Our ad sales guy just asked me, “Are we publishing on 9/11?” I immediately said, “Yes.” But then thought. Well, how good an idea is that really? Are the other media and people’s attention going to be so dominated by one-year-after stuff that it’s not worth bothering publishing any other type of content that day?
Or, will some people be offended by the fact that we publish on unrelated topics that day? Last year we received negative feedback when we published a regular issue the day after, and we ended up not publishing the rest of the week at all.
Feedback from anyone? editor@contentbiz.com
OK I was holding off because I’m a nice person and not a whistle blower, but this thing is been dragging on for a week now and it’s time to give a quick warning. If you are a SparkLIST client, you’ve probably been experiencing a higher-than-normal bounce rate for email broadcasts this week because they have (through no fault of their own) been blocked by Earthlink as a potential spammer. Let me note that SparkLIST is *not* a spammer and is infamous for booting clients who even secretly dream about spamming. It’s all just a vast tech misunderstanding.
That said, your Earthlink and Earthlink-hosted-domain (mainly small biz) email readers have not been getting anything you sent through SparkLIST for at least the past week. If this keeps up we are considering opening a backup account with another reputable broadcast vendor, stripping the Earthlink names from our lists and sending issues out that way.
Yeah, Earthlink names are only 3-10% of our lists, but in this economy, I don’t want to lose 3-10% of my potential issue revenues. Now is the time to eke out every scrap of possible revenue you possibly can because who knows how much worse this downturn is going to get.
In the meantime, not one but two subscribers wrote in to say our issues are being auto-tossed into their junk mail folders
because they use SpamAssassin to filter their mail. I think SpamAssassin is a great service, but unfortunately many of the terms they filter for (such as “opt-in”, “Spam”, “Email” etc.) are the subjects that we cover in our newsletters.
Alexis, our tech editor, said, “Why don’t we try to fool the filters by putting weird characters in words they filter for?
Such as S_pam or S*pam” My feeling is, many readers will just think our issues are riddled with (more) typos (than usual) and
the spamMers themselves will someday start using this ruse and then filters will filter for it, and we’re all back to square one.
OK, the next person who says, “There’s no cost to unwanted email” gets a waterballoon tossed on their head. Non-permission email overload is trashing every email publisher’s business right now.
Learned something neat today. In May when we relaunched all our sites I made one change to our opt-in forms that seemed simple at the time. Instead of just saying “Your email here” I asked our Webmaster to insert the word “work” as in “Your work email here.” We’re B2B so that made sense for us. If we were B2C I probably would have said, “Your primary email here” or “The email you check most often here.” Hey, why not ask for it if that’s what you really want people to opt-in using, right?
Anyway, one large national ISP used by lots of consumers, and businesspeople for their secondary accounts, decided for reasons known only to themselves to start rejecting mail this week from the mail server we happen to use. Neither we, nor the company we rely on to send our mail, are spammers or do business with spammers or anything wrong like that. Sometimes these things just happen because a tech thing sets off another tech thing and spam filters spring into action; and only techies can figure out what happens next.
The bad news is depending on the list, 5-20% of the newsletters we sent weren’t getting through to the end recipients. Except for two of our lists where our bounce rates were about 2% which is within the range of normal. What was different about those two lists? Same demographics and topics as the other lists, BUT these two lists had been collected 100% on our pages requesting “Your work email” while our other lists had loads of names collected prior to that time. Turns out people had been obeying, turns out those two lists had practically no consumer ISP email addresses on them.
Cool!
Just got a note from Clif Bar customer service in response to a query about their product that I posted using their site form yesterday. If you are in charge of deciding what your customer service email should look like, you might want to steal an idea from them:
1. The “From” was a real person’s name. In fact it’s the name of the person who signed the letter.
2. The subject line simply read: CLIF BAR INC which is pretty bare bones, but since they didn’t use their brand name in the “from” line sticking it prominently in the subject line was mission critical. Also, because it didn’t use up all 30 charactors or so that I can see of subject lines in my inbox, it actually really stood out due to brevity. Plus it just looked honest. So despite the fact that I get so much spam these days I often enough delete “real” messages by mistake that get caught up in it, I noticed this one.
3. The letter was in text-only. No HTML.
4. The letter started with a few lines of white space, which caught my attention because it was, well, odd. Then there was today’s date, then a few more lines of white space and then a salutation “Dear Anne”…. and oh I get it, it’s a real letter!
You know, suddenly it felt very honest and respectful and pleasant. Especially after spam overload.
5. After giving me some advice about my question (including handy links) the last paragraph gave me a toll free phone number to call plus an email address if I had any more questions.
6. Just like a “real letter” it ended with a “Sincerely,” and then a real person’s name and title there at Clif.
If you’re on some of the writing-related mailing lists that I’m on, you’ve probably gotten email pitches from Inside Sessions featuring famous name authors’ pics across the top of the screen, telling you that you too can be a famous writer. “We’re looking for manuscripts” the email says. In this week’s Studio 360 show, Kurt Andersen skewers this scheme delightfully. Check out the quick transcript here. In the meantime, all I have to say to Pengiun Putnam and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Melissa Banks, Nick Hornby, Sue Grafton and Kurt Vonnegut is Shame On You.
http://www.wnyc.org/studio360/commentary072002.html
I will not blame Rob Runett, who’s the expert I most respect on the topic of how newspapers are making money online, if he never ever speaks to me again, because he asked me to join his judging panel for The NAA’s Digital Edge Awards this Spring, and I was crushed by work and let him down in the end. My bad.
Here are the winners and finalists of this year’s best online newspaper awards for which I can claim no judging credit whatsoever. Aside from editorial kudos, the awards also recognized excellence and innovation in serving advertisers’ needs. So if you sell online ads, definitely check them out.
I was also psyched to see a wide variety of winners, both big names such as Washington Post and smaller local papers such as The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal and The Savannah (Ga.) Morning News won multiple awards, proving you can achieve excellence on any size budget.
http://www.naa.org/TheDigitalEdge/DigArtPage.cfm?AID=4301
Is using company “letterhead” in email smart or dumb? I know some of the email vendors are pushing it hard because they want to sell you on the capability. Some marketers like it because it “feels” professional. But I’m highly, highly skeptical of this tactic for 2002 anyway.
Today I got two notes from marketers using “letterhead;” one had their logo at the top of the email, the other used a vertical logo. Both were in HTML (of course) which meant they also dictated what typeface their letters appeared in. In both cases, I very nearly hit “delete” when I saw the graphic come up in my Outlook preview box. It looked like marketing email. Not a personal letter.
For now I’d reserve use of “letterhead” style email for stuff that’s obviously a mass communication (one to many) and not one-to-one. I’d also test it against a control non-letterhead group before blindly using it, no matter how pretty, neat, or professional you think it looks.
If you were out on vacation last week, you may have missed what was probably the most important news for email marketers and email newsletter publishers: The fact that Yahoo is altering the actual words in your subject lines and emails on occasion to avoid security problems. Some pretty ordinary words are changed; stuff you might never expect. I highly recommend you check out the best round-up article on this problem that I’ve seen, from at Ezine-Tips. It includes stories from marketers describing how this Yahoo problem is affecting their mailings already.
This past week, I was an invited speaker at the DMAW (Direct Marketing Association of Washington DC) annual conference. It is actually a bigger show than you might think because some powerhouse marketers are HQed in the region, including AOL, National Geographic, USA Today, Time Life Books, US News & World Report, as well as most of America’s associations and non-profits.
It was kind of a weird experience for me. Partly because the last DMAW function I was invited to speak at was about 10 years ago when I won their Bronze Maxi Award for a “breakthrough” direct marketing campaign I’d devised sending out 3.5″ floppy disks to promote sales of a CD ROM. About 1/3 of the copy in the package was dedicated to “what is a CD ROM?” because few people knew.
(I still have my winner’s plaque proudly displayed, propped up on a table in my office. You can’t hang the darn thing because it’s got a solid lead post office box stuck on the front which must weigh about 5 pounds. God only knows what future generations raised in e-only will make of it.)
It was also weird because, although it seemed like 50% or more of the speakers focused on Internet and email marketing, only two of the 40-something exhibitors were online marketing-related. I walked past booth after booth of envelope printers and the like. Speeches -> exhibit hall = disconnect.
Last but not least, partly because we at Sherpa suffer from the same affliction that I think everyone writing an email newsletter or hosting a radio show does: not viscerally believing our audience is out there listening. It’s one thing to write words onto your computer screen or speak into a mike. It’s another thing to face a real-life audience and have half of them nodding when you mention recent stories, because they read you.
If you write an email newsletter or any email or direct response marketing campaign for your organization, I urge you to get out there occasionally. Because it’s too easy to be divorced from reality and lose your step.
