Arrgh! We’re launching a new newsletter, MarketingSherpa, at noon today so I was up most of the night getting it ready. Then when I stumbled into the office bleary-eyed this morning, I did the final test: Signing several of my alternate email accounts up to check the welcome message, etc. That’s when I noticed something really uncool. Our welcome messages don’t come “from” the list name, or “from” us, even if we input all of that correctly into the Lyris-based system who hosts us.
Instead, the welcome message comes “from” our host. In this case a vendor called SparkLIST. That means brand new subscribers think a company who’s not us is sending them mail. This is an even worse problem when you realize that I often “play” with my subject lines to get maximum viral pass-along effect from new subscribers.
Instead of “Welcome to Listname” which is so boring most people delete without reading, I try things like “Your free Top 10 Case Studies… Pls. forward” (referring to a hotlink to one of our best-of articles).
I didn’t realize (until now) that when I did that, recipients had no idea that this message was from the list they just signed up for. Instead, they probably think SparkLIST is spamming them.
Tech support was sort-of helpful. Turns out that unless you pop bigger bucks for a custom version of Lyris, you don’t get your name in the Welcome “from” line, although it can appear on all your issues. Weird but true. So, if you’re on an outsourced Lyris server, check your own Welcome From today.
[NOTE: After I posted this, SparkLIST CEO Chris Knight emailed over that he’s been in touch with the Lyris folks about this exact issue and they are definitely considering doing something about it. Go Chris!]
Some reader notes from last week’s emailed compilation of Blogs:
Martin Roell wrote in from Dresden to tell us about the Blog he uses to promote his eBusiness consultancy at Roell.net. Martin sees Blogs as a natural extension of online communications practices first espoused in the cluetrain Manifesto a few years ago.
He adds (in English much better than my German will ever be), “I am sure that in the future, more and more weblogs will pop up that come from employees of companies and are endorsed by the company. Managers will actively promote participation of their employees in the internet community. Perhaps, small teams of companies will publish weblogs while working on a project. Think of a product developing team, that is designing a new toothbrush and blogging about their work and their progress while they are at it. 🙂
The important point is that these moves have to stay authentic. If the PR-Division starts publishing a weblog, which is, in effect, not
personal but the old marketing-ideas in new HTML, it will not be successful. People have a sense of when somebody is ‘real’ or not.”
Ankesh A Kothari of MaxMailer wrote in to say that despite the fact that right hand navigation is easier for Web surfers to click on, “there is one reason why many people prefer left hand side navigational panel; Screen Resolution.
“This is the case even when the window is minimized half way; or when the site is opened through a popup window. The site won’t give a good first impression to visitors who will have to scroll to the right to view the navigational panel. On the web first impression is everything, if the visitor is not hooked to your site within 10-15 seconds, he will usually exit. Also, if he has to scroll to the right to view the navigational panel, lo! 3 seconds went in scrolling.”
If you are a sales professional, or you are a marketer who works with a sales team, definitely check out http://www.salesautopsy.com/, the site that features real-life sales horror stories of the one that got away. Very funny. Good for a rainy day.
Be forewarned, according to Internet ScamBusters if you’ve registered any URLs with Register.com, they are now doing auto-renew, which means they renew your account and charge your card even if you didn’t ask them to extend your URL ownership for another year, and even if they didn’t tell you they were going to do auto-renew when you first signed up.
News notes from a few sources on general Internet trends have shown that the number of registered dot-com names is going down this year for the first time in history. Makes sense, there are plenty of companies (and even individuals) that bought hundreds back when we all thought you had to do a “land-grab.” This was partially a traffic-driving move. Way back when, we all thought surfers would just type in various URLs into their browsers to find stuff online. Then search engines like Google came along and changed everything.
Now the thinking is to concentrate on a few URLs for your company (a corporate site, a site for each major branded product you sell, and perhaps a promo content site) and focus your marketing efforts on getting them out there by investing in stuff like; paid listings on search engines.
Anyway, this trend means the URL registration firms that proliferated a few years ago are now feeling the pinch. And they may try means that aren’t exactly customer-friendly to jack up profits. It’s not long term thinking, but then how much online has been until recently?
I’ve just asked our Webgal Holly to pop up samples of three emailed circulation marketing campaigns I received recently for three different trade magazines. You can steal ideas and spot what NOT to do from each. Check these samples out at:
http://www.marketingsherpa1.com/magazines/sherpa_mag.html
My input:
– None of them has the order form incorporated in the email itself, although all are HTML campaigns and I’ve been assured this is “not hard to do.”
– Although I’m a fan of BrandWeek magazine, their campaign and landing page are definitely the lamest. The copywriter must assume that everyone already knows the benefits of subscribing and what the mag is all about because there’s no true descriptive copy. The solitary hotlinked response is well below the fold.
Also for reasons known only to their Webmaster, the landing page requires visitors click on yet another link to actually get to the order form. You guys know you lose at least 10% of your visitors with each click they have to make, right?
– The MediaPost campaign creative is fine (this is just one in a series of almost a ten they sent over time to convert free trials into paids) BUT they omit one critical fact in the email — when your old MediaPost subscription expired. We get several copies here at the office, and didn’t actually realize one had run out, so we never responded to any of the emailed offers. It’s the first item noted on the campaign landing page however.
– The Sales & Marketing Management magazine email campaign was superlative. A nice fat “act now!” button at the very top, several hotlinks to click on, solid descriptive copy in readable letter-style black and white typeface…. Then the landing page killed it. Why would you send out a lovely colorful email and then have people click to a stiff form with no sales copy, that uses completely different colors? It feels like the hotlink was wrong – this can’t be the right place!
Next time, let your email creative team take over the graphic design for your landing page as well.
Internet Retailer just published a great feature article on how online retailers are using affiliate marketing to drive sales. It includes loads of details about SmartBargains.com’s online marketing strategy. President & CEO Carl Rosendorf is quoted saying, “Our affiliate marketing program has provided the company with a substantial foundation of traffic and sales. In July 2001, one month before we launched the program, we had 400,000 unique visitors to our site. By October, we had 4 million visitors.
When I surfed over to check out SmartBargains.com, I noticed a clever merchandising tactic they use to raise sales. Top sellers lists are always a great way to move product. SmartBargains.com do their own twist — they show you a list of products that “Someone just bought”.
I love that wording because it brings the site alive. I may be surfing alone, but there are other real human beings shopping at this site at this very moment too. The virtual world comes alive. Plus there’s that implied peer product endorsement, gotta love it.
Well, today we finally switched hosting companies to handle our PDF downloads because the last host, although highly recommended by other online publishers, couldn’t cope when we ran a free PDF offer and hundreds of people all tried to download their PDF at the same time. (You’ll recall I wrote about this last week.)
I learned something critical; seems that many hosting companies limit the number of downloads that can be going on at the same time as a security measure in case they are targeted for a denial of service attack. So although our new hosting company has a great fat pipeline and we get a guaranteed % of server space (instead of being shoved into a server with a zillion other sites already running on it), we still wouldn’t be able to handle it if 100s of people want to download a PDF at the exact same time.
We’ve now set up lines of communication with the techies on their end. 24 hours before we launch any marketing campaign that might cause system overloads, we email them a warning to “flip the switch” and allow us more downloads for a limited time. Then they flip the switch back for security’s sake. I guess the free-and-easy life of popping out marketing campaigns on a whim is over.
If you are not a subscriber to the regular ContentBiz newsletter, and you are the publisher of an email newsletter, please click
over to ContentBiz right now to read an article I quickly posted on how Klez is affecting list owners and what you need to do to protect your own list. (If you are a regular ContentBiz subscriber, I just emailed you a copy of the article. So check your in-box.)
According to one ContentBiz reader, Klez is causing problems of “Biblical proportions” to list owners this week, and while I think that’s a slight overstatement (but a heck of a soundbite), Klez is a big problem. ‘Nuff said.
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2016
Who loves ya baby? The Newsletter & Electronic Publishers Association and the law firm of Levine Sullivan & Koch, L.L.P., just published a very useful new Memorandum from Counsel entitled Advertising by Fax and Email: What Publishers Should Know About Electronic Marketing Law. I called them both up this morning to get permission to post this 8-page memo for you, for free (normally only association members get to read it).
Although it’s written by lawyers, it’s really quite readable and clear on how US state and Federal laws and court rulings affect
publishers. Click here for your copy.
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2014
A big Yeah! to Web design shop LookandFeel New Media for making a Media Registration Form part of their online press center. Practically nobody, but nobody, ever does that. It’s much appreciated by the press who cover you.
On the other hand, what’s up with requiring street address, phone and fax number from the press? 90% of the journalists I’ve ever met (and I’ve met plenty) hate, loathe and despise PR people who call them about stuff when an emailed note could do the job. They shudder at the idea of giving out their phone number, so you’re requiring it?
