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IT Newsletters As A Service: Three Editions

Posted on October 22, 2019February 20, 2020 by johnjmclaughlin

We produce IT Newsletter for individual sales professionals (Reps), sales employees of certain major IT vendors and for teams of IT sales professionals.

Here is a table with a summary of the three editions:

No alt text provided for this image — Comparison of three Editions

Details Articles for The Editions

Personal Rep Edition – $30/month for Weekly IT Newsletter
Vendor Rep Edition – $90/month for Weekly IT Newsletter
Team Edition – ($165 + $20 per rep) per month for Weekly IT Newsletter

Overview

John J. McLaughlin, IT News And Events Editor-In-Chief, has been producing IT newsletters for 21+ years. We curate news stories from many IT publications, selection 60 to 80 based on our experience and a set of rules (e.g. no politics) and share those articles with 50k+ subscribers. We track which are the most clicked on and pick the to 20-25 to become articles in the core IT News Sections which are the basis of our IT newsletter service.

Core IT News Sections

The newsletter is built from core sections. Not every section has news articles every week.

Each specific edition includes a list of sections:

AI, Backup, BI, Big Data, Bitcoin, Blockchain, BYOD, Careers, Cloud, Compliance, CRM, CxO, Database, Developer, DevOps, DR, Email, Encryption, ERP, FOSS, HPC, HR, Humor, IoT, Java, Linux, Mobile, Networks, Operations, PM, Risk, Security, Server, Social Media, Storage, Tape, Technology, Virtualization, Wireless

Vendor Sections

A vendor section is made from articles based on the vendor’s press releases and blog posts.

The vendor specific editions will have the appropriate vendor section(s). Through acquisitions, some will have more than one. E.g. the Dell Vendor Edition will have news sections for Dell, VMware, EMC, RSA etc.

Team editions can have their choice of vendor sections. E.g. a reseller team may sell IBM, Citrix and Microsoft products so they could include all three along with their choice of core sections

Current list of Vendor Sections

AWS, Cisco, Citrix, Datacore, Dell-EMC, Dell, Fortinet, HPE, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nexenta, Nutanix, Oracle, Red-Hat, RSA, SuperMicro, TEKsystems, Tintri, Veeam, VMware

Subscriber Experience

Subscribers will receive a weekly email from the email address of the sales rep who “owns” them. That will be the:

Sales rep who added them
Sales rep whose custom URL they used to subscribe/opt-in
Sales rep who owns team edition whose opt-in form they used (Team Edition)
Sales rep who they were transferred to by team member who owns the team edition

Each subscriber has a profile which they can modify. A link to manage that profile is included in every newsletter sent to them. That link will log them in to their profile automatically, therefore they should not share their newsletter. Similarly, a link to unsubscribe is also included in every newsletter.

Subscribers can opt-out of specific sections in their profile or by clicking on the “turn this section off” or “disable” links in the sections they don’t want.

The subscriber’s profile is used to deliver a tailored newsletter and web site experience. If a subscriber disables or opt-out of a specific section, then they will not see it.

Enterprise Team Edition – $165 + $20 per rep

$165 plus $20/month per rep, up to 2500 subscribers (active or inactive)
team features – Team news section, transfer subscribers, submit articles to Team news section
team or company website – <team>.it-news-and-events.info
DNS can be used to make site appear under team’s own domain. E.g. https://itnews.<team web site>
Option to add sections (e.g. vendor sections)
Option to remove specific sections (e.g.. “IT CRM”)
Newsletter and website banner includes rep’s picture, contact info and vendor logo
Web for for new subscribers to opt-on in and they will be assigned to team lead
Team members can transfer their subscribers to a different team member
weekly newsletter, sent automatically, from each rep’s email address to that rep’s contacts
Newsletter template may be customized

Enterprise Vendor Rep Edition – $90/month

Standard section plus a Vendor News section (e.g. Cisco, IBM, Red Hat, Citrix, Lenovo, Dell)
one rep
Web version will be <vendor>.it-news-and-events.info
up to 250 contacts – more can be purchased
Banner includes rep’s picture, contact info and vendor logo
Each rep will have a unique subscription URL so that new subscribers are assigned to them. i.e. new subscribers can self-register
weekly newsletter will sent automatically from rep’s email address to rep’s contacts
Can be upgraded to Enterprise Team Edition

Personal Rep Edition $30/month

one rep
Account under <first.last>.it-news-and-events.info
up to 250 contacts – more can be purchased
Standard sections only
Banner includes rep’s picture, contact info and the rep’s choice of logo
Each rep will have a unique subscription URL so that new subscribers are assigned to them. i.e. new subscribers can self-register
weekly newsletter, sent automatically from rep’s email address to rep’s contacts
Can be upgraded to Vendor Rep or Enterprise Team Edition

Business Card Scan, LinkedIn Verify and Import for Newsletter Opt-in

$1.50 per card imported – minimum batch size is 30
Cards may be scanned and sent by email as PDF pages
Cards can be sent via the main (USPS, UPS, FedEx etc.) to be scanned and imported
Spreadsheet will be used for import also sent to rep

Personal Rep Edition – $30/month for Weekly IT Newsletter

Posted on September 27, 2019September 27, 2019 by johnjmclaughlin

IT Sales Professionals (“Reps”) generally understand the value of keeping their name and information in front of their customers, prospects and partners on a regular basis. Email newsletters are a great way to do that but there are challenges:

Finding content that will be of value to your contacts
Formatting that content each week in a tool like MailChimp or ConstantContact
Managing subscribers
Following these steps every week

Rather than doing all that work, we suggest that Reps use our IT Newsletter As A Service.

Buy vs. Build.

IT News and Events produces a weekly email newsletter for enterprise IT professionals. We curate about 80 items each week from a wide variety of professional IT publications (such as CIO, CSO Online, HelpNet Security, The Enterprisers Project, insideBIGDATA, SearchSecurity,…). We include those articles in a newsletter which is sent to our 30k+ subscribers.

We track which articles are clicked on and we pick the 20 to 25 most clicked on articles (“crowd selected”) to become the basis of our IT Newsletter as A Service.

The selected articles are placed into named sections. The newsletter is built from those core sections. Not every section has articles every week. Here is the current list of sections:

Subscribers will receive a weekly email from the email address of the sales rep who has them as a subscriber.

People can become subscribers of an individual Rep:

because the Rep added them through our web tool or
by filling in a registration form provided to them by the Rep

Subscribers can opt-out of specific sections in their profile or by clicking on the “turn this section off” or “disable” links in the sections they don’t want.

The subscriber’s profile is used to deliver a tailored newsletter and web site experience. If a subscriber disables or opt-out of a specific section, then they will not see it.

The Personal Rep Edition includes:

delivery of weekly Enterprise IT Newsletter to Rep’s contacts
web tool for managing contacts
a unique URL with
- web version of articles with links to source material
- registration form
- archives
- profile management
per Rep banner with picture, logo and contact information for newsletter and website
up to 250 subscribers included (add $25 for 2500 more)
optional service to upload a spreadsheet of subscribers
optional service to scan business cards into a spreadsheet that can be uploaded
no contract – month-to-month service
$30 per month

Purchase

The newsletter will have a banner with your name, contact info, picture and logo.

There is great value in being the provider of useful information to your key contacts!

You can sign up as my subscriber and experience the newsletter as would one of your contacts. See this blog post.

Getting Started

Posted on March 15, 2019April 14, 2019 by johnjmclaughlin

Here’s what you need to get started:

Your headshot picture (could be a link to your LinkedIn Profile picture)
Company logo
Name and email to be displayed in email (as sender) and in in newsletter banner
Title
Phone number that your contacts can call to reach you
Your company name

Here’s how my information shows up in the email newsletter banner:

And the same information on the web site:

I believe that by having your name in front of your contacts every week, automatically:

you will keep your professional contact list current
you will have an additional value to any future employer (we can add your new employer’s logo to the masthead)
you will be visible in the marketplace, you will be perceived as a trusted advisor and your ‘brand’ will improve
potential employers will notice your activities

You will see that the content in the newsletter is

for enterprise IT professionals
is quite broad
- sections include: CxO, Servers, Storage, Networking, Security, Cloud, Risk, Technology, Backup, Bitcoin, DevOps, PM, AI, BI, ERP, CRM, HR, Humor, Operations, IoT, etc.
can be filtered by each subscriber (e.g. people not interested in IoT or AI can disable those sections and get a shorter newsletter)

Once you are set up with an account, you will be able to add your contacts:

one at a time through our web based SAT tool
a group at a time by uploading a spreadsheet
by giving your contacts a unique URL to a subscription form

Here is a sample spreadsheet CSV. First row has the names of fields, second row has record for John Smith of Acme where he is an IT Manager:

company,first,last,title,phone,email,comment
Acme,John,Smith,IT Manager,954 324 7867,john.smith@acme.com,This will not be seen by the subscriber. Could be a customer id

If you are like most IT sales professionals you will have:

LinkedIn contacts
- you can download a spreadsheet from LinkedIn that has some information, but not the email, for each of your contacts
  - in a spreadsheet tool, you can delete the rows for those LinkedIn contacts that don’t make sense to add as newsletter subscribers
  - for the ones you want to add, you will have to look them up in LinkedIn to get their email address
- note that the trend in LinkedIn for the last few years is for people to use personal email addresses rather than business
contacts (in your email client, CRM system or other tools) which can be exported into a spreadsheet
stacks of business cards
- every sales rep I know has boxes of card from customers, partners, prospects etc.
- sort through the one that make sense to add to your list
- there are scanning/ocr products that will scan business cards into a spreadsheet

Go through those, removed unneeded columns, and determinate the people you want as key contacts and add them as your subscribers!

This effort will not only improve your visibility in the market, but it will set you up well for whatever new position you take!

Quick Pricing Summary

Posted on March 15, 2019May 13, 2019 by johnjmclaughlin

Here’s a quick summary of what the Managed Enterprise IT Newsletter As A Service costs.

For one sales rep, with up to 500 contacts, about $33/week
For five sales reps, with team features, a custom website, and up to 1000 contacts per rep, about $13/week per rep ($285/month)

Let’s break that down. These are the main components:

Content for main newsletter (52 weekly issues)
- ~80-100 articles/week
- selected from 150+ mainstream IT publications (e.g. CIO, eWeek, Computerworld, Network World, CSO, ComputerWeekly, Dark Reading,How-To Geek, Information Management, ZDNet, CNET, ITProPortal, etc.)
- No vendor or product articles. Nothing controversial or political
- Each subscriber can choose which sections are included in their copy of the newsletter which will be send by the “sender account”
Content for Enterprise Newsletter As A Service
- The most clicked on ~20-25 articles from main newsletter
- Slightly expanded
- “crowd-selected”
Sender account
- name + contact info, picture, logo as newsletter as website banner
- web-based account to manage sender’s own subscribers
- per-sender subscription request form
Website and team edition
- sender can move contacts to other team members
- unique URL for website
- add DNS record to make website appear under sender’s domain
- newsletter and website layout tailoring
- ability to add content to team edition
  - that content will be included in newsletters sent to each team members’ subscribers

Details

Number of Reps:	1	2	3	4	5
Website	Shared	Shared	Custom	Custom	Custom
Content	$100	$100	$100	$100	$100
1 sender	$20
2 senders		$40
3 senders			$60
4 senders				$80
5 senders					$100
up to 500 subs	$20
up to 2500 subs		$45
up to 5000 subs			$65	$65	$65
Add website with team features			$20	$20	$20
Monthly	$140	$185	$245	$265	$285
Weekly	$32.31	$42.69	$56.54	$61.15	$65.77
Weekly per rep	$32.31	$21.35	$18.85	$15.29	$13.15
avg. subs per rep	500	1250	1667	1250	1000

Email Marketing: Steps To Building An Effective Campaign

Posted on January 29, 2019January 29, 2019 by johnjmclaughlin

Brooke Bayer writes in Business 2 Community, “Developing an email marketing plan is a great tool to not only nurture your customers through the customer journey and to stay top of mind, but also a great tool for maximizing sales and customer loyalty. This tactic is used to build on that existing relationship and providing valuable information. Email marketing also allows you to target a specific audience, which is known as segmentation, based on your customer personas. The audience segments allow you to send the right content, at the right time, to the right people.

Why You Should Use Email Marketing (HubSpot, 2018):

Build Relationships – email marketing is a great way to build connections while delivering personalized content
Brand Awareness – When people receive an email from you, you will be top of mind and will be the first call they make when they are ready to move forward
Content promotion – people spend hours in their emails on a daily basis, which makes this a great outlet to share your most recent blogs, webinars, podcasts, etc.
Lead Generation – offering valuable content on your website will entice prospects to provide their information in exchange for the value add
Product Marketing – email marketing is a great way (and easy way) to promote your products and services right to your prospects
Lead nurturing – emails allow you the opportunity to nurture your contacts through the customer journey as you provide them with the right content, at the right time

However, a solid email marketing plan is not just segmenting lists and sending out a monthly newsletter – there is more to it than just that…”

5 Compelling Reasons Small Businesses Benefit from Sending Email Newsletters

Posted on January 18, 2019January 30, 2019 by johnjmclaughlin

Susan Friesen writes in “Business 2 Business“, “‘I don’t want to annoy people,’

That’s one of many excuses I hear from clients when I ask them about sending out consistent email newsletters to their followers.

Are you guilty of thinking this way too? Well stop it!

When someone comes to your website and enters their name and email address to sign up for your newsletter, they are literally putting their hand up and saying, ‘yes, I want to hear more from you!’…”

Bolstering Your Ecommerce with Email Marketing

Posted on January 12, 2019January 29, 2019 by johnjmclaughlin

Salesforce writes, “Want to boost your e-commerce sales, but don’t know where to put your marketing budget for your next campaign? Consider this: 64% of companies consider email marketing the most effective marketing channel. Even with numerous new marketing channels — such as social media, direct messaging, mobile app marketing, and so on — email marketing still provides a remarkably effective solution. Additionally, the relative low cost of implementation associated with email marketing makes for an astoundingly high return on investment; the average return for email marketing is $38 for every dollar invested, or an ROI of 3800%.

Historically, email marketing has been very effective. If current trends are any indication, it will likely become even more effective as technology continues to improve. Email open rates, engagement, sales, number of emails sent, and traffic generated from emailing are all on the increase…”

Ecommerce Email Marketing Best Practices

Read On…

Email Marketing Statistics – Still An Effective Marketing Strategy

Posted on December 28, 2018January 29, 2019 by johnjmclaughlin

Jomer Gregorio writes in an article for “Business 2 Community, “The digital marketing landscape has significantly evolved for the past recent years, with new and more advanced platforms, tools, and strategies being introduced for different marketing objectives and agendas year by year. However, these rapid advancements don’t leave out the more than a decade-old strategy which many digital marketing experts believe is still very effective today – email marketing.

Despite the rise of social media platforms and chat messaging solutions tailored for business such as LinkedIn and WhatsApp for Business, many marketing professionals still regard email as one of the most powerful communication channels out there….”

Experience The Enterprise IT Newsletter

Posted on December 3, 2018January 29, 2019 by johnjmclaughlin

I produce two Enterprise IT Newsletters. The first, “IT News and Events“, has a wide ranging collection of articles – about 100 each week – that are placed into 40+ sections. The articles are curated from 155+ sources.

You can register, for free, and have the same experience as all the tens of thousands of other subscribers:

start of week email with just the sections enabled in your profile that have articles
end of week email with list of most clicked on articles, sorted by popularity
website where you can update your profile, view the current issue, see what’s most popular

The website for that newsletter is https://it.it-news-and-events.info

Here’s how the start of week email looks for my subscribers:

it-news-and-events-sample-email

Here’s how the website looks for my subscribers:

it-news-and-events-sample-screen

The registration link is at the top of the page. It requires an opt-in.

sign-up The publishing system keeps track of which articles are clicked on the most and I produce a second newsletter, “IT News“, created from the 20 to 24 most popular articles. That newsletter is the basis of my “Enterprise IT Newsletter as A Service.”

You can register, for free, and experience that newsletter like the customers of the sales teams who use my managed newsletter service:

start of week email with just the sections enabled in your profile
website where you can update your profile, view the current issue, see what’s most popular

Here’s how the start of week email looks for my subscribers:

itnews-sample-email

The website for that newsletter is https://itnews.it-news-and-events.info

The registration link is at the top of the page. It requires an opt-in.

itnews-sample-screen

The “Enterprise IT Newsletter As A Service” offering includes:

an account with which you can add/delete/modify/import/export your own subscribers
automatic, weekly delivery of a custom newsletter to each of your subscribers
your picture, logo and contact information will be included at the top of each email and in the website
a unique, private URL for a registration form that your can give to potential subscribers. People who subscribe with that link become your your subscribers and will receive the weekly email with the custom newsletter from your address

Managed Vendor News Sections

Posted on November 15, 2018November 15, 2018 by johnjmclaughlin

A vendor can engage with IT News and Events to have their own News section in the newsletters we produce. Together, we can choose which subscribers will have the Vendor’s News section enabled by default. Remember that subscribers have control over which section are included in their newsletter, so I generally enable new sections so that people can see the new content then choose to disable unwanted sections.

When we produce a news section for a Vendor, we also produce a custom newsletter for that vendor with their news section at the top. Here’s a Cisco newsletter with the Cisco News section plus the ~24 most popular articles from the previous week:

https://cisco.it-news-and-events.info

Here’s a Red Hat newsletter with the Red Hat News section first followed by ~30 sections with ~80 articles from the weekly Enterprise IT Newsletter https://it.it-news-and-events.info

https://redhat.it-news-and-events.info

Note there are no other vendor sections, so it is a suitable newsletter for employees of that vendor to use as “their” newsletter.

A vendor can submit URLs with content they would like included in their news section or they can leverage our Managed Vendor News Section Service.

Managed Vendor News Section Service

When a Vendor signs up for this service, we decide on suitable sources for articles for the Vendor’s News section. Typically, that will include the Vendor’s press releases and blog postings (i.e. existing, published information). Every week try to select articles for the Vendor’s news section using those sources. No interactions are required with the Vendor – their News just shows up in their News section.

We can produce a custom Enterprise IT Newsletter service for a technology resellers and include just Vendor News sections of the Vendors with whom they have a relationship plus their choice of our news sections.