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Offer Compassion, Value and Monday Sends, Email Experts Say

by Media
Mondays have never been all that much fun. But a new study says that, precisely for that reason—and even more so in our present work-from-home era—it is the best day of the week for sending marketing emails during the pandemic. This comes according to COVID-19 Retail Pulse, a study released by BounceX.
The reason is that we are not jumping right back into the flow on Monday mornings (guilty). Rather, we’re easing back in, says Ryan Urban, founder and CEO of BounceX.
Email opens jumped to close to 50% on Monday April 13, plunged to 22% on Saturday April 18 and rebounded to 36% on Monday April 20. On Monday of this week, they hit 41%. Those are all higher than Mondays in March.
Here are more tips on email times and composition in this very stressful period:
We open emails on Monday and act on Saturday. Click rates have also been higher in April than March though they seem to decline on Mondays — for example, they reached only 0.07% on Monday the 13th. But they ascend on Saturdays. I wonder if this will change as the weather gets better.
Get your website spruced up—especially if you have a COVID-19 hub. Website visits have hit highs on Thursdays, peaking on April 16 and April 24. Revenue also hit highs on those dates. But there was a flattening toward the 27th. Many publishers report record traffic to their COVID-19 hubs or microsites.
Avoid clichéd phrases. There are ways we could all be writing better emails right now, says Randy Malamud, author of Email (Object Lessons), in an article on Wired. “You can do a draft and put it aside for a few minutes and come back and edit. You want to think about the person you’re writing to, picture her face and think about what her face will look like when she sees what you’re writing. There are ways to personalize this and to get beyond the rote, conventional, formulaic modes of discourse.”
Compassion and value. “The best way [to stand out in emails] is by providing real value for subscribers and displaying your own compassion for their situation (which is all of our situation),” said Jason Rodriguez on Litmus. “Too many companies are sending knee-jerk emails that do nothing more than signal virtues without providing actual help or resources to subscribers… Take the time to think through what—if anything—your subscribers need from you right now.”
Be careful with your images. Look closely at the images you’re using to make sure they’re still appropriate. Watch for imagery showing crowds or people holding hands—visuals that were absolutely fine a short time ago might come across as insensitive today.
Provide clear, succinct subject lines. In promotional emails, putting an intriguing spin can be an effective way to entice recipients to open your emails, wrote Kelsey Bernius on SendGrid. But, for the COVID-19 email, keep to simple subject lines such as “Our Response to COVID-19.” If your recipient uses your products or business, they will likely want to know more and open this email.
Maintain a reliable voice. “Now would be a good time to adjust the tone [from anything too light] and focus on the facts and developments within your control,” said Bernius. “But don’t over-correct so much and write in such a solemn or dire tone that you increase the recipient’s stress. When writing the body copy of your email, connect with your recipient by acknowledging their anxiety, but keep a calm, objective tone throughout.
Perform an audit of your regularly scheduled emails. Take a look at your content calendar for the coming weeks and decide whether the automations and the content you have scheduled—whether directly related to the impact of the coronavirus or not—is fitting.
Stay medium. I just listened to a webinar with four publishing CEOs—will be reporting more on that next week—and they all forecast uncertainty for the rest of the year (besides the fact that more of us will be working remotely in the future). So stay optimistic but clear of any bold predictions.
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Connectiv Awards 2020 McAllister Top Management Fellowship to Thomas CEO Tony Uphoff

by Uncategorized

Editor’s Note: Hear Tony Uphoff and other leading B2B media executives including Industry Dive’s Sean Griffey, Arizent’s Gemma Postlethwaite and Government Executive Media’s Tim Hartman in a live stream on Thursday, April 30 at 1pm ET called “CEO Power Panel: How Industry Leaders Are Planning for Their Companies to Not Just Survive but Thrive.” The event is free for all Connectiv members and more information is available here.   

Tony Uphoff, president and CEO of Thomas, a leader in product sourcing, supplier selection and marketing solutions for the manufacturing industry, will serve as the 2020 McAllister Top Management Fellow.

One of the highest executive honors in B2B media and information, the fellowship is awarded annually by Connectiv to help promote the study of business media, with McAllister Fellows acting as teachers and advisors at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications.

Uphoff, who joined Thomas in 2017, has helped lead the 102-year-old former print directory publisher in a radical leap to becoming a “data platform company that runs like a software business focused on user experience.” Thomasnet.com today serves more than 1.5 million buyers per month across 70,000 different categories containing over 500,000 North American suppliers and 7.8 million product listings.

Previously, Uphoff served as CEO of Business.com and held a variety of executive roles at B2B media and information companies such as UBM and CMP, where he helped transform CMP’s $125 million legacy print operation into UBM TechWeb, a $275 million media, events and marketing services business.

“I’m thrilled to receive the 2020 McAllister Top Management Fellowship,” says Uphoff. “I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have had great mentors, coaches and role models throughout my career. Quite literally I continue to stand on the shoulders of giants and I look forward to helping the next generation of business information and media leaders. I’d like to thank the McAllister Foundation and Connectiv for this incredible honor. I look forward to participating at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.”

The fellowships are endowed by Mr. and Mrs. Donald McAllister, Jr. and Ms. Liane E. McAllister, in honor of the late Donald McAllister, Sr., who was an active figure in specialized business media for over 70 years and a chairman of Connectiv’s predecessor, American Business Media. McAllister was chairman of the executive committee at Geyer-McAllister, one of the country’s oldest family-owned publishing firms, until its sale to Reed Business Information in 1998.

Marion Minor, owner and CEO of EPG Specialty Media, was the most recent McAllister Top Fellow and spent her three-day residency at Medill earlier this year discussing “How B2B Media Continues to Evolve and the Business and Career Opportunities It Presents.”

“The McAllister Top Management Fellow plays a key role in imparting B2B/information services wisdom at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications,” says Abe Peck, the school’s Director of Business to Business Communications. “Today, the Fellow interacts with students and faculty across the curricula, conveying key B2B trends and strategies and sharing the alignment of content creation to business goals. Increasingly, this involves digital, data and events, all of which are integral to the school’s continued transformation—and to Tony Uphoff’s own vision.”

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How Coleman Report Live Is Bringing in Record Webinar Revenue – and Goodwill

by Media
This is the first in a series of articles on SIPA member companies that are dealing with some part of the frontlines of the pandemic. Today, it’s Coleman Publishing,
Joseph Coleman is very proud of the job Coleman Publishing is doing with their daily online show—Coleman Report Live—serving SBA lenders, bankers and small business financing experts. And he should be. It’s a hit. Hundreds of small-business lenders—and, he’s told, the #2 at SBA—and more are tuning in every day to hear the latest news about the trillions of dollars that the government has earmarked for loans.

“For the most part, people are so thirsty for any spot of normalcy,” Coleman told me at the end of last week. “We start at 1 pm Eastern time every day, no matter what. I think it’s comforting for people to log in for 30 minutes. It’s a ritual now.”

And it’s leading to lots of goodwill and record revenue for Coleman webinars. “We cater to a not-really-talked-about segment of banking,” he said. “They deal with cumbersome forms that most people don’t want to deal with. Overnight, the government passed $659 billion of small business loans—that’s like 20 years of SBA funding, and we’re doing it in one month. Pass it Friday, open Monday.”

Coleman said that, through the show, they are talking to “600 CEOs of lending departments every day. We’re the only player in town reporting on this on a daily show. It was only weekly but now we’ve turned it into this wonderful platform where we can have the most up-to-date news, can do polls and see what’s happening on the street, and sell our product… And [despite being daily] the show’s standards haven’t dropped at all. I’m up all night reading federal notices, putting webinars together, lining up guests.”
If Coleman looked tired one day on the show, perhaps it was the day a speaker for a webinar called him at 5:30 am to tell him that he couldn’t go live later that day. So thinking quickly, Coleman recorded him from 6:30 to 7:30 am to broadcast to an audience of 200 later. Then he went on TV at 10 am—he’s in California.
When I asked Coleman how filming himself at home is, he said that he and his wife bought a house and recently put in hardwood floors. It makes sound much better.
Does working through a pandemic mean making specific choices about your house? In the new normal, yes. Actually, just the fact that Coleman and his father Bob started this show was a huge factor in their ability to pivot now to do it on a daily basis.
Similarly, Paul Miller, CEO of Questex—a large media company that has been able to move to virtual events these last few weeks—said that a couple decisions allowed them to successfully pivot.
“We chose to [look for people with] a lot of centralized skill sets,” he said. “This has helped to attract great talent and become a real engine for a 180-degree pivot in this environment. We knew it would enable us to be very agile. And it has allowed us to be very agile.
“Second, we spent a lot of time in the last 18 months breaking down silos in the company, always a good thing. That has allowed very fast sharing across divisions. I’m even doing virtual breakfasts with employees… So it’s cultural as well as strategic.”
I met Coleman Publishing editor Caity Witucki in Washington, D.C. a few months ago at a Coleman event. Her credentials were impressive but she seemed quiet so it’s impressive to see her now co-hosting the daily show. As Miller said, the more skills that people have today, the better—especially in this crisis environment.
“Our show is still the place for our audience to go,” Coleman said. “There’s so much misinformation out there. Bob and I have been doing this for the last 10 years. We’ll try to keep the show going as long as possible. All of the new connections we make become staples of the daily show.”
At the end of last Thursday’s show, Coleman offered a sincere message to his viewers. “We love the audiences; it keeps growing every day. We really appreciate the support,” he said quietly, before showing an email address where people could address more questions to.
You could see just a slight sigh as he said that they will be getting to the slew of questions offline that afternoon. And I’m sure they did just that.
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Crisis Initiatives That May Have Longer Shelf Lives

by Media
“Like most B2B publishers over the last three years, we’ve been trying to take our reach much higher up the value chain within the audience. We have VVIP segments within our audience, so a lot of the editors and editorial directors are running hang-outs for those groups.”
That’s from Jonathon Whiteley, CEO of Incisive Media, a large B2B publisher in the UK. It comes from an InPublishing article about Incisive’s strategy during the pandemic.
We’ve all been disrupted to different degrees during COVID-19. But when we do return to some sort of normalcy—hopefully soon—various types of virtual hang-outs may be one element we continue to see more of, especially if travel still lags.
Here are other elements that might remain prevalent post-pandemic:
Remote working. In comments from a video call last week published by Associations Now, Sunil Prashara, president and CEO of the Project Management Institute, said that workers’ increasing comfort with remote work and videoconferencing will outlast COVID-19. He also believes it can increase productivity. In a survey of some members we did here last week, 38% of respondents checked, “I actually like remote working and will do it more when offices reopen.”
News hubs. Incisive is yet another organization that was quick to create a Coronavirus news hub, a collection of content and resources focused on implications for the industries it covers. Almost every publisher I’ve interviewed has said their Coronavirus hub has brought excellent engagement—and goodwill because most are paywall-free. Of course, we all hope that nothing takes over our lives like COVID-19 has. But the success of these news hubs could provide a blueprint for future hubs around big-ticket or charitable topics.
More collaborative meetings. People are getting more comfortable with their cameras being on for meetings and making comments. In a webinar last October on managing remote employees, Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media, said that “frequency of cameras being disabled has become an issue that we’ve tried to address. We are encouraging people to use the video component.” Added Prashara: “It’s very difficult for people to talk on top of each other because the system can’t handle it. People will give people the opportunity to finish a sentence before they talk and etiquette starts to get creative. You don’t even have to define it—it starts to happen.”
Better retention. “There are people here that we would’ve hated to lose if we didn’t allow them to work remotely,” Fink said. But I’ve also seen companies where working remotely has not been greeted as warmly. That may change. “It can reduce turnover,” said Heather Farley, COO of Access Intelligence, during that same webinar.
Thought leadership. “What we’re doing editorially… is making sure we’re putting out as much thought leadership as we can,” Whiteley said. “In our financial portfolio, we’re doing a lot more senior opinion format style interviews. Our financial portfolio is quite technical because we are often dealing so much with regulatory issues, so we’re doing a lot more longer form explainer pieces around the implications.”
Better listening. With more people working remotely, the sense of being “left out” of meetings may dissipate. Said Prashara: “There could be 30 people watching, but I’m just seeing your face and you’re just seeing my face—therefore, it’s a bit more intense. There’s more of a likelihood that you’re going to be listening a little bit more attentively.”
Better platforms and tools. Zoom, of course, has become hugely popular, and other similar platforms will follow. Copyrightlaws.com, was having great success with their Zoom On Ins prior to the pandemic. Making these platforms part of our everyday—even in the best of times—will only improve what we offer. Money-Media was quick to order “kits for a number of staff who were having difficulty being efficient in their home work space; things like a mouse, keyboard, monitor, office chair, etc.,” Fink said. “Most of these items are pretty inexpensive on amazon.com but go a long way to helping staff be productive and letting people know how much we appreciate their hard work during this crisis.”
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For Industry Dive and Others, Content Has to Be Crisis-Related… For Now

by Media
Go to most publisher websites today, and most likely, COVID-19 has a big presence. On SIPA member insideARM, the lead story is Receivables Industry Leaders Share COVID-19 Strategies, Successes, and Lessons Learned. On Inside Mortgage Finance, the top story in “Latest News” is Amid the Pandemic, the Mortgage Market Has a New Origination King: Quicken.
At Education Week, a pop-up emerges, “Free Resources for School Closures.” At Business Management Daily, the lead article is Out of Sight, Not Out Of Mind: Managing Remote Employee Performance. At Behr’s GmbH in Germany, the first message I see is an ad for their “Online-Seminar-Serie – Corona: Maßnahmen für die Lebensmittelindustrie.” I don’t need advanced German to figure out what that’s about. (I just need Google – Corona: Measures for the Food Industry.)
Thus, I was a little surprised yesterday during an excellent webinar hosted by the American Society of Business Publication Editors titled, COVID-19 and B2B Publishing: A Panel Discussion. About midway through, a poll was conducted—and yes, polls really do work, because I was multi-tasking and it made me engage with the webinar! To paraphrase, the poll asked, “Are we continuing to cover the topics that had been previously planned or are we totally shifting to cover the impact of COVID-19?”
I voted shifting because it feels like COVID-19 has impacted everything, and we can’t look at anything the way we used to. But 84% voted the other way.
Fortunately, I had good company. “We’re going to be in the 16%,” said Sean Griffey, one of the panelists and CEO of Industry Dive. “We’re not hiring extra people [nor are they laying off]. So if we’re going to cover COVID, then we’re not going to cover some things that were planned. Some of those things we had planned just aren’t going to happen.
“At Industry Dive”—which now covers 19 industries—”we’re news driven. Every quarter we push our editorial to see what trends are shaping the industry and what stories do we want to own. COVID-19 is the story right now, if we’re going to be honest.”
In a Q&A yesterday conducted by Jim Kuhnhenn, the press freedom fellow at the National Press Club Journalism Institute, Industry Dive’s editor in chief, Davide Savenije, voiced a similar sentiment. “We’re seeing a black swan event that’s causing seismic change in every sector we cover. Some changes may last for the duration of the pandemic, and some may last after this is all ‘over.’
“So early on, we started asking, ‘Okay, well we don’t know exactly how businesses and industries are being impacted by it yet, we don’t know exactly how they’re planning or preparing, so let’s go out and ask those very simple basic questions….’ As we started tracking that really robustly just internally, we very quickly had the idea that readers will want to see these kinds of things.
“We’re trying to cover what’s changing in these industries, and part of the way that we do that is we think about storylines. … Part of our approach is to really think about which storylines are we going to own. We have relatively small teams of two, three, four or five journalists per industry. And so we really have to allocate our resources to go after the things that really matter most and not to be spread kind of thin and wide.”
I would guess that “small teams” describe most SIPA members, but then you see the incredible coverage that’s taking place and you would guess more. Quickly, most publishers realized that their audience wanted to know how this crisis is affecting them. And by answering that, more readers would come.
Writing on the Belgian news consultant site Twipe today, Mary-Katharine Phillips makes a great point. We’re bringing people in with crisis coverage, but then we need to show them more to retain them.
“As for new subscribers during the crisis, it will be key to ensure they develop a habit with the digital product in their onboarding journey. The first step in creating a habit is the internal trigger. For many subscribers today, that internal trigger is a desire to know the current situation regarding the corona crisis. However, publishers will need to make sure subscribers are exposed to the full breadth of their journalism. While it might seem like today all content is corona content, new subscribers need to be exposed to non-corona content as well.”
SIPA publishers are well-positioned to take advantage of the thirst of a new audience to know more about this crisis, in relation to their industry. Only time will tell when our “small teams” can return to those “non-corona” topics.