The monthly newsletter.

I’m not talking about the trite B.S. that passes for most company newsletters (if they publish anything at all), but rather relevant information and advice that your prospects WANT to tear open and absorb the moment they receive it in the mail.

ESPECIALLY if you’re in an “information-centric” industry with a high average transaction value, newsletters can add huge value to clients AND stack up well economically for you.

3 or 4 pages of content, plus relevant article clippings or exhibits of interest to your customers (i.e. leveraging other people’s content) is a simple formula that works.

Yes, putting it together involves an investment of time or money, but the returns can be well worth it.   One concept I enlarged upon in one of my print newsletters to a client directly resulted in a $72,000 contract.   Maybe I would have got the work anyway, but I would rather have it sooner rather than later

And once the first copy is complete, the marginal cost of printing and sending each additional copy is marginal — less than $5.

Again, depending on your industry, you can even make the whole process cashflow positive by selling subscriptions to non-clients for, say, $37 per month on a good-till-cancelled basis.  As long as you can create enough value to make the subscription price pales in comparison, it’s a goer.  1,000 subscribers @ $37 per month equals a $444,000 annual revenue stream.   Sure, getting 1,000 people to sign up to your newsletter isn’t easy — you have to be great at what you do and great at marketing what you do.

But even if you only had enough subscribers to pay for the cost of the mailing, wouldn’t that be worth the value of keeping in touch with customers on a regular basis?

Although it sounds like heresy for an “Internet guy” to say this,Email communication just doesn’t cut it.   Email is great for communicating with PROSPECTS, but once a prospect becomes a client the economics can usually support a print version.

Your customers can hold print newsletters in their hands, mark them up and annotate them, circulate them around the office with Post-It notes attached, and most importantly, NOT delete them from their overstuffed email inboxes (although the wastepaper basket is always within easy reach, so you have to be good.)

The best way to test this strategy is to commit to a number of issues (say 6 or 12) and follow through on your commitment.  If it’s not worth the effort, there’s no harm done and you can stop doing it (though you’ll have 6 or 12 high-quality autoresponder emails in the can for your trouble.)

If you don’t have the time to co-ordinate this, speak to a copywriting or marketing agency who can handle the whole strategy for you.  (I’m even considering offering this as a packaged service to clients, but I’m not actively marketing this at the moment).

Give it a try — I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Blue Ocean Strategy is all about creating UNCONTESTED market space in which you dominate the competition because there IS no competition!   It is just as viable (and profitable) on the web as it is offline, and I believe it will become more so.

Right now, many companies (especially small businesses) are “surviving” on the web because of moderate traffic costs (particularly PPC) and competitors who, by and large, don’t really know what they’re doing.

As the competition heats up, “me-too” companies will be eaten alive, leaving only those with a well-executed internet strategy and tight conversion funnel will really prosper.

Thanks for the summary Stuart!