When you operate a publishing site like MarketingSherpa, you want to be clear to your subscribers about the content available to them. Articles published in our nine weekly newsletters are open access to our hundreds of thousands of readers for seven days before they go into a members-only archive. The barrier date is stated in each email.
Still, results from a survey conducted earlier this year showed that 68% of our readers don’t know how long articles are available before going behind the membership wall. We decided our limited-access policy needed to be clarified. We also wanted to see if adding an expiration date to newsletter subject lines might create a sense of urgency that would boost open and clickthrough rates. Read more…
Which would you rather have to change, your email address or your credit card account?
In today’s MarketingSherpa, we pointed out that the list of opt-in email addresses that you have collected from site visitors is most vulnerable when it is sitting on your list host’s (or your own) server.
I’ve given this a bit more thought, and it occurs to me that while most merchants encrypt the credit cards of the customers who make purchases from them (if you’re not, you should be), none that I know of encrypt the email addresses of customers. An encrypted field makes the database far less valuable to a hacker, and protects your customers even from an employee who is in a position to take a backup of your database home with him.
Yet, upon further reflection, it’s obvious to me that (at least in the United States), most email users who have had their email addresses for more than a year and are in the addressbooks of other professionals *at that address* would be far more willing to have to get a new credit card number (and update any companies that directly debit their accounts) than get a new email address, and try to reach everyone who might have contacted them at their current email addresses. Yes, I know there are services that will handle email forwarding, but between finding an infinite number of people from whom I *want* to hear via email, and contacting the handful of companies that charge my credit card monthly, it’s a no-brainer. I AM my email address in a way that I am not my credit card account.
Then, why is it that email vendors (A.K.A. List Hosts) don’t generally encrypt email addresses of subscribers on their servers?
What, you know of someone who does? Please tell us and we’ll blog it here.
In the meantime, we’d like you to take our very brief survey about your answer to my first question above and your perception of list security in general. Click here (only 5 brief multiple-choice questions).
Here’s my useful marketing link for the week: Online marketing expert Mark Brownlow has written a 52-page guide to how to market yourself and your company through email discussion lists. You can get a copy free here. Discussion list marketing is one of those great guerilla tactics that’s free, effective (especially in niche markets of almost any kind) and really works when you do it right. Of course, if you do it wrong, you’ll look like a huge a-hole in a fairly public place.
The report Anne referenced is no longer live. However, if you’re looking for email marketing help, you can download the free (and much more recent) MarketingSherpa Quick Guide to Email Marketing: 10 tactics to personalize your message for better results.
In the wake of AOL’s most recent site redesign which eliminated most ad pop-ups, iVillage has announced they are removing most advertiser pop-ups from their site as well because according to their own reader survey more than 90% of iVillage registered users really really hate pop-ups. Now their ad sales reps have to explain to advertisers who liked pop-ups’ responsiveness, “Yes, they got you lots of clicks, but do you really want clicks at the expense of negative brand awareness?”
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.
How long do you think people look at your banner for? According to results from Stanford/Poynter research, just one second. That’s it. If your banner’s creative takes longer than a second to run, you should test shorter-running creative.
Stanford and The Poynter Institute; both non-profits which have nothing to gain from the online ad industry – teamed up to measure how consumers use online news in 1997, and have been improving the study ever since then. At first they videotaped people surfing, now subjects are hooked up with a head harness that tracks their eyeball movements (no joke, see photo here).
Eyeball tracking studies of this sort were used in the cataloguing industry in the 1980s to determine how catalog shoppers browse. One of their biggest findings at the time was that people look at big pictures first (especially of people) and then their glance goes to the right (unless they are Israelis reading a language that goes in the other direction). This is why to this day catalog layouts generally have the biggest photos at the left and the copy to the right of the page, instead of vice versa.
If you’re involved in the non-profit or not-for-profit community, definitely check out Nonprofit Online News, now celebrating its fifth anniversary. One of my favorite recent articles,Preventing the Nonprofit Spam Epidemic, is actually relevant outside of the non profit community, because they are struggling with the same email marketing issues everyone else these days. What’s spam and what’s not? How good are so-called permission lists on the rental market? What’s a true “opt-in” and does it really matter if a list is built using opt-out instead?
After reading in a NY Times article that nobody surfs anymore these days, I decided to surf this evening instead of turning off the computer, and ran into this utterly lovely note on the home page of a fairly obscure Irish-based antique bed dealership, “Our sales via the Internet have gathered momentum much more quickly than we imagined. We find that our website is rapidly becoming our showroom.” Yeah, no matter what the NY Times says, the Web still rules!
Congrats to Fleishman-Hillard for winning PRWeek’s annual award for Best New Media Site of Year 2002 for their work revamping TheAntiDrug.com. Interestingly this site, along with almost all the finalists for the award, was a nonprofit-sponsored site. Does that mean only nonprofits do great online PR? Oooh, come on you capitalists, put up a better fight this year!
CRM Reality Check?
On Friday, I interviewed Coremetrics, NetIQ/WebTrends, and Responsys (which just acquired NetAcumen) about what they’re offering and what their clients are requesting with respect to metrics. One message came through loud and clear: Everyone is looking for the benefits of CRM without the hassle of implementation. All three are offering some kind of campaign measurement that goes beyond Web site analytics. All three offer implementation time measured in days, rather than months. Does the availability of, and demand for marketing campaign metrics mean that the demand for CRM is dead?
Of course, CRM isn’t dead anymore than the demand for the S-class Mercedes is dead. It’s just that in this economy, more people are opting for the C-class. The metrics they are offering include tying online marketing campaigns to sales, calculating ROI, and calculating lifetime customer value. What’s missing? 50+% failure rate of CRM implementation, multi-million dollar up-front investment cost, and multi-month implementation. Right now, there’s no multi-channel component, but all three systems will let you export your data for integration into your existing offline systems.
Interestingly, the key that most marketers are looking for from CRM — the ability to mail a subsequent campaign based on Web site activity and responses to previous marketing campaigns — is available in this CRM-light that these three companies are offering. CRM may provide a 360-degree view of the customer, but marketers are satisfied getting the view of the customer that relates to their ability to target the customer based on previously expressed interests, and frankly, I can’t blame them.
