MarketingSherpa Blog

I’m spring/summer shopping now that the weather is turning warm and after a long winter of crouching next to the light of my PC monitor I don’t fit any of my old clothes anymore (reasons why jeans and shorts should be tax deductable, because they are work-related expenses in the computer age)!

Best bit was the Eddie Bauer online operator who was awfully nice when I asked her a question about a Lands’ End product. Apparently lots of people besides me get them mixed up (whoops). She was so pleasant about it that I ended up ordering from her in the end after all. And then going to LandsEnd.com afterwards and guilt-buying on top of that.

Second best was the OldNavy.com site, who have still not improved their product description details online (the bane of most e-retailers who don’t come from a catalog background), but when you submit an order and leave their site they do have an exceptionally smart note at the end:

If you are using a kiosk, or someone else’s computer, please click the Sign Out button to clear your personal information from this computer. – oldnavy.com Nicely done.

Peter Platt VP Marketing at SMART Internet Marketing taught me a valuable lesson in email newsletter publishing this week. We ran a text ad for them in one of our newsletters last week and it tanked, tanked, tanked. Plus we hurt our circulation. It was all my fault.

While we let the advertiser say anything they want in the 8 lines of space they’ve bought, we control the line above their ad where it describes who the sponsor is. Frankly, this comes in handy because I can sometimes help sponsors’ clicks by doing a very brief peppy intro. Peter’s ad copy had an offer that he worded, “enter our “Optimize your Vacation Budget” sweepstakes. I was in a rush, so without thinking I slammed a peppier version in the sponsor line, Win a Free Vacation from SMART Internet.

Peter got 35 clicks, total. Then over the next few days readers began complaining, “how come there’s no issue this week?”
Turns out my sponsor line was “caught” by many companies’ and some ISPs anti-spam programs. So the issue didn’t get through to a whole bunch of people.

Now that the content of your advertisements can affect your deliverability, should email publishers add a list of “forbidden terms” to their media kits? To learn more about what terms can get caught in spam filters, check out this short article by our Tech Columnist, Alexis Gutzman.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1932

I just got a piece of advertising email that I thought might be spam because I’d never heard of the sender, let alone signed up to get messages from them, so I scrolled to the bottom of the message to see where they got my name. It said:

“Please do not reply to this email.

You opted to receive Lycos Special Offers when you registered on a Terra Lycos Network website. You can change your registration and email subscription information at:

http://ldbauth.lycos.com/cgi-bin/mayaRegister?m_PR=3&m_RC=3

“on a Terra Lycos Network website” huh. Which one??? I don’t remember everywhere I’ve registered over the years and anyway my relationship was with that particular site – not its parent company (which I might not have even known was its parent company – do you know all the sites Terra Lycos owns off the top of your head?)

It gets worse. So I clicked on the link to see which site, and guess what? It doesn’t tell you. In fact you can’t change your settings or unsubscribe until you give them your password. I’m supposed to remember a password for a site, when I don’t even know which site it is?

Lesson — don’t rent lists from Terra Lycos because they are abusing permission and make unsubscribing unusually difficult.

Hysterical. Our tech columnist, Alexis Gutzman, just emailed me her own personal spam filter list. She’s got her email set up so if any of the following terms appear, the email goes straight to her deleted items folder and she never even sees it. Alexis says, “I just kept pasting in subject lines…” whenever she gets spam.

Aside from being funny to skim – you’ll recognize so many familiar spam lines – it’s also a good list to match your own email campaign subject lines against. Are you inadvertantly using a subject line that looks like spam? That may hurt your results. Alexis’ list (it’s long):

penis, enlargement, debt free, debt-free, out of debt, million messages, million emails, ‘viagra, viagara, horny, breasts, between my legs, accept credit cards, your own merchant account, extra cash, they will spend more, slut, toner, boost your windows reliability, double your money, phone rates, long distance, rates are low, consolidate bills, life insurance, windows reliability, unsecured credit card, unsecured visa, unsecured mastercard, refinancing your house, refinancing your home, eliminate IRS tax problems, are you in debt, losing your job, work at home, free party line, stock pick, porn access, start accepting credit cards,ADV:, woman will love you, girlfriend will love you, kids will love you, women will love you, wife will love you, free cash grants, lock your rate, saw your site, dvd library, your own business, be free, pay your bills, look great, free vacation, you have won, money making, stock market news, news from day, real psycologists, real psychologists, rates have fallen, penny stock, unlimited calls, get cash, handpicked referrals, energy-levels, energy levels, financial success, new and improved, stop smoking, XXX, get a bigger hammer, gay sex, your ebook as per your posting, company merger

Yeah! According to a story posted today at Online Publishing News, UpMyStreet, the UK’s leading online local information publisher, is having so much success signing co-branding content syndication deals that they expect their 3rd quarter revenues to rise by as much as 50%. It’s very nice to hear some good news after all these months of syndication sales doldrums worldwide.

http://www.onlinepublishingnews.com/htm/n20020419.294672.htm

I almost never link to white papers about online or email marketing because hey, they should pay us to advertise in our newsletter. But this time, even if it undercuts our profits I can’t help myself. This one is so good.

Catching Chameleons with Email, authored by MindArrow’s new head of marketing Jeanniey Mullen (formerly VP and GM of Grey Advertising), is a nine-page white paper that features some really useful metrics based on Jeanniey’s years of experience in email marketing for many clients. She describes what your open rate and click rates should be. Plus, she also gives hard numbers on how screwing up your email campaign can hurt your brand. Read it and feel fear!

Last night, freakishly, I took the night off from work and lolled about on my velvet sofa reading a novel instead. Bad me. Well at least it was a novel about the publishing world. In it, one of the characters, herself a novelist, says, “Why don’t more authors get their friends to post glowing reviews of their books at online bookstores?” Which indeed made me wonder, why not?

These days when I’m considering buying a book at Amazon, the first thing I look for are reviews. If there are none posted, then I scroll up to check the book’s publication date – is pre- Amazon old? Is it not out yet? If it’s been published in the last few years, without having accrued one single review, well then I assume it must not be any good.

Guilty before proven innocent.

PDF download hell. Our sister site SherpaWeekly just launched it’s first big promotion to get more opt-in subscribers.

We stole some ideas for the copy, which is unusually long for Web campaigns, from the copy for Web Position’s newsletter. They have more than 400,000 opt-ins so we figured they must be doing something right on their landing page! We also included not one but four opt-in boxes because old-fashioned direct mail rules say the more you ask for the order, the more orders you’ll get.

Then I wrote a little Publisher’s Note to our current subscribers to tell them about the offer (I figured it’s not fair to offer newbies a free offer that old-timers didn’t get, plus you never know how many pass-alongs are reading an issue too).

To encourage viral pass-alongs we also rewrote our new subscriber welcome letter almost completely. The subject line now says, “Free offer for your marketing buddies” instead of “Welcome.”

The body copy briefly welcomes them, but then immediately segues into a pass-along offer “Here’s a free offer for your marketing
buddies: (Please pass it on)

Your friends who are marketing, advertising and PR professionals are invited to receive their own copy of our new 44-page Report:

“Top 10 Online & Email Marketing Mistakes”

It includes notes on how you can avoid the most common marketing mistakes (almost everyone makes at least one of them). Plus 40 marketers, including Seth Godin and Oracle’s Mark Jarvis admit their own mistakes.

Please tell your friends to click here for their free copy:

http://www.marketingfame.com/topten.cfm

The results? I felt like a marketer at Victoria’s Secret during their live webcast runway model show. We kept slowing and crashing. Loads of emails from people saying, “Hey I got partway through but then I crashed.” “Hey I tried to download 3 x but it was so slow I crashed.” You get the picture. PDF Hell. So now we’re negotiating with our PDF web host; how much do they want to guarantee they won’t slow or stop requests when a zillion people all want the same PDF at once.

You know, in the old days, a successful marketing campaign was much more fun. The order entry department whined a bit, but I’d glance over the piles of order forms and smile with glee. The Internet? Bah humbug!

http://www.webposition.com/newsletter.htm

According to news posted today at The End of Free, American Express is discontinuing its free email service just as About.com and Altavista have recently.

While I don’t expect this to affect any ContentBiz readers’ opt-in lists much (I don’t think there were so many eager Amex mailbox users that it’s gonna take a discernable slice out of your hide), it’s a fascinating juxtaposition to the Case Study our sister publication ConsumerMarketingBiz published today on Care2.com (the portal for “light green” consumers).

You see Care2.com offers both free email boxes and free ecards (among other things). This past holiday season when major ecard sites such as BlueMountain shifted to a mostly paid subscription basis, Care2.com saw a directly-related 50% rise in their free ecard business.

So, duh, I can spot an email backlash coming too. Pretty soon anyone NOT charging for email boxes will be the exception and will benefit from it. Especially if they can guarantee to filter spam (hey, they’ll be gods walking on earth if they can do that).

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2005

In a recent interview in Online Community Report, the CEO of message board provider ezboard explains their switch from free to paid services, “We’ve had over 24,000 community subscriptions, 19,000 user subscriptions and 45,000 user donations over that time. This currently translates into monthly revenue in the low six figures, growing steadily at 5% per month.” Sounds great; who wouldn’t want six figure monthly online subscription revenues? (Aside from Yahoo who need much, much more than that.) But, you must bear in mind, ezboard had to boil these down from 8 million free registered users.

http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/features/nguyen2