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Email extends reach and frequency for newspaper publisher
Challenge
Information technology is a huge capital expenditure for healthcare, and the senior managers in charge of purchasing require plenty of timely, strategic information. Jerry Zeidenberg, publisher of Canadian Healthcare Technology (CHT), has been providing just that, delivering his tabloid newspaper to a blue chip audience of 12,000 professionals since the mid-nineties. Because this group is so influential in IT purchases, CHT has also had huge success in attracting brand-name advertisers.
Recently, CHT encountered some new competition - a U.S. publisher entered the market with a weekly email newsletter. With few boundaries restricting email, CHT risked losing Canadian readers. Jerry had already been considering a similar initiative. For one thing, he wanted to touch his readers more frequently than the economics of printing a newspaper permitted. CHT came out 8 times a year, and adding new editions meant more printing and postage. On another level, Jerry's advertisers had been making occasional inquiries about his plans for online marketing. Email seemed the likely medium.
Solution
Jerry decided on a quick counter measure - an email newsletter published 24 times a year that would meet the competitive threat and support the print publication. He contacted Inbox Marketer Inc., experts in providing email marketing and publishing services. The people at Inbox quickly explained their unique service spectrum that ranged from self serve to full serve. The company had spent years perfecting and simplifying its Web interfaces so that any marketer or publisher could manage their own campaigns with just a few hours training. Given CHT's publishing experience, Jerry and his staff took the self-serve option, and Inbox as its in-house email publishing system.
Inbox has an easy, three-step program to get any new client up and running in as little as a week. First, it consolidates all the customer's email contacts into a single, online marketing database accessible by the Web. Once the database goes "live" on Inbox servers it is constantly updated by subscribe and unsubscribe pages, hardbounce administration and even click-thru data.
Next, Inbox designed a reusable HTML template resembling CHT's print publication. It was very important to do this so that both advertising and editorial could be displayed in ways that were highly visible but non-conflicting. Once designed, CHT staff could then populate the template with fresh editorial content and advertising each time they deployed.
The final step was to train Jerry's team in using the Inbox Marketer system to both manage his circulation lists and to deploy the newsletters. The Inbox approach is on-the-job training. After an initial online session, both teams jointly deployed the first newsletter with Inbox taking much of the lead. On subsequent deployments, CHT took on more and more of the functions until completely self-sufficient after three issues.
Results
Zeidenberg says working with Inbox enabled him to meet his goals fast: "Inbox Marketer has provided us with a quick, easy-to-use method of entering the e-newsletter marketplace. With the assistance of Inbox Marketer, we were up and running in two weeks' time. Not only have our readers been impressed with the service, which provides them with useful information, but the e-newsletter has also created a fresh source of revenue for us through the sale of advertising spots in the electronic publication."
