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March 18, 2009
Rethinking E-Mail Subscriber Metrics (Or...Ziff Davis Must Die).
ATTENTION PUBLISHERS: This is an open plea about e-mail readership stats. Please...do not publish how many readers are on your lists...just tell me the average number of people who open and click through in any issue. Give me your unsubscribe rate. Tell me how many readers have been inactive for 6-months. I will pay a lot for exposure to engaged readers and couldn't care less about a big list of people who never open. Let me explain my plea.
For the past several weeks, I have been trying to Unsubscribe from Ziff-Davis' Web Buyers Guide. Frankly, I have no recollection of having subscribed...must have been some checkbox on a magazine subscription renewal that I forgot to uncheck. But that is just the beginning of the story.
I have now unsubscribed from countless "variations" of this "publication". I was getting multiple a day and realized something was up. I hoped for a Global Unsubscribe, but there was none. And sadly, unsubscribing from one flavor does not kill the rest.
And so, weeks later, I am still whacking at the problem. Now, admittedly, I have done this instead of simply hitting "spam" to see if ZD really was this clueless. And so, it is with some surprise that I found it is true. I actually like some ZD pubs, but this whole experience has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. That's how it goes for brands in today's world.
It shocks me that in this day, with all the knowledge that exists about best practices in e-mail, that a major publisher could use such abysmal practices. (Then again, in the middle of the wrenching changes happening in the publishing industry maybe it shouldn't surprise me.) Now, more than ever, building trusted online relationships means treating my Inbox with RESPECT. It is a hard habit to break...that relentless urge to shove "stuff" down the pipe in the hope of pumping up subscriber counts. But survival in online media will come from producing truly valuable content and building readerships that are active...not volumes of readers who are just trying to figure out how to Unsubscribe.
BTW...corporate e-mail marketers. This cautionary tale applies to your e-mail marketing programs as well. List size is sooooo 2005. Count who's clicking, not who's on the list...
Posted by jcioban at March 18, 2009 8:04 PM
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