Newsletter Nightmares - A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
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Anyone who has been through a merger knows that they present many challenges - sometimes on a daily basis. More of them are unforeseen than you'd think. In this case, our little laid-back crafts company was hooking up with a savvy firm with products aimed at up-to-the-minute designers trying to keep on top of the trends in their field. (Yes, there are trends in the crafts field; it isn't all grandmothers making sweaters and doilies!).
But if you think the big firm figured it would educate its smaller counterpart, guess again. The smaller company had more traffic, thanks to good content that lasted for a while, better SEO, and a loyal audience. The larger company, as it turned out, was alienating its audience without even knowing it. It was doing newsletters, but it wasn't doing them properly.
My friend wasn't entirely coherent on this point; she sounded rather like she did the last time she tried to put together a crazy quilt and decided that NONE of the scraps she had worked together. Anyway, it turned out that the larger company generated newsletters automatically from the content on its web sites. And it generated a LOT more newsletters than the smaller company - something like sixteen or so during the same period of time for which the smaller company did only two.
Now if you put all these things together - less traffic, lots more newsletters, all automatically generated - it's no wonder my friend saw this as a problem. Getting the larger company to put out fewer newsletters went onto the priority list. Oh, by the way, it's worth mentioning here that the larger company's newsletters did not have any content that you couldn't get from going to their web sites. The smaller company, meanwhile, made a point of including original content in its newsletters along with the usual enticements to visit the site; it just seemed to make things more personal, and they figured their readers appreciated it.
Anyway, back to the story. What the smaller company didn't realize is that there were some important gaps in the way the larger company conducted its business - specifically, for the purposes of this article, its newsletter business. When a subscriber signed up for a newsletter, the larger company knew she was interested in its content...so it assumed that she was interested in ALL of its content. Rather than just getting the one newsletter, the subscriber's name went into a pool of names that received all 16 company newsletters.
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