Bad McAfee. If you use the Web-based virus-protection software, VirusScan Online, then you have begun seeing a pop-up box every time you have scheduled McAfee to check for virus updates (9am daily for me). It says that Urgent Action is requested from you to “update your profile.” When the user clicks to check his profile and make sure everything is accurate, the form includes credit card information, which is blank. The form says that the credit card will not be charged until it’s time for renewal, but the user can’t close the form until he provides the credit card information. Sure McAfee wants to be in a renew-by-default relationship with me, but they haven’t earned that right.
Are they going to pester me every day until I give them my credit card, er, um, “update my profile?” This is the best news Symantec (their competitor) has heard this year. I hope they have the server capacity to handle all the disaffected customers (including me).
Didn’t they learn anything from the bad press Microsoft got (and continues to get) about Passport? Be careful what kind of information you ask for and what the context is. Note to McAfee: Go to Google and search on the words “Passport” and “evil,” and see how many matches you get.
According to Ezine Tips’ latest issue, some Comcast email users have been experiencing outages over the past few days. Which means your ezine undeliverables may have gone up. Between this sort of thing, and the inevitable “soft” bounces built up from folks being out of the office over the Holidays, or having filled email boxes due to folks like Hotmail making free boxes smaller, we ended up having the subscriptions of several thousand readers of our various newsletters on hold for bouncing, even though their email addresses may still be good.
Although list cleanliness matters in the long run, this week I made sure folks are not deleted as bad addresses just quite yet. You may want to do the same on your end if you are a newsletter publisher too.
http://ezinetips.com/articles/management/20020215.shtml
If you’ve been reading me for awhile, you’ll know I absolutely despise Flash intros. I’m going to a site for a reason, and it’s not to sit through your commercial twiddling my fingers waiting for your home page to load so I can get done whatever I went there to do!
That said, I am exceptionally impressed by the Flash intro at CorporatePlanners.com because they’ve used the Flash to present the most powerful marketing tactic of all — happy client testimonials. It goes on for a bit too long, and the site afterwards is pretty blah (I’m so bored of that handshake clip-art), but then you can’t expect me to be 100% enthused about everything can you? Anyway, if they cookie visitors so you only see the Flash intro the first time you enter (and don’t have to sit through it again and again as an ongoing client or prospect) then this would qualify as one of the best Flash Intros I’ve ever seen.
On an entirely personal note, my article, A Yankee Girl’s Guide to Brit Chick Lit, was just published at Crescent Blues, a Web site that January 2002 issue of Writer’s Digest named as one of The 25 Best Places to Get Published Online.
You may be amused to hear that this is the first time I’ve ever been paid as a real professional journalist (vs. a business person in the media industry) and that check for $17.32 is gonna end up in a handsome frame on my office wall.
http://www.crescentblues.com/5_1issue/feat_britchicklit.shtml
Wahoo! I don’t get to go to the big AAAA conference because the attendees are gargantuan advertisers who spend billions offline and close to el zippo online. However, journalist Masha Geller of MediaPost conned her boss into a free ticket, and reports that for the first time in history, this year at AAAA there are actually sessions on Internet advertising! Two in fact. Which may sound piddly to us Web marketing insiders, but we all must bear in mind that we have myopic vision. So, this is long-overdue happy dance time!
Search engine optimization marketers have complained for years now about “meta tag theft” whereby a competitor will deck out their site’s title and meta tags using all the same keywords that you do, in hopes of stealing your ranking and your traffic. This afternoon, Sherpa reader Meyer Baron of 1SmartPuppy emailed in a warning that there is a new kinda problem to watch out for — Google AdWords copy theft.
Turns out a direct competitor of Meyer’s liked his paid Google listing creative so much, that he/she decided to lift it practically wholesale for their own AdWords paid placements that compete with 1SmartPuppy. Meyer says, “Why do I care?
1. I create and implement marketing strategies for a living, and don’t tolerate people using my work without permission.
2. I’m paying for my AdWords campaign, and if someone else is going to benefit from it, they should at least pay me for it. They certainly should not reap any benefit from it without my knowledge and consent.
3. My company’s name appearing in their listing implied an association that doesn’t exist.”
Years ago when a direct competitor reprinted a direct mail package that I’d done, word-for-word (except they inserted their product name in place of mine, and changed the toll free order number), it took one simple, polite, phone call to get them to cease and desist. I kind of considered it a compliment and left it at that. This AdWords campaign theft is a whole different ballgame.
Quick update to a MarketingSherpa Case Study from March 2001. 10,000 Subscribers Pay $10 Each for “PLUS!” Edition of the Free LangaList Email Newsletter describing ezine Publisher Fred Langa’s first few months of transition from free to for-fee.
According to a story in today’s eBusiness Secrets, Langa now has 145,000 free subscribers, 19,000 of whom have anted up the $11-$12 annual subscription fee. That’s a bit more than a 13% conversion rate – which is unusually high, however, Langa’s price is unusually low.
Is it worth lowering your price to try to get more buyers? My new Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman just reminded me that research shows about 25-30% of online customers require some type of customer service. Perhaps they email you, or there are credit card snafus, or whatever, so you have to add that cost in whenever you are considering growing your subscription file. More customers means more customer service costs. (Not that I don’t fully appreciate what Langa is doing — he rocks.)
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=22521
http://secretspro.com/ebusinesssecrets
http://www.langa.com
Do you know what a “locator” is? How about “PRM software?” I’m relatively technical, and while I could guess them both, neither is a top of mind term/acronym for me. Yet, two companies who sell these two products have sent out e-mail marketing in the last week or so assuming I was just thinking about their solution. Neither bothered to offer an alternative description of the product in the opening lines, so that I could read the first paragraph and surmise what their solution did, even if I didn’t know their term for it.
Apositives were created for just this purpose. Try this: “Thinking of revamping your locator, the tool on your site that visitors use to find the store closest to them?” Or this: “SelfImportant Research Associates reports that 47% of companies that need PRM software don’t have it. Are you one of the 47% that isn’t managing its partner relationships well enough?”
If you think you’re marketing to such a qualified audience that you don’t need to define the terms, you’re wrong. The fact that I once had a conversation with your PR guy about your term or acronym doesn’t mean it’s been stored away for easy recall. Make it easy for your audience to nod along with you — define your terms and your product early in your messages.
AuthorizeNet, a merchant account processor for thousands of online retailers, decided recently that credit cards issued by banks outside the US are not a good risk this week. So this evening at 9pm ET, they turned off the ability for every single one of their merchant customers to accept non-US cards. Luckily they did send three email bulletins to customers prior to this. It was still a major inconvenience.
Here at Sherpa we had to send someone back to the office three hours after closing, to go online and manually turn our AuthorizeNet settings back to accept non-US cards again. During the few minutes that took, three Sherpa shoppers from Canada all had their perfectly good credit cards declined. I understand the need for security online these days, but come on! Are Canadians less trustworthy than Americans? I think not.
Are your non-compete contracts with departing editorial staff (or former publication owners) as thorough as they need to be? I’ve definitely noticed a trend these days of folks who are under editorial non-compete after they leave their companies, starting an email newsletter and growing an opt-in list while they twiddle their thumbs waiting for the non-compete to end. Then, the day it does, they flip the switch and all the readers they’ve gathered on that free opt-in list (many of whom include your long-term buyers) suddenly get an offer for a subscription product that looks like yours, smells like yours, but perhaps undercuts yours a bit on price. So, double-check that non-compete language to make sure it includes all sorts of writing and publishing, not just print and/or for-fee.
