3 big issues from the Sherpa Lunch in Chicago
Thanks to everyone who came to Sherpa’s Lunch in Chicago last Wednesday. Here are my notes for those of you who couldn’t attend:
The discussion moved from tightened marketing budgets, to how to find quality B2B email rental lists, to the fact that the anthrax alert may mean “viral” marketing is too offputting a term.
– Big issue #1: Email going into bulk mail (or spam folders) at the largest ISPs.
– Big Issue #2: Agencies and interactive marketing-related vendors’ struggle with educating clients on why they should invest in online marketing. It seems that many marketers are reluctant to spend even if you can demonstrate ROI because they don’t “get” what the online channel has to offer, and they don’t understand how it differs from the offline channels.
– Big issue #3 : Double opt-in (and even sometimes single opt-in) seems not to be as common in the marketing industry as it is in marketing literature. None of the marketers in attendance indicated that they (or their clients) use double opt-in to build their own lists, but one list vendor indicated that some of their B2B lists were, in fact, double opt-in.
What was most shocking was the degree to which some marketers didn’t understand (or care about) permission marketing. One attendee explained her dilemma at telling a client they couldn’t simply guess e-mail addresses of recipients and add them to the list (without permission). Another attendee relayed that his client frequently received phone calls from other companies with opt-in lists, asking to swap lists! Is permission infinitely transferable? Certainly not!
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