Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Breakout Session: E-mail Marketing
by Deb Shaw
Three media professionals shared the panel to talk about e-mail marketing this afternoon. Each gave insights into their unique approaches but one thing was common – email marketing is generating revenue and it’s profitable.
From left, Samantha, Allison, Rich
From Allison Cusick, Digital Marketing Manager, The Elkhart Truth (IN)
- They’ve been collecting email addresses for years. They’ve been collected from multiple sources but essentially any and all touch points with customers and market residents are used.
- With a total of roughly 77,000 addresses, they boiled that down to just over 41,000 useable addresses when they got ready to go full steam into their email marketing program.
- Since January, they’ve conducted 19 contests and surveys to grow their database.
- They’re selling marketing campaigns to local businesses at the rate of $12/M plus an extra $5/CPM for added levels like gender, income, job industry, interest/lifestyles.
From Samantha Johnston, Executive Director, Colorado Press Association
- Sync2Media is a separate division of the association. Developed to become more relevant to advertisers seeking to buy audience.
- Regardless of how technically savvy your market is, people understand what email is and why it’s important.
- Traditional newspaper and website advertising channels are strong; email is an affordable and viable audience extension tool.
- Consumers prefer receiving email marketing messages over message sent via texting and Facebook.
- Email marketing is very scalable, can be executed successfully in large and small markets.
- Open rates range from 10-17%; click thru rates range from 1.5-2.5%.
From Rich Whippen, President/CEO, Washington Suburban Press Network
- His newspaper network is huge with print circulation totaling over 1,000,000.
- They got into email marketing to generate revenue and it’s working. Last month alone, they generated $150K in profit from the program. Media Prowler is their email marketing division.
- Key ingredients to his success is transparency and purity of the data.
- There are a lot of email marketers – many are peddling inferior data. Make sure yours is clean and crisp.
- They will sell e-mail lists to clients, ranging in price from $25/M to $55/M depending on size and scope of sale.
- Go to www.mediaprowler.com to get a live experience of selecting email data.
- Rich is willing to explore partnerships with other publishers, to wholesale their collected data to others in the industry.
Contacts:
Allison Cuslock, acusick@etruth.com
Samantha Johnston, sjohnston@colopress.net
RichWhippen, rwhippen@wspnet.com