InternetVIZ: Anne, I'd like to thank you for taking time to talk with us about your experience with MarketingSherpa.

AH: My pleasure.  Thanks for asking.

InternetVIZ: How would you define MarketingSherpa?

AH: Good question! Having a really clear, targeted definition is one of the biggest challenges for any email newsletter publisher, especially these days now that there are something like 70,000 being published. Why would somebody bother to read you?

So, I actually spend a lot of energy making sure we stick to our definition in our editorial, in our marketing, even in the way I answer "what do you do?" at cocktail parties. The official definition is:

"Marketingsherpa is a publishing company that publishes practical how-to resources, such as newsletters, to help marketing and advertising professionals at medium-big companies improve their Internet and integrated online/offline marketing results."

InternetVIZ: It sounds like you've made a real conscious effort to establish your own niche.

AH: Absolutely!  You'll notice a couple of critical deferentiators rolled into the definition of MarketingSherpa.

First, we're in the publishing business as a business. So we're not consultants or another kind of vendor using a newsletter to market our product. Our product is the publication. So there's no other agenda (or bias.)

Second, we're not in the "news" business. There are so many great news publishers that I didn't see a need in the marketplace for more of that. So we really consciously focus on "knowledge" rather than news. In our case, we report on marketing campaigns after they happen so people can reveal results. Most other publications report on stuff when it launches, when it's "news."

Third, we're explicitly targeting marketing professionals from companies with more than 10 employees. There are a zillion great publishers out there serving small biz and entrepreneurs. That niche is filled. We consciously fill a different one.

InternetVIZ: How long has MarketingSherpa been around?

AH: I founded the company in October 1999 when the idea to fill this particular market hole came to me. I was actually sharing a hotel room with Kim MacPherson who's now a pretty famous broadcast email marketer. We were at the same Internet marketing Digitrends show in Arizona and that night she wrote her very first column for ClickZ on her laptop while I was working on the business plan for Sherpa on mine! But unlike many online publishers, I actually come from the subscription publishing world. Kim and I both worked for Phillips Publishing before starting our own separate companies. I actually launched the 2nd newsletter in the world on Internet marketing back in 1994 for Phillips. The first was launched by Andy Batkin who later created Digitrends.net. So, it's a small world! Having that old fashioned publishing background has really made a difference as I've adjusted to the new post-boom business climate. It's like putting on an old pair of jeans that were at the back of your closet. It's been a while, but I remember wearing them and they're comfortable. They fit me.

InternetVIZ: What was the first lesson you learned about running an online newsletter company?

AH: How incredibly quickly the world was changing! We've had to rev up to change business models either somewhat or completely about every 4 months since we launched. There's never been time to relax and just focus on getting one right. Aside from that, which won't affect people who are doing newsletters for promotional purposes (it only affects publishing publishers) the biggest lesson has been how hard it is to get opt-ins. Partly that's because if you're a good targeted publisher you are picky about them. For example small biz sites often want to recommend us to their readers and I've turned them down ... it's painful to turn down free opt-ins, but small biz is not our definition! Partly that's also because people's in-boxes are SO FULL these days. The average professional in my marketplace gets 7-10 email newsletters a week! I hear that's normal for a lot of markets. So your editorial really has to be incredibly good. You'd think, "well it's free, so they should be glad to get it." but that's really not the case. There's a plethora of information now, my free stuff actually has to be as good or better than the quality of the information I used to market in the 1990s at $500 subscription fees for Phillips! That's hard to do.

InternetVIZ: I know that you now have over 90,000 opt-in subscribers.  How have you managed to grow your list so successfully?

AH: We never got any VC money (which I'm incredibly grateful for now) so we had to do everything on a shoestring. If you look at our site you can see that it's built to generate subscriptions -- there's a subscription box on every single page. Plus a pop-up when you leave. You can't miss it. Plus the very first thing we say in every single issue is "Yes, you can forward this issue!" and we get a lot of viral pass-along that way. And the stories themselves all have that "tell a friend" box at the top so lots of people pass the word that way. We feature a lot of prominent people in the articles so often they will come to the site and use that form to send the link to all of their friends. So we take advantage of our sources' connections. Guerrilla stuff like that has grown us to about 90,000 weekly readers. Now I'm planning our very first paid marketing campaign for October and I'm so excited! I'll be testing CPA models using co-registration on related sites. You can only do that though when you know exactly what a new subscriber is worth to you as a business. What their lifetime value is. Then you know how much you can afford to pay for them. Until then, you may be wasting money. There's a danger of overspend. You really have to have measurable goals with newsletters, even if they are "just" promotional vehicles. This is business!

InternetVIZ: One of the things that really makes the Sherpa newsletters stand out is the quality of the content.  How do you continue to create content your readers will respond to?

AH: That's hard. I do a lot of formal and informal surveying to keep my finger on the pulse... and I'm always surprised by answers. Even if you think you know, you don't! I also track the basics, which stories get the most traffic or click throughs, which topics do we get the most email about? Plus I watch the industry email discussion groups to see what topics are hotly discussed by people. Often it's stuff you might not think to write a news story about.

Sometimes you can get bored to death of a topic, but your audience just eats it up like ice cream. They don't care that they've heard it before, they want that same kind of story again and again! Sometimes you can get really excited about something -- for example I'm personally VERY passionate about co-registration ideas right now -- and your audience is yawning. I've worked for more than 100 business publications in my time and the editors invariably have this problem. The minute you know enough about the topic to be a good editor and have great sources, etc., you are not like your target audience anymore. You can lose track of them easily and get caught up in your own stuff. You become such an insider that you're lost to the mainstream. It helps that unlike most professional journalists, the people who write for Sherpa, including myself, are all personally from professional backgrounds matching our readers. I've been the head of marketing for a $100 million company. I've sat in those committee meetings, and managed those budgets, and known that reality. So I try to pretend I'm talking to my old self when I write. But again, it's not easy!

InternetVIZ: Have you seen any changes in newsletter marketing during the past year?

AH: Definitely.  The biggest one is that people are doing it! Starting about 6-7 months ago, just about every marketer we talked to on the phone (and we talk to about 20 a week on average) said, "I'm going to start a newsletter this year." So promotional newsletters are the big online marketing trend of 2001. Period. Now I'm starting to hear about people getting fancy with them. Dynamic generation and personalized content is a coming hot thing -- where your back end database starts collecting information on the reader either passively through watching what links they click, or aggressively by surveying them, and then people's newsletters are created personally just for them. I first heard about people doing this last Fall. I think by this Fall a bunch of leaders will be doing it. And within 2 years a lot of people will be doing it.

However, I don't think it's critical for everyone. If you are in a tight niche industry, it probably doesn't make sense. It's only good for people with a broad range of stuff to talk about, so they can niche down to the varying recipients' needs.

InternetVIZ: Gazing into your crystal ball, do you believe more companies are going to enter the email newsletter market? If so, what kind of companies will these be? Media companies? Ad agencies? Or businesses distributing their own?

AH: Just about every week I get contacted by another entrepreneur who says, "We're starting a technology company to help people create and distribute newsletters!" and they are all excited and I'm like, oh you are so one of a zillion out there. And I often hear from marketers who are using one of the older companies who are pretty expensive... they want to see who they can move to to save money. Also a lot of marketers who started company newsletters in the past 6 months are now finding they have too big a list to handle on their own, so they call me to see who they should move to now that they want distribution handled out of house..... So you've got the new tech companies and the older companies all battling over this emerging marketplace. Plus everyone's calling all the ad agencies, pr firms and list brokers and trying like mad to partner with them and be the newsletter distribution place they send all their clients to or even offer as a private label. So the ad agencies are getting sometimes several calls a day! We'll see some new lasting leaders emerge from the battle in 9 months or so, so that should be interesting!

InternetVIZ: Anne, thanks again for taking time to talk with us.  Any final thoughts on the email newsletter business?

AH: This is a hard business. Just like creating other kinds of great marketing, it's a harder slog than you ever think it's going to be. But it's also really fun and completely worth it. A friend of mine said once, "Before I had kids, all I could think about was the responsibility, the expense, the midnight feedings, the lack of free time. I never realized along with that came all sorts of wonderful things that more than made up for it!" That's pretty much newsletters in a nutshell for you. Hard work and totally worth it. If you do it remotely right, you'll get better response than you ever dreamed. Incredible.

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Anne Holland is the CEO of MarketingSherpa.com a media company currently bringing six live news channels to Internet marketing, advertising and PR professionals via the Web at MarketingSherpa.com. The site is famous for featuring new Case Studies for free every day.