SSP E-Marketing Webinar

By Duncan Humphrey

Oxford Journals

2

What is E-Marketing?

• The use of digital technology to promote and sell your products and services

• The basics of marketing remain the same: creating a strategy to communicate the right messages to the right people. E-marketing simply makes a larger number of options available

• Essentially, e-marketing provides new ways to reach your customers, many of them cheaper and more effective than traditional channels such as direct mail or advertising

3

Some Benefits of E-Marketing

• Global reach

• Lower cost

• Higher conversion rate than print

• Personalisation

• Greater measurability

4

E-Marketing Tools

• Electronic table of contents (ETOC) alerts and announcements

• Online sample issues

• Email newsletters

• HTML email campaigns

• Pay per click advertising

• Free trials

5

ETOC Alerts and Announcements

These are a great way of getting your content out there and attracting new readers and subscribers to a journal.

The facility to attach short announcements to ETOC messages allows for cross selling of related journals, products and services to recipients.

RSS is the latest incarnation of alerting technology and is proving successful, although as I understand it there is no way to run additional promotions to RSS subscribers.

6

Online Sample Issues

Accessible to anyone, 24 hours a day, at little cost to the publisher; certainly in comparison to the cost of mailing out print samples.

If customers viewing the online sample have to register in order to do so, you can also legitimately follow up via email with a variety of approaches:

• Offering a discounted subscription rate

• Asking them to recommend the journal to their librarian

• Encourage them to register for the ETOC service

• Send a survey asking their opinion of the journal

7

Email Newsletters

A chance to promote your organisational brand and a range of products or offers within a single email. Newsletters should reflect the look and feel of your website, strengthening the seamlessness of the browsing experience from promotional email to website purchase.

Books at Transworld newsletter: (next slide)

Books at Transworld website: http://www.booksattransworld.co.uk/

8

Email Newsletters

9

HTML Email Campaigns

Using HTML for an email campaign allows you to introduce graphical elements, a broader variety of links, and to reflect the look of your website, as we saw in the example of the newsletter a moment ago. Tracking click through is also easy from HTML, although there is debate as to whether HTML or plain text emails generate the highest responses.

If your company lacks the resources to handle an email campaign (sophisticated reporting, recording of bounce backs and unsubscribers etc) there are a range of businesses that will manage an HTML email campaign on your behalf. I have found the following companies to be helpful:

ISI: http://www.isinet.com/

MDR: http://www.schooldata.com/

CMI: http://www.cminteractive.com/

10

Pay Per Click Advertising

This enables you to get to the top of search engines such as Google whilst only being charged when someone clicks to go to your website. So unlike some internet advertising, you only pay when someone actually visits your site.

We have recently started using pay per click advertising via Google’s ad words service and it seems to be both successful and cost-effective. A useful aspect of this service is that it is very easy to test and measure the results.

Google ad words: www.google.co.uk/ads/

11

Free Trials

Free trials, when targeted well, can be a powerful tool in generating usage, profile and subscriptions.

As with the online sample issues, free trials generate the opportunity of a follow up email to registrants of the trial. These follow ups are the beginnings of a more direct and personal dialogue with a customer; in this situation we now know what they are interested in and can start to tailor our marketing accordingly.

12

Driving Traffic Online

Enticing people online via print publicity is a key skill. It is particularly important amongst disciplines such as those within the Humanities which are still very print focused. Useful strategies include:

• Emphasising your URL (which should be as simple and memorable as possible) within the design

• Reflecting the layout of your website in your print publicity to create a consistent and familiar look and feel

• Distributing a CD-ROM with promotions

• Running a campaign/offer beginning in print but for which vital information can only be located online i.e. free trial cards

13

Building a Community Around Your Site

It can be a good idea to offer areas within your website which provide opportunities for customers to interact, enter competitions, or participate in market research. Examples include:

• Online surveys: http://nq.oupjournals.org/

• Competitions: www3.oup.co.uk/earlyj/special/4/default.html

• E letters: http://bja.oupjournals.org/

• Student essay prizes: www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/list/tweceb/special/1/default.html

• Charitable work: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/donatebookprogram

14

Tracking and Measuring Results

• Invaluable in your planning and reporting

• Marketing by e-mail or banner advertising makes it easier to establish how effective your campaign has been. If someone clicks on a banner advert, or a link in an e-mail or on a website, you can see how they arrived at your website

• This detailed information about customers’ responses to your marketing allows you to assess the effectiveness of different campaigns and compare response levels across different activities – experimenting with different approaches to see which gives the best result

15

Marketing in the Age of Google

The advent of self-archiving and the fact that researchers can now easily locate self archived papers via Google and other search engines potentially cuts publishers out of the research process. We need to clearly illustrate the benefits and added value that our services provide:

• Searching across a full text HTML version of the paper

• Linking to related articles and references

• Peer review as a marker of quality

• Security: the version of the paper stored securely on a publisher’s site will not be tampered with in future

16

Author Marketing

Marketing to authors, demonstrating that you are aware of their needs, and providing an easy interface for them to view information on their article both before and after publication, is an area of increasing importance.

Many publishers, such as Elsevier, have web pages allowing authors to view instructions on how to submit an article, to track their paper through the production process, and to see usage and citation data for their articles: http://authors.elsevier.com/

17

Personalisation and Contextual Marketing

Response rates to email marketing are already dropping, due to spam and also just the sheer amount of it saturating the market! The way forward is highly targeted, personalised marketing.

If your customer database is linked to your website, then whenever someone visits the site, you can greet them with targeted offers. The more they buy from you, the more you can refine their customer profile and market effectively to them. A good example of this is Amazon's website which suggests products based on your and other people's previous purchases:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385511809/ref=pd_nfy_gw_nr/104-7197584-3722343?v=glance

18

Tips to Take Away

• Always include an opt out box – and have the systems to be able to maintain records accurately! Respecting data privacy is crucial to your good reputation as a business

• Offer a choice of HTML or plain text emails, it may not look so nice but many customers much prefer plain text for its simplicity and fast download speed

• Consider download speed. Large attachments or graphic emails may be fine for emails sent mostly to people at work but if a campaign is focused on people at home plain text may be the most appropriate format

19

Tips to Take Away

• Be very careful choosing your data source for emails – you can’t use conference lists unless the recipients have opted in to receive marketing info in the first place. You ideally want to use your own lists, as you can then be more certain that they aren’t going to contain people who don’t want communications

• Don’t overuse your email lists – well targeted, well timed, and carefully thought out email campaigns are going to be more successful. Don’t forget – its incredibly easy to press ‘delete’ on an unwelcome email before even seeing the content!

• Use a compelling subject line in your email and avoid spam words such as ‘free’ or having everything in caps

20

Tips to Take Away

• Set goals and agree specific, measurable objectives for your e-marketing campaign in order to judge its success. You can then use this information to compare response rates across different marketing methods and decide which one is most appropriate when planning a campaign. Being able to report on the effectiveness of your marketing is also useful when dealing with stakeholders

• Take every opportunity you can to personalise and tailor marketing to your customer’s needs. Once your customer data allows you to build profiles of your customer’s interests you can ensure that you are sending them relevant promotional information. Your response rates will soar!

21

Tips to Take Away

• Collect email addresses whenever and wherever possible and add them to your database systematically. Lots of companies still waste opportunities to pool all of their customer data together

• Make sure links work, web sites are up to date and that copy is short and readable. Most of the worst websites and emails are cluttered and incomprehensible: www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

The best are clear and simple:

www.guardian.co.uk

www.google.com

22

Thank You

Questions & Comments Welcome