Does your website sell subscriptions? A review of current practices.

It's now been 30+ years since B.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful climbed the best seller lists, but it may be that today's newsletter website designers should re-read it.

Spending time looking at 40 or 50 websites, I find that most are not really effective marketing tools. I understand why many of the publishers I've interviewed allow they get "some" new business from the web, but it isn't a major revenue source. The sites aren't really designed for that purpose.

That's especially true of the largest companies with a multitude of products. When you look at the websites and see how many products and services publishers like UCG, Business & Legal Reports and Ragan Communications sell, you understand the SIPA surveys that indicate newsletters are now less than 50 percent of revenue.

Business & Legal Reports

Take a look at the B & LR homepage to see the amazing variety of products some publishers now have--that has to make it difficult to concentrate on selling any single one. When you visit the B & LR website (blr.com) and find the products page, newsletters are the 5th option displayed following online services, books, CDs and downloads.

UCG

The UCG homepage (www.ucg.com) is about the company and its now many subsidiaries. You really can't get to a newsletter unless you know the title. If you are looking specifically for Funeral Service Insider or Part B News, a search will take you there and once you find the Part B News page (PartBNews.com), it does an exellent job of providing information for the prospect.

Newsletter Holdings

Allie Ash at Newsletter Holdings LLC avoids this dilemma simply by not having a corporate webpage. You can only go directly to Personal Finance (pfnewsletter.com) or to the Rukeyser newsletters (Rukeyser.com).

But you can see it isn't easy for a "casual prospect" to find your newsletter page and offer. One of my favorite websites is Ardmore Publishing--publishers of Law Office Administrator (Ardmorepublishing.com). But if you thought it was Ardmore Publications or Law Office Administration, a Yahoo search won't find them.

B & LR publishes Best Practices in Compensation & Benefits, and a search for compensation and benefits newsletters will bring them up as the 4th option. (Search for "Search Engine Optimization" and you find a myriad of firms claiming to know how to do it--lots of stuff about "metrics" and "spiders" but, as Alton Brown says on the Food Network, "That's another show.")

NewsRx

Charles Henderson's NewsRx (NewsRx.com) is one of the most successful publishers in the world. One of their titles concerns cancer vaccines, but a search for "cancer vaccine" brings 236,000 hits. NewsRx may be in there somewhere.

Marketer Craig Huey posits the following as his "first rule" on website marketing: Every option you include on a website loses prospects. * A strong marketing website sells the newsletter and offers no options.

I find almost no newsletter websites following his rule. What the large publishers do on their websites is offer free e-zine subs, which is obviously a great way to collect e-mail addresses that can later be marketed to with offers that direct the prospect immediately to the newsletter page. (I've signed up for one just about everywhere they are offered so my in-box will be full.)

Harvard Health Publications

The Harvard health newsletters website (health.harvard.edu) is one that does this well--which means it's easy and convenient for the casual visitor. That echoes the advice of the e-marketers at last December's SIPA conference: Make your visitors feel good; make them happy.

It appears to me that smaller publishing operations--ones where the publisher actually writes newsletters--are much less likely to offer this free e-zine option. The larger operations do worry that the editors will "give away the store" in the free e-zines and fail to reserve the really good stuff for the paying customers.

Back to the DM basics

A half-century ago when newsletters began emerging on the scene, marketing was basic--often not more than a sample issue and an order form. Over time marketers learned a lot about how to most effectively sell information products by mail. Where did those rules go?

I would estimate that somewhere north of 80 percent (and closing in on 100 percent) of direct mail include several of the following elements:

* Long copy. Everyone agrees that people won't read a 4-page sales letter on a screen, but many newsletter sites contain no selling copy at all. A pix of the newsletter, maybe 25 words or less, and "Click here to subscribe."

* A Savings Discount. Most online sites don't offer discounts. It's the old reasoning, "Our newsletter costs $297 and is worth every dime."

* Premiums. Some sites may offer a bonus report (usually online in PDF format), but the percentage is way lower than in mail offers.

* Guarantees. They are considered vital in a direct mail offer but guarantees are virtually invisible online.

* Testimonials. These pop up occasionally but I always love the "3rd Person Pat on the Back." Kudos to UCG which includes not only testimonials in some places but photos of those providing the testimonials.

* Uncomplicated offers. Ideally just check either the "My check or credit card info is enclosed" or the "Bill my company" options. I saw websites that really present the prospect with a dilemma of choice--3- or 6-month trials, full year, print or online versions (or both). Practically a matrix of options. That's not good.

How much should you give away?

Now, the important question: How much should you give away? As noted, some offer very little for free but some, including a couple of my favorites, tip-toe toward the line of offering too much.

The Cook Political Report (cookpolitical.com) offers Charlie Cook's National Journal columns (on a briefly delayed basis).

Paris Notes (parisnotes.com) offers many of the type of highlights prospects might be seeking, "20 Best" Paris hotels, restaurants, etc.--enough that you wonder if the prospect might go away feeling "full" without buying. I guess this is the "If they give this much away, how much more must they have available?" school of marketing.

On the other hand, Paris Notes publisher Mark Eversman's letter on the site is perhaps the best selling vehicle I found in my online wanderings. Read it to see an excellent one-to-one communication.

Three very effective websites

My very favorite "personal touch" is Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher's blog on the website beernet.com, chronicling his political views and the "exciting and glamorous life of a beer newsletter publisher." (And this is a website that gives away nothing.)

You get article titles and, Harry told me in our interview, a certain number of prospects are so intrigued by the headline that they "have to" subscribe to get the article.

Finally, here are two examples Craig Huey calls strong newsletter selling websites (they're his clients).

* Dr. Bruce West's Health Alert (healthalert.com); and

Patrick McKeough's Canadian Stockpickers Digest (cdmginc.com/dev/spd/index.html)

If you know Craig's work, you'll say these landing pages look like a "Craig Huey package on screen." He insists this works best and his DM packages have won a barrel-load of awards.

In conclusion, review your website's selling power and incorporate into them some of the traditional DM practices that have withstood the proverbial test of time--such as guarantees, premiums, and targeted marketing.

* Reading a draft of this article, NL/NL editor Paul Swift told me that Craig's advice reminded him of Steven Hawking's note in the acknowledgments section of A Brief History of Time: "Someone once told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."