Somewhere along the line being a Nerd became cool. Beauty and The Geek and The Big Bang Theory have become staples the country’s nightly television viewing (I challenge you to find a night where Big Bang isn’t on).
I believe most people are pretty nerdy about something. There are people who would self identify as jocks who can easily name the starting 22 of each AFL footy side. I’d say that is pretty nerdy too. There are fashion nerds, art nerds, music nerds (Ever seen Rockwiz?).
Anyway, to me what makes someone appear nerdy, is knowing something at a deeper level than most of the rest of the population. For me, I am a marketing nerd. I know the fundamental difference that made Google the dominant search engine rather than Yahoo. (They used a different metric to set the prices in their Pay Per Click Advertising models – that is the difference between the biggest internet business in the world and lying around waiting to be put out of your misery.)
We all have our own areas of expertise. Customer retention is as much a science as it is a black art. It requires planning, being absolutely meticulous and the ability to follow a very precise program. When doing a customer newsletter, that multiplies out because late and missed issues cost you, repeat business, referrals, cross sells and more.
If you don’t have someone who is a nerd with an attention to detail looking after this part of your business then you are sunk. This is one of the areas of your business where lack of attention to detail is really magnified and overlooked problems add up over time.
Sadly a ‘poor’ newsletter mailed every month like clockwork will outperform a well prepared newsletter done irregularly. The problem for those who are DIYers without the necessary attention to detail is even to get a newsletter in the mail on time every month is a herculean task.
Don’t believe me? Then think about how few newsletters actually stay on a regular production schedule.
There are far more started and abandoned than you will ever count.
Even to produce a single good newsletter is harder than you might imagine. Most of the people who are trying to pull a newsletter together are struggling to get it done in two days. What is your ‘day rate’ if you are charging even a slender $800 per day then that means you newsletter is costing $1600 to produce. An astronomical sum compared to outsourcing it to us who come in at less than half that to produce a newsletter.
We can usually do a higher quality newsletter for our clients can than they can do for themselves and in all of our time doing this we have only had one newsletter go out late, that was when a client called us the night before we were scheduled to post and asked us not to mail because he had a staff member who he featured in that newsletter walked out on him that day.
We got a replacement in the mail for them in under a week.