IMN Takes a Dose Of Its Own Medicine

IMN has been advising people for years on how to create and upgrade their e-mail newsletters.

Now the company is going to heed its own counsel. It is about to relaunch its monthly e-zine, now called Informed Marketer News, as Pro & Content.

“Frankly, we thought it was getting kind of stale, so we decided to take our own medicine and do a revamp,” says David Fish, CEO of the Waltham, MA-based service provider.

The rebranded newsletter will deliver content on the importance of content. That is, it will be about filling e-mail newsletters with compelling material.

“We’re entering a world of declining newspaper rates,” Fish says. “People are going to be focused online, but they will have limited time and attention. Content will win the day in the end.”

IMN should know. Its auto dealer e-zines have opt-out rates of 1%, largely because they deliver in-depth professional articles.

Beyond that, what’s the secret of e-zine success? “Marketers should think more like magazine publishers and build a community of interest,” Fish answers.

They should also monitor what Fish calls the “signal-to-noise ratio.” And that means challenging one-to-one orthodoxy.

“The one-to-one event-triggered environment is getting very chatty,” Fish says. “Large firms are over communicating.”

In contrast, Pro & Content will discuss “how to achieve frequency without freaking people out, and without causing them to opt out. The issue is how to sustain high-quality content.”

Another of IMN’s guiding principles is to “monitor content popularity and correct on the fly to provide readers with articles they want to read.”

Now we know what Pro & Content will be about. But what form will the material take?

To start with, IMN will conduct reader surveys, asking the questions in one issue and discussing them in the next. It also will do Q&As with practitioners, delivering as many as possible in live podcasts. Finally, there will be a monthly wrap-up of relevant news.

The IMN edit team will be headed by Fish and by Jo Ellen Collins, vice president of marketing.

Who will get Pro & Content? Initially, the rebranded product will be sent to the roughly 25,000 people who subscribe to Informed Marketer News. But Fish hopes to double that, reaching out beyond the firm’s customer base.

Despite his debunking of one-to-one, Fish believes in segmentation. Accordingly, IMN is also launching an e-zine strictly for customers: Bounce! It will focus on tips for using IMN’s system.

Customers will be asked to opt in separately for this newsletter. In the end, e-zines should “carry a marketing payload along with editorial designed to engage people,” Fish says.

Want to subscribe to Pro & Content? Go to the IMN Web site (www.imninc.com). You should see it in your inbox later this month.