How to Maximize Business-to-Business Email Newsletter Results:
Useful Data & Samples


CHALLENGE: "We're pretty lean and mean," says Julia Ochinero
Openwave (NASDAQ: OPWV) Senior Manager Customer Marketing.

The young wireless data tech Company, formed by a series of mergers
and acquisitions four years ago, needed to build its brand name.
Plus it had to educate customers and potential partners about the
technology as a whole, "we're on the cusp of the evolution of the
industry."

How do you grow a brand and educate an entire marketplace when your
marketing budget and staffing are tight?

One of the most obvious answers is to launch an email newsletter.
But, let's face it, the business technology world is so overun with
newsletters that making any kind of impact with one is increasingly
difficult.

Plus, Openwave didn't have an in-house list to send email to.
Their target audience were powerful executives in the wireless
telecom industry - such as the heads of Verizon Wireless and
T-Mobile. These are not names you easily can rent to mail to.

CAMPAIGN: First the team carefully mapped out a newsletter
communications strategy (see link to handy diagram below) that
detailed each stage of the process from gathering opt-ins to
analyzing results.

-> Step #1: Gathering opt-ins into a centralized database

The team scrambled gathering contact names from every direction -
including marketing files from their acquired companies, executives'
Rolodexs (R), trade show meetings, and a pop-up on Openwave's site.
However, there will two strict rules:

Rule a. No name could be emailed on a regular basis until that
individual had proactively opted-in. Each name added to the database
was automatically sent an email asking them to opt-in to the
newsletter list. If they didn't respond in the affirmative, Openwave
did not mail that name again.

Ochinero says, "We wanted to start off on the right foot with this
audience. These are valuable contacts. I don't want people getting
the newsletter who don't want to get it."

Rule b. Name quality was far more important than quantity. While,
the team yearned for a nice fat list (who doesn't?), they
restrained their name-gathering to just the most targeted names --
highly qualified customers and prospects. "We are narrow focused,"
explains Ochinero. "We do not throw spaghetti against the wall and
hope it sticks.

She realized this pickiness would be a critical factor for the
program's long-term success, because the newsletter team had decided
from the start to base future editorial and creative designs on
response metrics such as which stories were the most read. If you
have off-target names on your list, they'll skew your response
metrics ... and ultimate editorial.

It's easy for the whole newsletter to be derailed quickly.

-> Step #2: Creating must-read editorial

But, the marketing team needed to study results from a few issues
before they could figure out which content would be most appealing
to the *right* recipients.

Although they wanted to send a newsletter every 60-days, this wasn't
possible with limited editorial resources. And a less-valuable
newsletter might be worse than no newsletter at all. So the team
decided to start with quarterly frequency.

To get the most possible cross-departmental buy-in and input,
Openwave formed a newsletter editorial committee to brainstorm up
topics for their first annual editorial calendar. Ochinero notes,
"The biggest challenge is product or technical oriented people
writing very tech oriented articles. Our newsletter was supposed to
be more focused on the business decision-maker."

The committee solved this by creating and internally distributing an
editorial guidelines memo, clearly describing "the filters through
which all stories have to fit."

Ochinero also got great story ideas by attending quarterly sales
account planning meetings. "I asked, what stories would help you
communicate to your customers? I'm not in the street with the
customer; I really need the sales team's help in making the product
relevant."

-> Step #3: Maximizing issue impact

Aside from a solid list and great content, the third element that
can make or break a newsletter's success is to individualize it to
each recipient, and make it appear to be a one-to-one communication
instead of a mass broadcast.

So, whenever possible, names in Openwave's database included a code
indicating which staff members actually knew that person. That way
when a newsletter was sent, it could be "from" an Openwave staffer
the recipient knew. If the recipient responded back to the
newsletter with a note, that note was logged by the system prior to
being forwarded on to the original "from" staffer.

Plus, the team added a short text-note at the top of each issue --
before the HTML graphics for the issue began. It's the
email-equivalent of clipping a personal letter to a mass-produced
brochure. (See link below for samples.)

Ochinero wanted sales reps especially to personalize these notes to
the names in the database that were tagged as being from their list.
However, sales reps don't love to type lots of letters. So she made
it as easy as possible for them, by posting four different template
letters per issue that they could choose from. Reps could use one of
these notes, or create their own.

The notes included the rep's direct phone number.

Once reps oked the copy for the names on their list, the newsletters
were sent out. The whole process from posting the upcoming issue to
the intranet to gathering all the reps' notes took about two weeks.

-> Step #4. Using stats to grow internal help and buy-in

The key to this entire process -- creating a list, inventing
stories, sending out personal notes -- was that the marketing
department could not act alone. The newsletter required almost
everyone company-wide to pitch in, in some way or another.

So, Ochinero created an internal marketing campaign to get buy-in.
The editorial committee helped, as did personally schmoozing the
sales department. But what really made the difference was posting
newsletter results publicly.

After each issue, Ochinero created a new Powerpoint presentation
that included a brief overview of the newsletter process, and then
revealed metrics data for that issue. She picked her metrics data
carefully to emphasize that what's important is how a name responds,
not the gross number of names sent to. Stats included:

- Average clickthrough per article topic
- Opens, bounces, and unique clickers per list source
- Average amount of time names from each of 54 specific customer and
business partner companies spent reading the issue

To foster competitive spirit, she also posted the results data by
named source (individual sales rep or Openwave exec name) on a
prominently located bulletin board at headquarters. So, everyone
could see that one person's names had performed exceptionally well,
while someone else's weren't so responsive.

Again it's worth noting that the factor promoted most was how
responsive sourced-names were, not the mass quantity of names. A rep
who turned in a large but lower quality list could not shine.

RESULTS: Openwave's newsletters consistently meet or beat
business-to-business average metrics. Average issue open rates have
ranged from 33-59% of names mailed.

Open rates are sliding slowly over time but this appears to be more
a list hygiene factor because bounce rates can be in the mid-****s
as names age on the list. For example, 33% of the latest sent issue
were opened, but if you remove bounces from the total, the open rate
rises to 39%.

A newsletter sent more frequently than quarterly would have lower
bounce rates.

The personalized lists, where the "from" is a name the individual
would recognize, consistently get a significantly higher open rate
than other lists. The lift can be as much as 8-9 points.

Subscribers who joined the list from the Web site pop-up generally
get the lowest open rate, because they have not been qualified in
any way aside from the fact that they visited the site. In an effort
to keep name quality high, Ochinero recently replaced the standard
pop-up with a registration form asking a few questions beyond merely
"what is your email address?"

Overall unique clicks as a percent of names sent averaged just under
10%. Click rates varied per issue, which makes sense because each
issue covers different topics. However, overall the click rates have
held steady for the past 14 months, indicating that once you get
recipients to open, you can keep them clicking if your content isn't
boring.

Fascinatingly, the source of a name appears to be directly related
to which articles that name is most likely to click on. Names
gathered from the Web site, trade shows and other general sources
tend to click on the top article overwhelmingly, with a smattering
of clicks on articles lower down. For example, 30% of site-gathered
clickers read the top article of the latest issue.

Names gathered from personal contact lists that got a personal
letter at the top, are far more likely to dig deeper into the issue.
So 22.5% of personalized recipients clicked on the top article of
the most recent issue, while the rest clicked articles further
below. At 14.8%, personalized recipients were also twice as likely
as other names to click on an issue's link to download a PDF report.
Personal contact lists varied significantly in value. Several sales
reps' personal contact lists got click rates in the mid-40s, while
most others averaged just under 10%.

Last but not least, the relationship the recipient's company had
with Openwave directly affects newsletter read-time. So, although
the average read-time for one issue was 4:34 minutes, executives
working for companies closely allied with Openwave spent 5:51
minutes per issue, and other lists spent 3:20 minutes with the
issue.

Taken together, this data indicates that you may want to create two
different types of newsletters: an in-depth newsletter with multiple
articles for closer, personalized, relationships, and a "lite"
version with only a couple of stories to woo folks who have less of
a relationship with you.

Useful links related to this article:

Samples of Openwave newsletters and their handy communications
planning diagram
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ow/ad.html
MEA Digital LLC - the interactive agency who help Openwave
strategize and create newsletters:
http://www.meadigital.com
Bluestreak - the broadcast platform MEA uses to send Openwave's
issues:
http://www.bluestreak.com
Openwave
http://www.openwave.com