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Hi, Steve. Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
I'm the Marketing Coordinator for Trade Books, and I've been at Norton since July of 2006. My job here has been to start up a lot of online marketing initiatives. Like many in the publishing industry, we're learning what are the best avenues to present books online.
It's been my duty to develop appropriate online marketing approaches, see what works, and make sure we're doing it effectively. Before coming to Norton, I was working in the editorial department at Yale University Press in New Haven, CT.
Give us a short overview of all your e-marketing efforts so far.
I've been doing many seemingly unconnected things and along the way have learned a lot. The goal is to get all the marketing efforts connected into one solid, unified strategic marketing approach.
Right now some of our efforts consist of the e-newsletter, blog outreach, social networking, and audio/video. Many publishers are experimenting with how short online video clips can help create interest and buzz around books. For decades publishers have been putting their authors in front of television and radio audiences, and continue to do so. Now we are just continuing that tradition with all the benefits to be gained online.
Let's start off by talking about the newsletter. I've noticed that I can definitely hear a personal voice behind it, can you tell us a bit about that?
I create the newsletter, slowly working on it over the course of the month, including just enough information to make the e-mail interesting but not too long. I usually write articles for just four or five books, out of the ten or so we release each month.
I'm signed up for many other publishers' e-mail lists, so I'm receiving what everyone else is sending out, and I've noticed that in most cases the various books highlighted in each newsletter are not connected in any way -- there will be a political book next to literary fiction and so on.
Since our mailing list is not yet large enough to effectively segment by topical interest, I decided that to connect our features in some way might be useful and make it more entertaining. For example, I created a "how-to" issue that was a modest attempt to encourage readers to challenge themselves to learn a new skill (bake bread!) or improve on an old one (edit your writing!). [Click here to see the newsletter.]
And in our October newsletter I included an excerpt from our recent publication, Frankenstein: A Cultural History as a special Halloween feature. Each of those issues got about an 28% open rate and 8% click rate.
You also include a contest in every issue. How does that work?
Everybody loves free books! When we were just starting the e-newsletter, we figured it would be a nice incentive to get more subscribers, and since then we've found that it's also nice way to encourage more one-on-one communication with anyone interested in Norton's books.
In every issue, we ask a trivia question that's related to the content of the newsletter, and to enter, people just send us an e-mail with their answer and their mailing address. Whoever answers first gets a free book, with a note saying thanks, we appreciate your reading.
But I also write to the other entrants to thank them for their time, and sometimes I'll surprise those people with an unexpected free book as well. What that means is that I have direct communication with just about all of the 45-55 people who respond. It takes me about two hours, spread out over a few days.
What would be your main suggestion/tip for other organizations, regarding their e-marketing?
I definitely think that letting people know there's somebody on the other side of the newsletter that they can communicate with is so helpful. It gives your organization a personality, and I think that makes people talk about it to their friends and think about it in a different way than they would otherwise. So it's important to try to take advantage of (and create) those opportunities in your marketing efforts whenever possible. It's definitely a time expense, but I think it's a worthwhile one.
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