More Dumb Things and Their Successful Solutions
Complicated spread sheets, over-crowded Websites and courtesy-reply envelopes are just three of the next 10 of 50 Dumb Things Publishers Stopped Doing and So Should You that we started in this space last month—based on a popular session at SIPA 2010.
Denise Elliott and Greg Krehbiel, both from The Kiplinger Washington Editors, led this session and will also be speaking at the Marketing Conference in Miami, Nov. 10-12—Elliott leading the Marketing Directors Roundtable on the first afternoon and Krehbiel leading a session called Top 10 Things Marketers Need to Know About IT. A couple other experts in this listing will be speaking in Miami as well.
1. Dumb idea – Created a membership portal for accountants with three access levels: free, registered, and premium, based on 3-, 6- and 12-month subscriptions. Tried to put everything inside, connected: articles, legislation, cases studies, examples to create a perfect tool. It confused everybody and we had no profit for 2 years.
What we did – Changed the focus of the portal, and we started to collect emails and promote our products and services.
Results – The traffic increased dramatically and the project works very well. We’ve duplicated the success elsewhere, having other 10 free portals on various topics: labor law, business ideas, juridical, management etc. Additionally, we recycled the premium content from the former membership portal, added new content and made everything very, very simple: Question and Answers for accountants. Broke even in 4 months!
(Florin Campeanu of Rentrop & Straton will be one of the presenters in Miami of the Conference Wrap-up session.)
2. Dumb Habit – Paid editors a base plus royalties based on new sales and renewals.
What we did – Switched to paying them just a higher percentage of renewal sales.
Outcome – It’s simpler for them and for accounting. It ties them more closely to the long-term health of their products. It relieves acquisition campaigns of additional expense.
(Phil Ash, National Institute of Business Management)
3. Dumb habit – We were using a complicated spreadsheet to keep track of the editorial process for our monthly articles, but it was impossible to put every step in the spreadsheet, so the missing steps often got skipped, resulting in errors.
What we did – Implemented a step-by-step system that could be used for every article.
Result – This has saved our editors a lot of time and effort and significantly reduced errors.
(Robin Williford, EB Medicine)
4. Dumb idea – Thinking our solid brand name justified being the audio conference price leader in our industry.
What we did – Dropped our price from $249 to $99.
Results – AC revenue increased about 10%, but the larger “new customer” pipeline gave many more active leads to the inside sales department and helped the business overall.
(Lucretia Lyons, Business Valuation Resources, is one of the two Conference Chairs for Miami.)
5. Dumb habit – Weighing down your web page with unnecessary images, technology, plug-ins, flash.
(Christopher Moffa, Kiplinger)
6. Dumb habit – Failure to emphasize post-event sales.
(Deirdre Hackett, Kiplinger)
7. Dumb idea –Trying to save money with a courtesy-reply envelope. In most markets, the cost-savings aren’t worth the lift you get from a business-reply envelope.
(Denise Elliott, Kiplinger, will lead the Marketing Directors Roundtable in Miami.)
8. Worst practice – Co-mingling direct mail to reduce DM postage expense. It did save on postage, but DM response rates declined. Was the decline in response rates due to the economy, bad lists, offers, package, etc., or co-mingling?
Solution – Test staggering DM by “library” rather than co-mingling DM and improving the DM presort with a new vendor to reduce postage costs.
(This was an anonymous tip.)
9. Worst practice – Thinking publishers and ad sales managers can effectively sell and renew site license deals
Solution – Hired lots of site license specialists and set clear rules for what publishers can and can’t do
(Louise White, Incisive Media)
10. Dumb habit – Insisting that the value of a piece is dictated by the effort taken to create it, rather than a calculation based on the reader’s needs.
(Graham Ruddick, NEC Group)
The entire list of 50 is in the member section of the SIPA Website under Handouts.
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