Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Email Marketing Tips	July 20, 2007

Find out how this email newsletter is raking in revenue and awards

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LCC

We are happy to announce that the 19th Annual Awards for Publishing Excellence awarded HR Daily Advisor the grand award in its newsletter category.

HR Daily Advisor is a human resources management newsletter running on a Mequoda System. It and seven other newsletters came out on top of the 540 entries in APEX's newsletter category.

"Inviting, readable layout, interesting, tightly written articles, a (rare) willingness to allow reader feedback -- all combine to make [HR Daily Advisor] an excellent example of what an electronic newsletter should be," according to comments from the judges on the APEX website.

This award is a shared moment of pride for the Mequoda Group and Business Legal Reports, Inc, HR Daily's publisher. For us, it recognizes one of our Mequoda Systems, and for BLR, it acknowledges one of its fantastic products.

We had a conversation with the man behind HR Daily Advisor, Jay Schleifer, to find out what makes HR Daily so successful.

26 Million Emails

Schleifer writes HR Daily and emails it to about 100,000 people, 5 days a week, he said. That's about 26 million emails a year.

"Try doing that with direct mail. You'd need your own postal department," Schleifer said.

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Those 100,000 subscribers are mostly satisfied customers. According to a reader survey conducted last August, HR Daily found that 84 percent of responders found the articles interesting and 88 percent would recommend the newsletter to a colleague.

"One of the more amazing statistics to me is a large number of people don't see [HR Daily] as having too much advertising, or even seeing it as being primarily advertising. They see it as an editorial product," Schleifer said.

The right editorial mix

Part of HR Daily's success is from being "built to not only deliver information, like most newsletters, but it also operates as a marketing vehicle," Schleifer said.

HR Daily learned how to do that directly from our Managing Director and Chief Information Architect Don Nicholas.

"Mequoda essentially gave us the winning formula, which was to create a newsletter where 60 percent of it was editorial and 40 percent of it was marketing."

The 60-40 rule applies to an email's content, and even though 40 percent of it could be seen as self fulfilling, Schleifer considers it valuable information.

"To me [HR Daily] is providing information. It's information about a product, and that product solves your problem...that's what Don Nicholas calls 'service journalism,' and that term was a key on how to it," Schleifer said.

"It's just like when you read a movie review, that is basically a product pitch," or service journalism, Scheifer said.

Blueprints of Email Success

Having 100,000 satisfied customers reading a marketed email has made HR Daily very successful, but Schleifer could not disclose it's monthly revenue.

"It's successful, and it's exceeding planned" projections, he said.

"Mequoda basically gave us the key to this thing, they gave us the formula. They put us on the track of the idea that you could have a marketing built newsletter," Schleifer said.

Schleifer added that elements like rapid conversion architecture, and other Mequoda concepts, were "the elements of the blueprint that we worked from."

"What we did was we executed the Mequoda plan and we added our own enhancements. Well, that couldn't have happened without the plan," Schleifer said.

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Those enhancements include HR Daily's consistently great content and what Schleifer calls the "1-2 punch sequence."

That sequence takes Mequoda's 60-40 formula a step further by assigning Monday, Wednesday and Friday to editorial mailings and Tuesday and Thursday to promotional mailings.

How the sequence works is Schleifer writes an email that identifies an HR problem on Monday or Wednesday, and on Tuesday or Thursday a product is offered as a solution to that problem.

Friday's are left for stand-alone editorials, Schleifer said.

HR Daily's other "enhancement" is a clean and content-rich style, which can only be attributed to its skilled writer, Schleifer.

Jay Schleifer has been writing marketing copy under various business titles for about 30 years, and it shows with HR Daily's success.

New Addition

We have a new addition to Mequoda's Handbooks today, the Multiplatform Publishing Strategy Handbook.

Inside the handbook we describe a new and powerful way to publish online that focuses on organizing your content for quick reformatting into other products. It's an incredibly profitable system that can quickly expand your product line and your customer base.

Library members can click here to read the book, or you can read more about it at our books website.