Publisher's Value (ROI) is Huge
Online marketing responsible for up to $20,000 in revenue per month
Jonathan L. Bernstein, President and CEO of Bernstein Communications, Inc.
speaks with Meryl K. Evans, eNewsletter Journal
To many people, a minor crisis is not having matching socks, being out of your favorite ice cream, or not finding a parking spot close to the office. The crisis becomes a biggie when a family member becomes ill or a storm damages a home.
In business, crises come in all shapes and sizes, from natural disasters and system hacking to a recalled product or a service lawsuit. Few businesses have a crisis plan in place for handling these types of events, which may affect millions of people. In this quickly changing business world with Internet access and real-time technology, however, crisis management has become a whole different animal needing different and sometimes more attention than in the past.
Luckily for Crisis Managers, there ¡s a resource that provides continual management updates and ideas to ensure fast and responsible action in these situations. Bernstein Communications, Inc. Crisis Manager Newsletter
provides relevant bi-monthly information and advice to help simplify crisis
management for those managing it in Jonathan Bernstein's words, ¡°whether they
want to be or not. Its timely articles are syndicated in PR Newswire's Media Insider newsletter, and recently, Crisis Manager won the first eNewsletter Journal sponsored VIZable Value Award for online newsletter excellence.
After congratulating the winning team behind the newsletter, Meryl K. Evans spoke with Editor Jonathan Bernstein about the value his company receives from Crisis Manager.
eNJ: How did you get started in crisis management?
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Jonathan
Bernstein |
Jonathan Bernstein: By accident. I segued from journalism to PR in 1982, landed my first position as manager of corporate communications for Playboy, Inc. during a year when they had almost non-stop bad news. They lost their casino license in NJ, sold the famous Playboy Clubs and lost their book division. The last press release I wrote for them was announcing a 40 percent reduction in force ¨D including me! I proved to have some innate talent in crisis management, however, and thereafter sought out positions that gave me an opportunity to pursue that specialty.
eNJ: What brought about the creation of the newsletter?
JB: I was already self-publishing individual articles that I'd distribute to clients and other business contacts as a means of staying in touch and enhancing my perceived value to them. Reading other publisher's ezines,
I realized what a positive impact the good ones were making on me and thought,
"I can do that!" I then read an absolutely invaluable book Poor Richard's E-Mail Publishing that taught me exactly how to launch the newsletter.
eNJ: How did you grow the newsletter mailing list?
JB: A couple of months before I published my first issue, I sent email to EVERYONE in my Outlook Express address book telling them about my plans for Crisis Manager and asking if they'd like to be on the initial distribution for the newsletter. That got the first 100 subscribers. Since then, reader referrals have, without a doubt, been the single biggest source of new referrals. The second biggest is the Bernstein Communications Web site, which both archives back issues and promotes the newsletter in several locations. Other sources include links from many other sites either directly to the newsletter archive or the company Web site, favorable reviews by those who evaluate online publications and, of course, announcements of occasional awards like yours!
Also, about 18 months ago, the editor of PR Newswire's Media Insider newsletter approached me and asked if she could reprint one of the two featured articles from EVERY issue of Crisis Manager. Given that Media Insider has a circulation just under 30,000, I was delighted to agree, and that's been the arrangement ever since.
Hence, although the direct readership of the entire ezine is 3,400 and growing, many people read at least one article, and every one of those reprints links back to our Web site. Additionally, Crisis Manager articles have been reprinted in at least a dozen countries and in multiple languages, including Japanese, Turkish and Hebrew!
eNJ: How did you determine the mailing frequency of each issue?
JB: I studied distribution frequency of comparable business publications and, after I got started with twice-monthly publication, I surveyed my readers to ask if they'd like to receive it more or less often. They liked semi-monthly.
eNJ: What benefits has Bernstein Communications, Inc. received as a result of the newsletter?
JB: Bernstein Communications as a business, and Jonathan Bernstein as a consultant, have been blessed with worldwide recognition as a result of the newsletter being read and often reprinted in around 60 countries. The newsletter, thanks to reader and client feedback, has helped define my personal business and crisis management philosophy. Clients who were subscribers before they hired me have said they felt they already "knew" me. My writing also serves to screen out clients I'd prefer not to work with. For example, if you don't have a sense of humor, you're unlikely to want to hire me after reading the ezine for a while! Additionally, the thought process involved in writing so many articles has helped me grow professionally.
eNJ: How has the newsletter as a sales tool affected your business? How much business is a result? What is the ROI?
JB: The two most visited pages on the Bernstein Communications' Web site are (1) our home page and (2) the newsletter archive. 50 percent of Bernstein Communications' business originates with visitors to our Web site. Even if someone's not already a subscriber, he usually reads at least a couple of back issues before hiring us. Additionally, unique visitors to the site have doubled each of the three years I've published the newsletter, and I doubt that's a coincidence.
I have never calculated exact return on investment, but it's immense. We get at least one client a month from site/newsletter readers. The newsletter requires maybe eight hours of my time monthly, including all administrative/maintenance functions. Lyris/Sparklist, our mailing list host, costs $50 monthly. The most recent client that came in through the Web site/newsletter will probably incur more than $20,000 in fees in the next month.
eNJ: Have you revisited the newsletter and its focus since you first rolled it out? If so, what changes did you make and why?
JB: I believe in customer-driven publishing and have regularly surveyed readers, at least once a year, to find out what I could do better or different. They've consistently said, almost universally, to change nothing. I appear to have lucked into the right formula from the get-go.
eNJ: What advice would you give to someone contemplating starting a newsletter?
JB: (1) If you love to write, and write quickly, do it yourself. No one else can communicate the "essence of you" like you can. But, conversely, if you can't write well, don't try to! You may be a wonderful in-person communicator, but poor writing will undermine your credibility, and be the exact opposite of what you want to accomplish. There are many fine newsletter writing/production services that can assist you.
(2) It's worth reading Poor Richard's or any of the many other texts and ezines out there focused exclusively on Internet publishing. Some of them are step-by-step "how to" guides that make it pretty easy to get started.
(3) Clearly define and understand your audience and stay in touch with their needs and desires vis-a-vis your publication.
(4) Identify a cadre of potential guest authors, it saves you having to write everything yourself. I have superb contributors, and the publicity of being printed in Crisis Manager is their compensation.
eNJ: What are the challenges of managing a newsletter?
JB: I find it a lot easier than most people think it is. Every now and then a reader gets offended by something either a guest author or I wrote. There have been periodic, but minor, technical glitches with the mailing list. I have to exercise my diplomacy skills sometimes in rejecting submissions that either aren't a "fit" for my audience or are so poorly written they would take far too much time to edit.
While the annoyances Jonathan Bernstein speaks of are right up there with disappearing socks and having to walk a few blocks to the car, the information he provides in Crisis Manager is valuable to Crisis Managers in times of ¡°real¡± crises. It can make the difference between a major business catastrophe and a minor disaster.
Jonathan L. Bernstein is President and CEO of Bernstein Communications, Inc., a crisis management consulting company. He is also the publisher of Crisis Manager Newsletter, a semi-monthly electronic newsletter.
Meryl K. Evans is an editor, wordsmith, and writer for InternetVIZ and other resources. The content maven is available for editing, writing, and pepping articles and copy. InternetVIZ is a custom publisher for companies wishing to find, acquire, and retain customers through Internet newsletters.
