Dan Kennedy argues a customer newsletter is the backbone of a business, not just a sales tool. He points to Weight Watchers and streaming services losing subscribers because they failed to build real relationships with customers, and shows how newsletters and events create the stickiness that keeps people coming back.
You got to think about sustaining relationship, not just selling things. And there's different ways to skin that cat, but it requires a strong tent pole of some kind around which everything else revolves. Foreign.
Welcome to this month's Masterclass. I'm Darcy Juarez here with Dan Kennedy to talk about a very fun topic about the customer newsletter. And Dan, you're quoted as saying, no one thing is more vital and valuable to almost any business than a good customer newsletter. It is costly to do one in time and money, and especially if printed and mailed rather than delivered online, as you argue for. So how can we justify your almost religious belief in this?
So. It's a. It's a devout belief based on a mountain of fact, generating experience not just in my business, but in an endless variety of businesses, small and large, local and national in scope. And. But it's in a context. And so if I could back up a little, the context is how do you create glue stickiness in your business with your customers? Now, if you have actual pain of disconnect and monopoly, so think of the utility company, okay? Gary Halbert always said they had, they had the least problem with renewals of anybody in the subscription business because very few wives are happy sitting in the dark without a refrigerator. So if you got that and you actually can pull a plug and wreak havoc. And on top of that, if you're like the only one who can fix the havoc, then you don't have to worry about stickiness. You got it. But very few of us are in that position. So we are more dealing with intellectual, an emotional pain of disconnect or flip side, intellectual and emotional connection, right? And you need tactics and you need tools to sustain that, okay? And amongst everything else, they have to keep you. They have to keep people interested in, in you. So right now, if you look at streaming services, all right, now, I said from the beginning, the business model was severely flawed, if not fatally flawed, because there's no pain of disconnect in between the thing you want to see. So you binge watch, right? Well, let's say I want to see right now, as we're. I could see. I want to see the Batman movie. Okay? It's in pay per View at $25, right? I can sign up for HBO Max for 9.95. Yeah, I can watch the Batman movie and I can cancel HBO Max, all right, I just save 20 bucks right now. I won't do that. But a lot of people have. Hence Netflix is in serious trouble because the cost of content that they have created for themselves because they have no content. So it's not like Paramount plus, where they have access to all the old CBF content and all the new CBF content. It's definitely not like Disney, where they have access to all the old Disney content, although now they have to change it all to be woke. But they got it, and they. They got to take the hook off Captain Hook. I don't know if you heard the latest. Oh, yeah, it's offensive to handicap people. So they're going back and changing the Peter Pan cartoon. I swear to God. Oh, yeah, they're nuts. They're just. They've just literally lost their minds. But anyway, they have all the content. Netflix starts every day with nothing. So they either gotta make it or they gotta go buy it. Right. And they've taught everybody to binge watch it. All right? So it's a disaster. And even Disney streaming has problems that are already surfacing. The tendency not to stick. Right. And if you think about it, other than maybe Disney, there's no relationship with anybody in any of those businesses. None. Right. So I would do two things to fix that. If somebody asked me, number one, if I had Netflix, well, first of all, I would start to curtail the damn binge watching. But setting aside, I would do two things. I would find myself a star, a celebrity to be my Netflix host with whom you now had a relationship. Secondly, I put out a newsletter, slash magazine in print every month, all about my content and my stars and upcoming things and contests in it that people could enter and on and on and on. Okay. And I wouldn't solve their problem, but I would mitigate it. So you got to think about sustaining relationship, not just selling things. And there's different ways to skin that cat, but it requires a strong tent pole of some kind around which everything else revolves. Right. And so Weight Watchers frozen foods business has suffered mightily. Has the Weight Watchers business itself has suffered mightily. The tent pole that made everything work, Frozen Foods, magazine events, everything, was the weekly meeting in the church basement all across the country that everybody went to and weighed in and fraternized. Take that tent pole away, you got trouble. So a tent pole. In many businesses, it's been mine, but it's doable. In many businesses is the newsletter around which everything else revolves. Now, most people think about it as a kind of an incidental marketing thing, whereas I would argue it's the tent pole of the business. Yeah.
So it shouldn't be on the back burner. It should be on the forefront of what we're thinking about.
It's one of the most important things you can do. Okay.
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