asking or attribution? http://ow.ly/1cOgi”

Here’s the backstory: In just two weeks, I’ll be presenting my “21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites” at SES New York. It’s a presentation that took me the better part of a decade to put together. The presentation had received rave reviews as a keynote speech at SES London, including this tweet from @Liz_Gray: “#seskey Unbelievable keynote this morning from @thegrok! Action-oriented, clear and concise. Everyone with a website – test something today.”

I first delivered this presentation in December 2009 at SES Chicago and then recorded it in January as a Webinar for my conversion optimization students. This is where my friend was “influenced” by my presentation. No other copies of these slides were shared anywhere.

I have shared presentations in the past, but since I am now focused on being a professional marketing speaker, these slides are a good part of my livelihood, and my paying clients don’t want them shared all over the Internet. So when I reviewed this person’s newest Webinar presentation, it was a shock to find that “his” slide titles and content, including many of the images, were essentially the same as mine. That’s when I tweeted the question.

The tweet led to quite a firestorm on Twitter and Facebook as people responded. My friend RSS Ray, a.k.a., Brian Offenberger, who had committed this act, was inundated with e-mails and comments on Facebook. You can read some of the discussions on Facebook here. Two of my MarketMotive students who really studied my presentation shared these comments on Twitter:

Gene Gerwin wrote: “Judging from the slides, it’s such a direct lift that I wonder if mere attribution would have been sufficient…”

And Noran El-Shinnawy wrote: “Hey, @rssray here’s my comment on your blog since you won’t approve it (@TheGrok ) http://tweetphoto.com/12949589.” In a follow up tweet, Noran added: “INCREDIBLY UNPROFESSIONAL: @rssray rips off @TheGrok ‘s 21 Secrets presentation and passes it off as his own http://ow.ly/1cOgi.”

The next morning, Brian pulled the slides he shared from his Web site, posted an apology on his blog, and explained how items from my presentation unintentionally ended up in his. We subsequently spoke on the phone.

I asked him to share with me a list of what he learned from the experience. “I had the importance of checking and re-checking work re-taught to me in the most painful of ways,” Brian wrote.

The Future of Sharing

Some people suggested I sue for damages. I’m not an attorney, but from past legal advice I know that you cannot collect damages for material that is yours unless you have filed for the copyright with the Library of Congress. You can have them remove the duplication just by placing the copyright notice on your material and you can prove it was yours first.

These two situations have left me with more questions than answers:

• Do I feel comfortable sharing my slides any more? I have shared many presentations in the past. Do you?
• How do we prevent ourselves from being overly influenced by others?
• Let’s say someone shares a presentation online through sites like SlideShare and copies a slide or two from others. During the presentation, the speaker gives verbal attribution to the original source of information, but written attribution is not placed on the slide. Is that ok?
• What would you do if you were accused of “copying” someone’s slides? I think Brian handled it as well as anyone.
• How will copyright laws evolve with the times?
• How would you have handled this situation?

At several conferences that last few months and in several emails, there is one question that keeps popping up, what is the critical skill for marketers to have today.

Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist recently said that the “…sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians…The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it.” I agree with Mr. Varian completely. However, I’d like to add the other sexy job of the next decade, the copywriter. Being data centric and being able to use that data to communicate to your customers effectively and in a human way is what will differentiate companies in the decades to come.

It’s all about creating engaging and effective content. It doesn’t matter if it is words on a page, a script for a video, a status update or an ebook or whitepaper. The challenge will be how you communicate your message effectively in a world where our attention is constantly slammed, while continuously shrinking.

Copywriters in the 1960′s used to say that copy needed to be like a lady’s skirt: long enough to cover the essentials and short enough to be interesting. My brother Jeffrey Eisenberg recently observed, “The skirt just seems to be getting shorter and shorter.”

AdWords, Twitter (microblogging), social media, text messaging, Google’s seeming preference for pages 500 words or shorter and the continual assault of data on our senses is raising the bar. What do you think copywriters in the 2010′s will say copy is like?

What other skills do you think will be necessary in the decade to come?

P.S. Want to improve your copywriting skills? Be sure to subscribe to my friend Jeff Sexton’s blog.

This week marks the 15th anniversary of my good friend Dr. Ralph Wilson’s newsletter, Web Marketing Today. Dr. Wilson’s newsletter was among the first newsletters I subscribed to in the mid nineties that got me started on my path to understanding what was happening on the internet. To this day I still open and read almost every newsletter I get from WilsonWeb.com.

Dr. Wilson’s first business venture back in 1995 was designing and building websites for small and medium businesses, but he soon found that these entrepreneurs needed help to market their businesses online. At that time web marketing was unknown territory.

Web Marketing Today features practical, how-to articles written by subject experts with hands-on experience. The site contains more than 100 video interviews with expert speakers at major Internet marketing conferences. The content of the site focuses on what people are actually adopting online and how a small business can implement and profit from these ideas and tools. The goal is to give readers practical, how-to advice they can put into use immediately.

If you are not subscribed to it, I highly suggest you should. See what Ralph’s been doing for the past 15 years to accumulate more than 101,000 subscribers and such a loyal readership.

Last week, I moderated several sessions on Emerging Trends at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. A couple of the sessions were about measuring social media. That same morning announcements were made regarding the deals Twitter had struck with Microsoft Bing and with Google. With Microsoft Bing also announcing a deal with FaceBook. The gist of the deals, is that now your tweets or status updates can be found on the search engines.

I think of this as a behavior changer in several ways. First off, people will start optimizing their tweets for real time search on the engines. This may lead to a whole new level of search engine spamming. How will Google and Microsoft deal with the increase in hashtag/trending topic spam?  Who is already building the tools to optimize Tweets for trending topics and hashtags? Will these irrelevant tweets train search users that this content is not worth clicking on?

The other question it opens up is that if you publish content on your site, then push it out over Twitter and FaceBook and someone finds it on Bing doing a search – where should the credit for the referrer to your website go to. Will it be credited as a search referral, a Twitter or Facebook referral?

If you want credit to go to your content creation team and to find out which “channel” was responsible for the ultimate referral, content teams are going to have to be trained to ensure that they are using tracking urls on their Tweets. Scott Calisse from MTV Networks shared how his team created a custom tool using Bit.ly and Google Docs that the content team could insert their original url and the tool would spit out customized links for them to copy and paste with all the proper tracking codes in place for each channel (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). How will you train your content teams to remember to always do this? Scott shared with us that even if the team doesn’t do it today, they can still sort it out organically, but with this new Google/Bing integration that won’t be the same.

This evolution in the portability of content just reinforces the trend those of at the eMetrics summit heard about from Darren Mauro of NPR.org. He shared with us how they are seeing an ever growing demand for being able to download podcasts as opposed to listening to them live or streaming online. People like to engage with the content they want, when they want it; just like DVR usage on TV. Of course that makes tracking it and understanding its usage and engagement infinitely more difficult.

I’m really curious what do you think the implications of these deals will be. Please share in the comments or link to posts you have below.