The Pontiflex Blog

Of chocolate, newsletters and online lead generation

August 8, 2008 at 3:55 pm Arun Krishnan Leave a comment

Comcast, the cable giant, has agreed to buy DailyCandy, a free daily e-mail newsletter catering to women looking for tips on fashion, food and fun things to do in big cities. To quote from their website, DailyCandy is a free daily e-mail from the front lines of fashion, food, and fun.

While a good newsletter can be priceless, Comcast put a price on the deal: $125 Million (though to be honest, in my book, this comes close to priceless).

In eight years, Daily Candy has 13 daily and 8 weekly newsletters, reaching 2.5 million subscribers in 11 American cities and London, on the other side of the pond.

Daily Candy is not alone. All of the major brands today have a newsletter through which they engage consumers with relevant information and special offers. This is an excellent way to keep the consumer engaged with your core value proposition and drive repeat business.

In these tough economic times, many marketers are heavily relying on branding vehicles like online newsletters. Many of our advertisers use transparent CPL advertising to grow their newsletter list. This ensures:

a) Cost-effectiveness: Paying only for leads gets new newsletter opt-ins at a fraction of the cost of CPC or CPM campaigns.

b) A high quality of leads: If advertisers can select publishers and serve ads in contextually relevant environments, they will get a higher quality of leads.

An important caveat is to ensure that you can seamlessly “hook-up” (the technical term) your lead vendor with your email services provider. That way, you can optimize the front end of your campaign based on important back-end metrics such as newsletter click-throughs and conversions.

One last thing – don’t just announce. Listen. Embrace the interactive era by turning your newsletter into a two way conversation. DailyCandy is largely driven by a small army of contributors who send in tips for the publication.  Encourage your users to write in and give feedback about what they like and what they don’t like.  Start a conversation and you’ll become a trusted and valued source of information – for candy and all things non candy related.

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