Travel newsletter breaks all (or many) marketing "rules".

Paris Notes is one of my favorite newsletters (10x, $39/year), a wonderful read for anyone who has ever been to Paris and hopes to go again one day[ldots] or even dreams of going the first time. Along with restaurant and hotel reviews, calendars of museum shows, etc., Paris Notes also features intriguing articles in every issue, such as the history of the bridges over the river Seine.

While publisher Mark Eversman and I have talked many times over the years, he resolutely goes his own way in his marketing strategies and practice.

For several years his control was a 2-page letter-order form, later expanded to a 4-page letter. Rather than "making the letter look like a letter," his was illustrated with nice line drawings. I did give full marks to Eversman for creativity in "testimonials," using wonderful things writers like Hemingway and Balzac have said about the City of Light as pull quotes on the illustrated letter.

Now in its eighth year of publication, Paris Notes has reached a circulation of 8,500, and Eversman is making a determined effort to expand his market universe.

"There are only a certain number of Francophile lists available[ldots] Some of the best lists we have I've mailed now eight or nine times--and they still work--but I'll test anything and remail anything that breaks even."

For the Fall '99 campaign, "I tried something different," Eversman reported. "I decided to ignore all the advice from experts [that's me, I'm afraid]--things like bold headlines, subheads for entry points, bulleted reader benefits--and wrote a personal letter [back to 2 pages] from the publisher, aiming for 'small and humble.'"

Excerpt: "I'm just a guy who loves Paris[ldots] I've been doing this for more than eight years now[ldots] Paris Notes is not for everyone, but if you're like me[ldots] someone who visits Paris when he can, dreams about doing so again.[ldots]"

Not only did the package do well, "but for the first time ever, I got letters, even phone calls, from people who liked my sales letter, Eversman said.

Do not try this at home

Nothing in direct mail is stronger than authentic, one-to-one personal copy. Faking it and failing can be disastrous.

Normally this technique is only effective for consumer products. Eversman can speak from his heart about Paris in a way that perhaps the publisher of Telecommunications Report can't address prospects.

When I was at United Communications Group (UCG now), we did have success positioning a publisher's letter as a personal note from the founder publisher. "Why I founded the ASW 400 Letter" outpulled a bulleted listing of reader benefits.

"Following my usual bent to do everything as cheaply as possible," Eversman continued, "I downsized this package, letter and envelope. For the spring mailing, I've returned to a #10 envelope with a slightly revised version of the letter."

The envelope teaser reads, "An invitation to subscribe to the newsletter for [ldots] people who love PARIS."

In April Eversman dropped his largest mailing to date, 171,000, including among other tests his first foray into the gay market with 10,000 names from Out & About travel letter.

Another first

Included in the mailing were 8,000 expire names. Some people, including me, have nagged Eversman for a couple of years to do expire mailings.

Paris Notes is a great publication, but it's not "absolutely must-have" information, and the renewal series isn't exhaustive (two or three efforts). This combination should yield a gratifying number of former subscribers who "meant to" renew and can be brought back with a gentle nudge.

Another item of "conventional marketing wisdom" that Eversman has been able to ignore with Paris Notes has been selling subscriptions with space ads. One can seldom get in enough selling copy to convince the prospect to part with money. Eversman has had continuing success with small space ads in The New Yorker. He runs a 1-inch ad which obviously gives him only enough space to display his logo, title, price, 800 #, and web address.

Combining the magazine's offers of publisher's rates, frequency discounts and an additional 15 percent discount for being an in-house agency, Eversman's cost for The New Yorker is about $700 per insertion. (The rate card price is more than $1,000 for this space.)

So, he said, "I need about 18 orders to break even. The holiday-winter season is the best time of year. We run a 'flight' of perhaps ten ads between December and mid-February and may average 30 orders per ad.

"We've tried travel and other upscale magazines. The New Yorker is the only one that has worked. I think it's the only one for which reading the 'quirky little ads' in the back of the magazine is part of the reading experience."

In addition to raising its rate base, The New Yorker has quite a turnover in subscribers these days. "When Tina Brown came in and shook up the magazine," Eversman commented, "a lot of people hated it. But it's been good for us. Our offer is reaching a lot of new prospects each year--different from the times when the magazine may have had mostly a solid core of loyalists who had been with them since the days of Harold Ross."