An interview with IMN’s David Fish

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Go to the average online marketing conference, and you will find many e-mail service providers selling their wares. Some will be generalists, others will excel at a single thing. But only a few will be focused on e-zines and other recurring marketing communications.

Here’s one: IMN Inc., of Newton, MA. Since its founding in 1999 by brothers Peter and Jeff Mesnik, the company has evolved from a provider of Web hosting services into a specialist in all aspects of e-newsletter production, including delivery, content development and analytics.

Not that it has given up on Web hosting: IMN places a small Web site behind every newsletter it sends. This enables it to analyze page-view duration and other indicators that show just what people are reading.

E-ZINE IQ recently talked with David Fish, CEO of IMN, to get his thoughts on what he calls informative marketing. He believes that an e-mail newsletter is “a little bit different than an e-mail blast or event-triggered marketing, although it relates to both of them.” Here’s his personal seminar on what it takes to launch and run an e-mail newsletter.

E-ZINE IQ: How widespread is the practice of sending e-zines?

FISH:: It’s pervasive. We think that the e-newsletter will eventually become, just as Web sites did, part of everybody’s online presence. There isn’t any constraint. It applies to business-to-consumer, business-to-business and business-to-channels of distribution. We even have some customers using it internally to communicate with divisions.

E-ZINE IQ: How do you square that with reports of declining open and click rates?

FISH:: That's a fair question. In the early days of the Web, we had high response rates for banner advertising, and eventually we went through the era of banner burnout. Since then, we’ve seen lots of innovations, some of which have been a little too intrusive while others have really worked. All of these media channels have a natural evolution.

E-ZINE IQ: Where do you fit into this?

FISH:: We believe in informative marketing—the idea of using very detailed analytics to evolve the editorial content of the newsletter to ensure an engaged readership. And we see the market evolving in a very exciting way from e-newsletters to e-communications.

E-ZINE IQ: What’s the first thing to consider when launching a newsletter?

FISH:: You’ve got to have great content and you’ve got to know whether or not it’s actually being read. And that means you've got to have the analytical capabilities to know that. I also suggest that people think very carefully about their objectives. It’s a mistake just to say, “Gee we’ve got to do a newsletter,” and not think about why. Are you trying to retain a customer? Are you trying to build brand? Are you trying to drive a transaction? All the normal marketing considerations come into play, but the objectives will dictate the audience and the metrics that you want to apply. Once you know the audience you can start to attend to content and layout issues.

E-ZINE IQ: How do you sell a newsletter idea to upper management?

FISH:: In terms of hard benefits. An organization that has been producing a print newsletter can save a ton of money by substituting an e-newsletter. One of our clients was shocked to learn that e-newsletters could be done for about a tenth of the cost of what he was doing with a physical newsletter on a monthly basis. Beyond that, it can be based on measurable transaction results. In the automotive space, that might be significantly increased Web traffic that the dealers can directly associate with new vehicle purchase transactions.

E-ZINE IQ: And how do you measure long-term success?

FISH:: Certainly there are traditional measures in terms of brand exposure and that sort of thing. Those are fairly obvious. Many of our customers are tuning in to the lifetime value of a customer. We’ve done some research on the value of a household to an auto dealer. As you creep up towards the luxury brands, it can be $300,000. Once the management tunes into that, they're willing to make a judgment call on communications that help retain that customer relationship.

E-ZINE IQ: Once you’ve decided to go forward, do you always ask for the customer to subscribe, or do you just send the e-zine to everybody on your customer list?

FISH:: The best practice is to have an explicit opt-in. That’s the thing that ensures that you’re getting a well-qualified readership. At a minimum, though, we require that our clients be compliant with the Can Spam Act (which requires an opt-out).

E-ZINE IQ: Would they typically send an e-mail asking customers to subscribe?

FISH:: You might send them an invitation-to-subscribe e-mail to kick that off. In other cases, we have customers who need to do a physical solicitation. In addition, there are viral mechanisms like 'tell-a-friend,' where a subscriber refers the newsletter to a colleague who then subscribes. At a more granular level, there’s the notion of forwarding a single article to somebody to get them interested.

E-ZINE IQ: How do you determine what kind of content would be appropriate for your audience?

FISH:: We’re big believers in not doing puff content but doing stuff that people actually read. That’s why we work in some vertical markets with content partners to provide professionally written material. In the high-tech vendor market, they have lots of great content that they’ve developed that can be repurposed fairly directly. The best clue as to what content might apply is to look to other channels of communication serving the same audience.

E-ZINE IQ: Any advice on how to write a newsletter?

FISH:: We have some rough rules of thumb, but I’d caution that general rules don’t apply everywhere. We recommend half a dozen to maybe 10 or 12 content items in the newsletter at most. And if it’s somewhere in the upper range, some of those are going to be short vignettes—quote-of-the-day-type things. We recommend that you lead with a headline and a synopsis to drag the reader in, providing a really succinct newsletter. That synopsis links to the full article. If people exhibit a certain behavior in clicking through to successive articles, we might count that as a purchase interest that warrants some kind of response in terms of an e-mail follow-up or a phone call.

E-ZINE IQ: How long should the articles be?

FISH:: We recommend 500 to 1,000 words But we do have success with long articles like car reviews. Often those will run on for 2,000 or 3,000 words. Another recommendation is to pepper the articles with images. We like to see at least a minimum of a couple in every article.

E-ZINE IQ: Do you always recommend that articles link through to the Web site and not appear in their entirety in the newsletter?

FISH:: The full story should appear not on your Web site but on a micro site. This way, your analytics for the newsletter won’t get tangled up with the analytics of the Web site. You can still have links out to the main Web site where appropriate.

E-ZINE IQ: What about the age-old question of text vs. HTML?

FISH:: We encourage people to think about the impact and the production values that go with HTML. If somebody can’t receive that, then things automatically default down to the text version.

E-ZINE IQ: What about the delivery issues?

FISH:: The key to delivery is working with the ISPs. We put brand-new newsletters on a clean IP address, and they develop their own reputation in terms of the black-list, white- list process that goes on at the ISPs. Then there's the problem of getting through the spam filters at the actual end user PC. That comes down to best practices that we advise our clients to observe. A lot of it is avoidance of key words that get picked up by the spam filters. We’re also developing the capability to automatically run a score on the newsletter to evaluate its likelihood of getting trapped by the spam filters on the PC, but that’s not something we’ve implemented yet. And we think that Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a very promising delivery mechanism. What it is is a very simple piece of software. Imagine three window panes in your screen. On the left side, you have channels of information that you can pick from. On the top, you’ll have program items within those channels. It’s very simple to opt in: You click on the channel to subscribe. And it’s easy to opt out: You just delete the channel if you don’t want it. You never give up your e-mail address so there’s no risk of spam.

E-ZINE IQ: What are some of the worst mistakes you’ve seen in newsletters?

FISH:: It’s a really big mistake to turn a newsletter into just a promotional mechanism and to slam people with whom you have a trusting relationship with promotion after promotion. Another bad practice is to go out so infrequently that you don’t maintain at least some top-of-mind awareness. We are big fans of going monthly rather than quarterly, and we even see weeklies on occasion. Another common mistake is when people use high-end Web HTML editors to inject formatting. Some of these things inject constructs that the e-mail client just can’t process—things like cascaded style sheets. It’s very important to either work at sort of the lowest common denominator of HTML or have an e-mail service provider who translates formatting into something that all e-mail clients can absorb.

E-ZINE IQ: Do newsletters have a lifespan?

FISH:: We’ve had customers doing the same basic newsletter for years. But as you come to know your audience, you get a keener sense for the sub-segments, and that can be the prompt for offering more tightly focused newsletters. You might start with a fairly generic piece and find a few years out that you’ve got two or three different audiences with distinct interests that you want to serve more specifically, so you recruit them into separate publications that focus on those narrow interests.