Consultant Takes Aim at New Business
Robert Cannon left the hardware business after 20 years to set up shop as a consultant in 2001. But when a business contact hired someone else for a job Cannon was well suited for, he realized importance of keeping his name and talents in front of prospective employers.
Thus, his e-newsletter, Taking Aim was born with 150 subscribers in 2002. It covers general business topics.
“I came from the hardware industry and I had a fairly extensive list of contacts from trade associations, so that’s where I started with the subscription list,” he says.
Initially, Taking Aim was primarily targeted to professionals in the hardware business. It has since expanded, and now has 3,000 subscribers from product managers up to chief executive officers, predominantly in the durable goods industry.
Cannon grows the list in a number of ways. “It’s optimized on all Web search engines,” he says. “I come up high when someone searches for a free management or marketing newsletter.”
He also conducts public speaking engagements in which people are exposed to his programs Recently he gave a speech on decision making for the Institute of Management Consultants that added to his subscription list.
It’s not unusual, he says, to get spurts of sign-ups after a speaking engagement. Altogether, he gets about 10 to 20 new subscribers per month.
Pass along readers have also contributed to Cannon’s growth spurt during the past three years. “People who got the newsletter from friends e-mail me and ask if they can get their own copy,” he says.
Occasionally, he’ll direct readers to his blog, another subscription avenue sign–up tool.
Cannon uses his monthly newsletter sparingly when it comes to promoting his consulting business. However, he admits to giving his business a plug three or four times a year. “I try to have something in there apart from standard every day practices so people will remember me for consulting and speaking opportunities,” he says.
And those consulting and speaking opportunities, ranging from $3500 to $4000, go a long way to covering his costs for the production of the newsletter, he says. “I’m not going to get rich off it, but the newsletter is taking care of itself at this point.”
Cannon encourages newsletter reader interaction via business quizzes and assessments that he houses on his Web site. “Earlier this spring, I created a 16-question quiz to assess an organization’s momentum. At the end, the reader would receive a report telling them whether their company was in decline, coasting, building momentum or experiencing positive movement,” he says. Although the quiz received 100 to 120 hits, only a small handful actually took the quiz.
Open Rates
Open rates for the e-newsletter have been as high as 108% and as low as 35%. “Summer months are the worst,” Cannon says. “I don’t know whether it’s people taking vacation, but our tracking shows that opens tend to be seasonal. It picks up in the fall and falls off in May and June, sometimes depending on the weather.”
There is also a correlation between the number of subscribers and the open rate, he says. “Generally speaking, the higher the number of subscribers, the lower the percentage of opens. So there’s some trade off with high subscriptions.”
Cannon, whose business is located in Chagrin Falls, OH, works with a local company, FancE-mail for distribution and back end reports. He tracks the amount of opens, Site visitors and the number of subscribers.
As for challenges, Cannon cites optimization as his biggest hurdle. “For the first few months when we ran the newsletter it wasn’t doing a whole lot,” he says. “Then we started optimizing the newsletter sign-up page and some pages on the Web site. That increased traffic to the site and the number of newsletter sign-ups.”
Cannon also relies on reader feedback to gauge his success. He adds that the additional newsletter content on his Web site has increased his site’s search engine standing.
“That’s a plus for me and my business,” he says. “But the newsletter is something I enjoy doing.”
