Tribal Email Marketing

Email Marketing that Your Audience Will Actually Care About and Read

Tribal MarketingGetting your members

to actually read and value your email

Basic Email Challenges:• Spam filters increasingly block legitimate email to

opted in addresses

• Messages that get through are often buried in tremendous inbox clutter

• Up to a third of all Americans change their email addresses every year

BUT NONE OF THESE ARE THE BIGGEST EMAIL PROBLEM

Is Anyone Reading Your Email?

• Many broadcasters have gained permission to send email to their audience but have no granular knowledge of their specific wants. As a result, most stations push out everything to everyone

• Many are pushing information that is important to the station, not the consumer. The information sent is not relevant or anticipated by the consumer.

• Continued abuse of the consumer’s “permission” to send messages reduces readership and can damage the overall relationship.

The Biggest Problem is Irrelevance

Recognizing…that your audience actually consists of many different ‘tribes’ of consumers each with its own set of common interests, crises, causes, and passions

Identifying…these tribes by asking consumers what information they would like to receive and also observing the content they consume

Serving…these tribes with shorter, single purpose emails, targeted to their common interests (in other words – get the right information to the right people!)

Tribal Marketing – What is it?

Increasing the utility of information you send to listeners will:

• Increase the value they place on their relationship with you

• Drive up brand recall, thereby increasing the likelihood they will give you credit in the diary

• Open up opportunities to drive new revenue by integrating relevant sponsors that the member will welcome

Why Should You Care?

A Typical Tribe

Tribes form around common passions, interests, crises, or causes. These tribes gravitate to shared possessions, shared knowledge, and shared rituals.

Tribal Email - Reinventing the Newsletter

• Tribal Email Marketing is about becoming a trusted source of ‘shared knowledge’ to a given tribe

• Don’t try to tell them everything about everything (as a newsletter might), just deliver short, relevant, anticipated information and alerts:

• Breaking News• Traffic Updates• Underground club events• Concert presale info• Wine of Week, Cigar of the Month• Family events for the weekend• Quick meals for working moms• Political commentary • Others?

Shared Knowledge

“Propaganda”

Be a Trusted Sourceof Shared Knowledge

Let your members “subscribe” to the specific content they want based on tribal interest

• Take the content you send now and use your StickyFish admin to set up the different categories of content as individual “subscriptions” (see KRXQ’s example to the left)

• Members can choose the content they want all the way down to “sub lists” such as choosing favorite artists from a list of hundreds.

• These selections can be maintained by the member in real time (drop/add subscriptions).

• When you are ready to send an email, our backend email tools make the list management and message creation easy.

• We can help train station personnel on how to set up subscriptions and we can help create additional HTML templates for use with each subscription.

A Simple First Step – Let Them Choose!

Once you have set up subscriptions for your existing content, you’re ready to serve more tribes:

• Start by researching the lifestyle interests of your audience

• Then develop or acquire content that can serve the interests you identify (in our example to the left, we show an wine subscription – you could recruit a local sommelier to create the content in exchange for the exposure you provide for his restaurant).

How we can help:

• The survey tools within your StickyFish program can be used to research audience needs/wants

• We can design HTML templates for each subscription and consult on the local ‘content’ partners you might try to recruit

• We are working on acquiring licensed content that you can use (so you can add more value without having to develop or acquire more content yourself)

Step 2 – Develop/Acquire New Content and Serve More Tribes

Generate additional revenue by recruiting relevant sponsors for each subscription:

• If the sponsor is relevant to the content, the response rates to their promotion and special offers will be very high

• Using direct marketing pricing models, you only need 2700 people in a tribe to justify an advertiser’s investment of $1,000 per email

• Email marketing to 8 tribes, once per month at a $1000 per sponsor per month will yield $96K in annual revenue…far more than you are probably making from email marketing today.

• Increasing the members of the tribe and/or the frequency of the messages will yield even more revenue.

• We are available to consult on sponsorship packaging, pricing and sales. Just give us a ring!

Making Money From Tribal Email Marketing