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Last month, I discussed using surveys to better understand your customers and prospects—and asked you to fill out a brief 8-question survey regarding what you like and don’t like about this newsletter. After all, I’ve been publishing at least one monthly newsletter (up to four) all the way back to 1997, and I need to check in every now and then to make sure it’s still relevant. I confess, I know a whole lot about marketing copywriting and marketing strategy, but have no particular training in market research. So I’m flying by the seat of my pants to begin with, in both designing the survey and evaluating the results.

So take my results with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, here’s some of the data, and the conclusions I take away.

First of all, I either did not create enough incentive to read the November newsletter in the first place, or to do the survey, or both. I only got a 9.44 open rate on the original newsletter with the subject line, “Are You Asking the Right Questions?” When that original newsletter had produced only 11 responses, I sent out another one, with a subject line tied directly to the benefit you could get: “Reader Survey—Get a Chance for a 15-Minute Consult with Shel”, which got a 9.16 percent open rate (and was mailed later in the month, when you typically don’t hear from me).

I have no way of knowing how many of the same people and how many unique subscribers opened each version—but I do know that the second one, even with a slightly lower open rate, generated more responses to the survey.

An open rate approaching 10 percent is actually not bad as such things go these days; we are all buried under e-mail and the days of 40% open are long gone. However, my newsletters in September and July, with “sexier” subject lines, got much better open rates: 13.81 percent opened “Since When Are Libraries Known for Brilliant Marketing?” (July) and 12.16 percent opened “The Marketing Impact of Michelle Obama’s Convention Speech (September). So one lesson for me is to be sure I have subject lines that hook my readers. Thus, instead of calling this issue “Making Sense of the Results?” I went with an ambiguous yet accurate title that I hope will generate curiosity—and a higher open rate.

If there was zero overlap between those who opened the original and the reminder, about three percent of the people who saw one of those messages took five minutes to do the survey. However, I am guessing there was substantial overlap. I know I have a core group of fans, and a portion would have opened both. If 2/3 of the people opening the second one had seen it before, my success rate was actually below two percent of the unique readers—and 0.5 percent of the total subscriber base. I think I should be able to do better than that. So either my incentives were not good enough to get people over to the survey, or the chance to influence the content of this newsletter did not resonate, or the design of the survey discouraged participation, or…who knows? So another lesson is the reminder that market research is far from an exact science (I’d say even for those who have been trained in it. Judging by seeing many badly designed surveys and strange results reports over the years).

So the survey may have failed on a quantitative level, with too few participants to be meaningful. However, on a qualitative level, the results were very telling. I clearly pulled deeply from that loyal fan base:

• About 40 percent have been reading my newsletter between four and fifteen years
• An astonishing 66 percent prefer the long-form articles and book reviews over the shorter option
• 54 percent have passed my newsletter around to others
• 31 percent have changed your own marketing based on what you’ve read in my newsletter
• Smaller but substantial percentages have bought books/information products I’ve either written or recommended (again, I don’t know if there’s overlap)

So, for now, I will honor those who put so much trust in me and continue to publish the newsletter—even though the ratio of time I put in versus monetization is not satisfactory, and even though most of you aren’t even opening my mail. There are, after all, some definite benefits to me that go beyond revenue—ranging from the ability to do joint ventures because I have a subscriber base to keeping current in my field reading at least one business book each month, in order to review it for you. Still, I’d love to find the secret of getting you, my subscribers, to hire me for speaking, consulting and/or copywriting, or at least to buy my books (which have far more information than the newsletters, of course).

Congratulations to the Winners:

The three 15-minute consultations go to Peter Lukacsi of Hungary, zoldmarketing.hu, MJ Ray of the UK, software.coop, and Eckhart Beatty of the US (https://www.indowwindows.com/).

The two ebooks go to Gautam Chaudhury of India and Robert Stosser of Germany.

Kind of cool to have five countries and three continents represented, don’t you think?

Happy with Your Current Webhost?

In the summer, I switched to a new hosting service after several of my sites had gone haywire and the previous host couldn’t fix the problem. And I have to tell you—I have been thoroughly delighted. Hostgator not only has the most responsive and well-trained tech support of pretty much any company I’ve ever dealt with, and nice features such as the ability to check all my numerous domain-based email addresses from a single page—but it also has prices that compare favorably with any of the several hosting companies I’ve used (starting at $3.96 a month)…45-day money-back guarantee…tools and templates to create a site…and on and on it goes.

https://shelhorowitz.com/go/HostGator/ (affiliate link).

Enjoy your winter holidays and we’ll see you in January. And remember—I offer commissions if you locate me a full-fee speaking gig or a new consulting/copywriting client.

Global Sense by Judah Freed (Hoku House, 2012)

Noting the turning of both the 5000-year Mayan calendar and the 365-day modern calendar used in much of the world, I’m going to take a three-month break from the nitty-gritty in-the-trenches marketing and ethics books I usually review in this space.

We start, this month, with a very personal book on social transformation, combining big-picture thinking around a prescription to save the world with the author’s own deeply personal journey. Next month, a fascinating look at how visual maps of the world influence our thinking, and then in February, community organizer and former White House staffer Van Jones’ book on green activism in urban low-income communities. I’m a huge fan of Jones, have heard him speak several times, and think he’s one of the best marketing strategists in the green world. So I’m very much looking forward to reading his book.

Meanwhile, let’s get started with Judah Freed’s Global Sense.

In only 256 pages, Freed has managed something quite remarkable: a sweeping, ambitious, and holistic approach to replacing what’s wrong with the world with what’s right. Most authors would have demanded 800 or 1000 pages to attempt even a quarter of what Freed sets out to do. Despite the large scope and the small canvas, Freed does surprisingly well at tacking these very big questions. I think the reason he succeeds is because he frames each of these big-picture issues in the context of his life, his personal story. Each chapter begins with a personal narrative, and then expands out to examine the larger world.

Freed has had a very wide range of experiences: successful entrepreneur, failed entrepreneur, spiritual seeker, respected journalist, teacher, abuse survivor, self-healer, scholar of spiritual enlightenment and social change, event planner, community organizer, cult follower, and homeless person (among many others). Paying deliberate homage to 18th-century pamphleteer Thomas Paine (Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, etc.), he’s been able to channel this breadth into a great deal of insight into human relationships, power structures, personal growth, and social change. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s gotten such a diverse range of endorsements: Rabbi Michael Lerner, Pete Seeger, Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva, and even Joanne Greenberg (author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden). Democracy writer and radio host Thom Hartmann is also on the list—which makes a lot of sense given Hartmann’s own status as a modern-day Paine.

I’ve read hundreds of books that cover some aspect of what Global Sense covers; I can’t remember another one that covers all the aspects Freed touches on. Charles Hayes’ Beyond the American Dream looks similarly at materialism and the need for liberal thought. E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia look at the green/local economy. Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer’s The Success Principles combine the spiritual underpinning with business and life success tools. Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone and others make the feminist case. Gene Sharp, George Lakey, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. make the case for nonviolent social change, and John Stuart Mill and other Libertarian thinkers showed us that self-rule is better than heavy-handed government. But this is the first book I can remember that synthesizes so many worlds into a coherent whole.

Some of the many insights I took away:

• Society develops from our wants and needs–but government develops from our failures; we should strive toward “enlightened self-rule,” both as individuals and as a culture
• Darwin’s “fittest” survived not because they dominated, but because they were the best at adapting to change
• Adam Smith, 18th-century author of The Wealth of Nations and creator of the “invisible hand” theory often used to justify capitalism, opposed monopoly capitalism and favored government regulation
• As Ben Franklin pointed out more than 200 years ago, it is not wise to sacrifice liberty for security—but this persists because each successive generation believes itself incapable of self-rule
• We give governments and institutions permission to govern us, and we can withdraw that permission at any time (as we’ve seen in the past year in both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement)
• Quiet social change too often fails; Gandhi and King were not quiet—yet, in order to get from the current mess to a better place, positive vision and personal transformation are key ingredients, even more than the critique of what needs to change: “our redemption redeems the world” (p. 87)
• Justice is satisfying when it focuses on restitution rather than revenge
• Finding solutions means dwelling on—and expanding—the possible, not putting up barriers of supposed impossibility (I have experienced this in my own social change work, and it’s very powerful)—and sometimes there are multiple right answers
• With every purchase, we vote for the kind of world we want—so let’s “vote” wisely
• When building movements or personal relationships, look first at the easy points of agreement, then build out
• We can’t control others—but we CAN control our emotional responses to their behavior
• When we create high expectations, people/organizations/governments are more likely to live up to them

Chapter 19 is the best mini-crash course on organizing I’ve seen in a long time; that could be spun out into an an entire book.

Be warned: this book is a lot more “wu-wu” than the books I typically review here. There’s a strong spiritual component, and a lot on listening to your inner voice/the divine through many techniques, some of which may be unfamiliar to you. If this is new territory, I’d say it’s worth the struggle–but you may want to go and read a few of the numerous books he recommends, and then revisit Global Sense once you have that broader perspective. There’s some attention to cutting edge psychology, neuroscience and particle physics (I did say it was a holistic book). And there’s a heavy dose of political correctness, including a tendency to see most of the world’s problems as symptoms of “alpha male rule” and “authority addiction. Having lived in some superfeminist communities, I speak from experience when I say that alpha female rule can be just as oppressive. And despite his fondness for enlightened self-rule, Freed supports world government. I’m more of a bioregionalist; I think solutions will be found in networks of small communities cooperating with each other, and see many places where a central world government could go awry.

The book is also marred by a few structural flaws. It needed a good proofread, an index, and a centralized list of all the wonderful resources scattered throughout the book (fortunately, the last of those is posted on Freed’s website, GlobalSense.com).

Still, on the whole, it accomplishes quite a bit of its ambitious agenda, provides lots of food for thought AND action, and may be just the thing you need to get started in the second 5000-year epoch of the Mayan calendar/the Age of Aquarius/what Barbara Marx Hubbard calls the time of humanity’s rebirth.

Full disclosure: Freed is a friend and colleague.