If you’d rather listen — The Krehbiel Letter in audio
Some people don’t have time to read. I get it. So here — you can listen too. The podcast feed is available here.
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CDP use cases for publishers
In this 12-minute video I explain the benefits publishers can reap from a customer data platform by outlining 14 use cases. The list is not exhaustive, but it will give publishers an idea how they can benefit by implementing a CDP. Things such as … Customized emails in response to a visitors online activity Encouraging…
Dial back your expectations for the metaverse
Examples of the metaverse are silly and childlike, and people aren’t using it. Meta is falling short of projections for their version, called Horizon Worlds. Most “worlds” get no visitors. The appeal of the concept is the ability to interact with a virtual world, but to make that happen would require a full-body suit that…
Content is not King
Trusted content is king. (At first I said “trustworthy,” but that’s not right. It doesn’t matter if the content is objectively trustworthy. It matters whether the readers trust it.) If you’re a publisher, you hire professional writers to create fantastic content, and then some amateur takes up the topic as a hobby and creates a…
The information vs. experience metric
You may have seen the recent Bo Sacks post with the headline “Magazine readers prefer print.” One interesting thing about the results is that even younger magazine readers prefer print. Not to the same degree as older readers, but it’s still a strong preference. At the same time, there is a strong move towards digital…
Can you really calculate ROI on marketing efforts?
ROI is very important, but it’s also a bit of a myth. It’s tempting to think that ROI should be easy on the internet. After all, websites run on computers, and e-stores use databases, and we can track links and clicks and such, so that when you boil it all down it’s just math. We…
How do you measure engagement?
A recent Bo Sacks post included this interesting paragraph. “Norwegian publisher Amedia reaches 2.4M readers daily across all platforms. It uses a machine learning algorithm to identify characteristics of user behavior that indicate happy and satisfied customers. The algorithm analyzes up to 70 reader behavior statistics and boils it down to a single number called…
Eat your own, before somebody else does
(If you’d rather listen to me explain this, I did a LinkedIn video on this topic.) Let’s say I have a service on the Fair Labor Standards Act. It covers the whole Act, but the subscribers are always calling and asking the editors questions about chapter 4, which covers whether an employee is exempt or…
Publishers: add an email service to go along with your podcast
I enjoy podcasts, but one of my frustrations is that I’m usually listening to a podcast at a time when I can’t (or can’t easily) take notes — despite the fact that I always carry a little notebook in my pocket. I usually listen while I’m running, walking, or driving, and it’s not easy to…
The illogical thinking that plagues digital publishing
(I wrote this in April of 2016, but it’s still an important message.) This article — Publishers: Weigh The Risks Of Platform Content Distribution — makes a lot of good points about the dangers publishers face when they put their content on a platform. Unfortunately, it starts off with a very common but fundamentally misleading…
On the virtue of simple fulfillment systems
A few years ago a publishing colleague asked about some of the simple subscription management plugins that work with WordPress. The question took me back to the days when I was first learning how incredibly complicated circulation systems can get, which also reminded me of the early days of iPad. When Apple first got into…
The myth of the single customer record
Sellers of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) promise their software will gather data from various applications, and assemble it into a single-source-of-truth “golden record” for each customer. It’s a lovely vision, but rarely achieved. And that’s perfectly okay. The trick is to press on anyway. Let’s use this common CDP use case to illustrate the complexity:…
Publishers as pick-up artists?
Pick-up artists claim to use psychological tricks to manipulate women into close encounters. The story is that if you follow a certain procedure, or method, you’ll play off instincts and hidden desires and such that women aren’t consciously aware of. I don’t know how much of that is true, but I’m pretty sure most people…
Two e-newspaper formats contrasted
My wife and I recently switched our long-standing newspaper subscription to the digital edition (i.e., an e-newspaper). We both bring a tablet to the breakfast table. Here are some of our observations after a few weeks of daily reading. The biggest change is that we can both have the entire paper, rather than one of…
CDP use cases your customers will love
Our ability to collect and use data about our customers is skyrocketing, but consumer expectations can seem contradictory. How can we craft a data strategy that’s beneficial to our brands and to our customers? Read on to find out. On the one hand, many consumers don’t want websites to collect their data. On the other,…