MarketingSherpa Blog

Per today`s Case Study, Lewis Weiss was able to trade on a long-standing advertising relationship in order to get custom-created content from a recognized industry expert in each issue of his email newsletter.

It’s a sweet deal, but other marketers can copy it if they swing the same kind of heft among trade magazines or vendors.

Some considerations:

— Are you a major advertiser in a trade magazine, Web site or email newsletter? We’re talking a regular contract for display ads of at least a quarter page in print or skyscraper-size online, not one-time deals, or co-op or classified ads.

The next time the publication’s ad salesperson comes around looking to get extra money from you to underwrite a special issue, ancillary program (like the audiocassette program for Weiss) or the like, see if there’s room to barter away some of the cost by picking up a key writer.

You should try to get the writer to produce something special for you. Failing that, try to negotiate the rights to rerun a column by a popular writer.

— If you don’t have that kind of ad-dollar pull, look at your own vendor relationships. Do any of them have exceptional knowledge to share that your customers would also appreciate?

Although he doesn’t have a separate contract with his writer — terms are covered under his ad contract with Purchasing magazine — I recommend that marketers who use talent from outside their companies work with a contract that specifies the following work conditions:

— Pay: How much, how often and how much if any should the company cancel an issue?

— Copyright: Does the marketer or the writer own the copyright to the material the writer creates for the newsletter?

— Editorial content and control: Who has the final edit on copy, the newsletter publisher or the writer/editor? Who determines the editorial calendar, solicits articles and artwork and works with the newsletter designer?

Here’s a link to a standard freelance writer’s contract template (modify for your own needs)

We were wrong when we told you last week that Arial Software didn’t ID the three spammers it uncovered in its six-month undercover study of email marketing practices.

The three got busted in a related report intended to reassure consumers that they won’t get spammed if they opt in to email newsletters from reputable companies.

The three, all freebie-giveaway sites, are Prizeomatic.com, freebiepeople.com and memolink.com .

The report suggests that no consumers “in their right minds” would mistake any of these for Fortune 500-level emailers, but that’s beside the point.

Consumers will report even opt-in email from Fortune-500 companies as spam when it comes too often, becomes irrelevant or irritates them in some other inexplicable way.
What’s the most likely way? Forcing consumers to uncheck the box giving permission to share their names with third-party advertisers.

Check out Arial’s spam audit and the CAN-SPAM compliance survey mentioned last week (you don’t even have to register for them):
http://www.arialsoftware.com/whitepapers/SpamAudit2004.pdf

Our Editorial Assistant Stacy Cornell drove up to New Hampshire last weekend to campaign for her chosen presidential candidate.

New Hampshire is a swing state, so things could go either way. This means residents, already hammered with campaign marketing during primary season, are now dealing with a fresh onslaught of foot soldiers for both sides knocking at their doors.

I hired Stacy because she’s an admin whirlwind. She doesn’t know much about marketing. Yet, her tactics last weekend helped several voters make up their minds definitively in favor of her candidate. Why?

As one older gentleman told her, “You are the first and only person who’s shown up here and asked me with genuine interest what my concerns about Bush and Kerry are. Everybody else just shoved slick marketing brochures at me.”

This story reminded me that we’re all too apt to focus on pushing out campaigns without listening patiently to the marketplace first. Focus groups, surveys, and usability studies take time and money that many marketers convince themselves they don’t have.

Before you write or approve your next bit of copy, at the very least pick up the phone and call a few prospects (or surf sites where they post comments) to find out what their pain points are, and what sorts of verbiage they use to describe them.

I know, I know — most marketers come from the introvert end of the Myers-Briggs spectrum. Don’t let your shyness convince you you’re too busy to reach out and ask about pain points. I know mine has in the past, and I always regretted it.

Looks as if RR has lifted its block against SparkLIST. Two publishers who were having their emails blocked from RoadRunner subscribers told us they’ve had no problems since Tuesday. They still don’t know what provoked the block, though.

“All I know is I tied up a good 2 hours yesterday dealing with this. What a pain,” one of them told us.

If you are counting sponsor-paid subscriptions as part of your overall paid circ, the ABC audit bureau is watching like a hawk. ZiffDavis’s PC Magazine has been censured for counting more 100,000 subs they’d given away to qualified readers via Synapse’s FreeBizMags.com as paids.

The problem was that the sponsor didn’t pay the bill on time, and ABC only allows six months. More details at Circulation Management Mag today.

Today InfoCommerce Group announced their picks for the top 15 “Models of Excellence” innovative database and directory products.

Worth noting: these were chosen by editors who like the interactivity and editorial quality and not by business analysts who like the bottom line. So, while I’m sure some are profitable, others may be great stuff that doesn’t make a dime…

* All Media Guide (www.allmediaguide.com), a detailed and current database of all movies, music and computer games.

* CoStar Property Professional(www.costar.com), a database that contains detailed information on commercial buildings.

* The Engineering Search Engine, (www.globalspec.com), which couples a high-end buying guide with a vertical search engine.

* eStat Database (www.emarketer.com), an aggregation of statistics on e-business and online marketing.

* EuroInfoPool(www.euroinfopool.com), a common interface to the official corporate registration databases of 12 major European nations.

* HighBeam Research, (www.highbeam.com), an online research engine for individuals that fills the gap between free search engines and high-end information services.

* HotelGuide.com, (www.hotelguide.com), an Internet database of hotels that allows direct reservations by consumers.

* ImageAtlas,(www.globexplorer.com), a database that correlates detailed aerial and satellite photographs to latitudes and longitudes.

* O Series Software, (www.vertexinc.com), a program that allows corporate users to centrally administer sales tax, use tax and value added tax collection.

* Physician Quality Reports(www.healthgrades.com), which provides background information and ratings of nearly 600,000 individual physicians.

* Realtors.com (www.homestore.com), a database of more than 2 million homes for sale nationwide at any given time.

* IMDB (www.imdb.com), a one-stop database of more than 375,000 movies.

* TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com), a comprehensive travel search engine and directory.

* WAND Online Directory, (www.wandinc.com), a multi-lingual product taxonomy, including more than 1 million distinct product attributes.

* Technology Marketing Reports, (www.wendovercorp.com), a powerful database that offers directory style contact information on companies that purchase IT products and services.

How are you notifying visitors to your Web site about the information you collect from them when they visit or register? If it’s with a privacy policy that you’ve buried on an inside page or with a teeny-tiny little link or icon, you’re violation a new California privacy law.

If a California resident accuses you of violating the law, which extends current state privacy law to cover Web sites and online services, you get 30 days to fix the problem. If you don’t, that resident could sue you.

The Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003 requires any Web site operator who collects “personally identifying information” from California residents to have a clearly marked and accessible privacy policy, which meets four conditions:

Condition 1: List all the categories of personal information you collect at your site and whom you share that information with.

(“Personal information” is full name, address, email address, phone, Social Security number, anything else that would let you reach an individual and anything you collect in a cookie or other online device.

Condition 2: Explain whether and how visitors can review and change their personal information.

Condition 3: Explain how you notify users that you have changed your privacy policy.

Condition 4: Post the policy’s effective date.

You also can’t bury your privacy policy on an interior page unless you link to it with an eye-catching icon or text link whose type size is larger than the rest of the copy on the page.

Esteemed ContentBiz Publisher Anne Holland also found three vague areas in the law, too:

Grey Area #1. Email programs
Check with your own legal advisers if the term “online service” equals your emails to house lists. We suspect it does. So, you may have to make your privacy link much more conspicuous there.

Grey Area #2. Landing pages
Also, check with legal to see if you should assume the Act extends to campaign microsites and landing pages which may not be obviously part of your main site. We suspect it may, and this means you’ll need to change your privacy policies there, too.

Grey Area #3. Third-party-hosted registration forms
If you collect any consumer data using third-party services such as a co-registration deal, an online lead generation service, or a co-branded marketing presence, check with legal to see if you need to fret about your partner’s privacy links and statements. We suspect you do.

You can read the law here (go ahead and check it out; it’s short and written in what to bureaucrats is plain English):
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/bill/asm/
ab_0051-0100/ab_68_bill_20031012_chaptered.pdf

If you host your newsletter with SparkLIST, you might or might not know that the broadband giant RoadRunner has been blocking SparkLIST email deliveries for about three weeks for reasons they apparently won’t even share with Sparky’s own people. (ISPs usually cough up at least one reason, even if it’s not the *real* one, why they’re blocking you.)
The block was supposed to be lifted today (Monday, July 12, 2004). That’s what SparkLIST reported to the client, who then reported everything to us.

We’ll know for sure whether RR has lifted the block by tomorrow, when her next newsletter is scheduled to go out (including one copy to our own RR address).

In the meantime, if you find your newsletters are getting blocked, you should call your account exec at your broadcast vendor, who might or might not be aware of the problem.

That’s what our reader did. Her exec was on top of the situation and told her exactly what they were doing to solve the problem. Then, she got a follow-up phone call telling her what the current status was. (That’s pretty astonishing by itself!)

If you don’t host your list with an outside vendor, you’ll have to go it alone to find out where the problem is. The problem with RoadRunner is there’s very little information at the Web site, beyond some generic email addresses, to help you either connect with real-time help or pinpoint the problem areas.

RoadRunner does have provide some information at this Web site:
http://security.rr.com/

(Disclaimer: We used to work for a sister company to SparkLIST and had our newsletters hosted by SparkLIST before investment partner Lyris bought out the remaining shares of the company it didn’t own previously.)

A new study from Arial Software, which makes email-marketing software, found 67% of businesses sending promotional newsletters didn’t comply with CAN-SPAM rules, but that didn’t automatically mean they were spamming their recipients.

The company spent six months subscribing to and analyzing the performance of email newsletters sent by companies of all sizes — including brand-name, Fortune 500 companies — and found that only 3 of the 1,057 it subscribed to engaged in what the surveytakers considered spamming: sending high-volume commercial email or emails with unsubscribe links that didn’t work.

Although the survey didn’t name the three apparent spammers, it did bust 12 that apparently ignored unsubscribe requests, including About.com, Backcountrystore.com, Knight-Ridder, Kraft Foods, Omaha Steaks and Camping World.

Some other findings:

— 51% didn’t offer an unsubscribe link

— 93% didn’t confirm new addresses. That doesn’t break the law, but it does make an emailer more vulnerable to spamming claims by people who say their addresses were added without their permission. In addition, 72% of companies didn’t send follow-up emails to confirm opt-ins.

— 45% didn’t identify themselves clearly in their email messages.

— 36% sent no emails in the six months since Arial workers opted in to their programs.

The survey has lots more statistics and suggestions for why companies aren’t meeting the law or following email best practices. Download the survey here.

Looks like all the time and money HighBeam Research invested in redesigning its online-information site is paying off: the company announced today it has registered 600,000 Basic (free) users since the site launched Jan. 26, 2004 and added about 4 million documents to its 32-million-item eLibrary archives.

(Paid subscribers are at about 45K right now.)

HighBeam (formerly Alacritude) was at about 375,000 free registered users in May 2004 when CEO Patrick Spain and VP/CMO Kathleen Greenler spoke at the ContentBiz Summit in NYC.

HighBeam had to rebuild the entire sign-up process, since they didn’t have a way to move visitors from a first-time visit to the point where they’d hand over a credit card and buy a full membership for $19.95 a month or $99.95 a year.

Patrick and Kathleen blueprinted everything they did in point-by-point detail for our ContentBiz attendees.