MarketingSherpa Blog

Many of you have asked, “Why isn’t your Blog part of your main site?”

Well, from the start I figured it was best to keep a church and state separation between our editorial content. MarketingSherpa’s various “Official” newsletters (six of them now) are written by various members of our editorial team (myself, Senior Reporter Catherine Getches, Contributing Editor Mark Brownlow, and Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman). They are very factual, based on in-depth interviews with the marketers we cover. I worried that a first-person opinion Blog by mainly just me, would give you the wrong impression of the rest of the stories.

Well, last week I learned I was wrong. At our Newsletter Publishers’ Workshop, I learned that people really like to have a personal note included along with their more formal articles. I learned the most popular newsletters include both kinds of editorial.

As we drove back to the airport after the show, Alexis turned to me and said, “Well that’s it. You should move SherpaBlog into the SherpaWeekly newsletter. It can be the first part of each week’s issue. Kind of like a hostess welcoming you to a party. You’ll go and mingle with the other guests later, but first you want a personal note.”

I know a smart idea when I hear one, so that’s what will happen. Instead of dashing off a note whenever here at odd hours, I’ll do a Blog/letter in SherpaWeekly each Thursday morning.

This means if you’re a SherpaBlog subscriber, you won’t get any more issues. It doesn’t make much sense to email out a Blog separately. In the old print publishing days I would have said, “We’ve merged the two lists together and you’ll get the Weekly automatically.” But in this brave new permission world, it doesn’t seem right anymore to do that. Instead it’s entirely up to you.

If you’d like to continue getting my Blog emailed to you, just sign up for SherpaWeekly. It’s quick, it’s easy, you can get off the list with one click anytime, and no, we never ever rent or share email addresses with other marketers. Thanks for your support.

What does it mean if your Web site is #31 for your most important keyword on (free) search engines? According to new research (about which you won’t be reading from anyone else for a week) from iProspect, it means that you might as well be number 3001.

This is not your typical “we surveyed our clients and they all thought that [fill in your marketing tactic here] was the most important part of an online marketing mix.” No sir. iProspect hired Dick Morris to write the survey and Vote.com to conduct the research. (We tend not to report on that other kind of research.)

The most important results of their 13-page not-quite-a-white-paper-not-quite-a-marketing-brochure (although perhaps my copy was a pre-publication draft) were as follows:

• The largest group of search engine users (32%) look at the entire first page of results before clicking a link.
  
• Only 12% of all search engine users consistently look at more than three pages of results before either following a link, rephrasing their search, or going to a different search engine.
  
• How most people use search engines. They:

  1. type a search term
     
  2. review (up to three pages, but usually just one page of) results
     
  3. follow a link OR if not satisfied, type a revised search term
     
  4. review results
     
  5. follow a link OR if not satisfied, go to a different search engine and try the first search term again

What does this mean to marketers? No news there: search engine optimization/marketing matters.

I would love to see comparable research on how often people click on the sponsored links (from someone other than Google) that appear on the side of the page, rather than like Overture’s, at the top. If you have anything on that topic, please send it my way.

Never schedule your annual conference to take place in another city two weeks after you’ve moved house. I guess if this Blog is useful for anything, it’s how-to-avoid-Anne’s-mistakes.

Anyway, the Email Publisher’s Workshop this Monday was quite an experience. My Official Notes are posted for ContentBiz readers at the link below. They print out to 8 pages, so I suggest you go ahead and print them out rather than getting eyestrain from reading them on your screen. Which may not be brainy of me because then you won’t be able to impulsively click on the link to buy the full Workshop transcript which I placed at the end of the notes. (How do you do long content and still get impulse clicks? Not solved yet.)

Here are my unofficial notes just for you Blog readers:

#1. Text dominates HTML! After one speaker said text works better for his advertisers, a few different people in the audience came up to me during the break and said they’ve found the exact same thing. “It’s not worth the work to publish in HTML.” Sosummit in mid-May and the 2nd annual Email Publisher’s Workshop in mid- October. Buh-bye.

Link to the Official Workshop Wrap-Up (much better than above)

http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2179

I just got a note from a magazine publisher who wants to sell ads in the magazine’s sister-email newsletter. His concern, “I’d like to be able to reasonably predict what impact soliciting sponsorship of our newsletters will have upon advertisers in the printed magazines. The fear is that it would cut into the success of our magazine advertising.”

Here’s what I told him: “My suggestion is that you pitch the newsletter sponsorships as an entirely different product that fills an entirely different need for the advertiser.

If their strategy is becoming a best-known name brand and being the company/brand that people think of when they think of that category, then print ads work very well.

If their strategy is to get out time sensitive news (perhaps a hot offer or product launch) or to make a soft direct response offer designed to grow their own in-house prospect list, then your newsletter is the best place to sponsor.

In other words, if your newsletter sponsor has to ‘steal’ funds from another budget to pay for ezine ads, perhaps those funds should come from PR and/or direct mail, not space advertising.”

Agree, disagree? If you’ve got some real-life experiences to back this one up, let me know.

Are your headlines showing up in Google News? If this latest Google launch has even a quarter of the success that the main Google site does, it could become a major traffic driver for news content sites.

The “about” page proudly states that Google News isn’t created by humans. No editors, no writers, no managing editors. Nothing but
the non-journalist programmers who wrote the code Google robots use to surf 4,000+ news sites on the web and bring back headlines. Google hopes this non-human factor will make it more interesting than news selected by people. Unusual sources might get top spot and opposing views may jostle next to each other on the page. We’ll see. My theory is the mighty buck will speak out at some point and paid placements will end up taking the lead.

Anyway, if you think your site should be included in their sweep, email your info to news-feedback@google.com. Google notes,
“While we can’t guarantee that we will add all sources that are recommended, we will review all the suggestions we receive.” Go ahead, flood their inbox!

Thanks to reader David Yale of Control Beaters who sent in this note, “DoubleClick finds that 12.6% of its clients’ emails bounced in the second quarter of 2002, which is an all-time high.” There are a zillion reasons why bounces are getting higher constantly, including people switching email addresses as they change jobs or just change boxes hoping to slow down spam overload. Plus ISPs are increasing their anti-spam vigilence, and bouncing mail that may be perfectly good opt-in, but innocently shares a spam characteristic such as many identical messages being sent to multiple mailboxes in the same system (such as Yahoo) within seconds of each other.

DoubleClick figures the biggest problem is ever-decreasing mailbox sizes. Last year both Hotmail and Yahoo decreased the sizes of their free email account holder mailboxes in an effort to save on server space and to get people to pay for something (in this case a bigger mailbox). Also some corporate IT departments are reducing employee mailbox sizes.

Which adds up to a powerful argument in favor of less-rich email. Logos, pictures, Flash animation, audio, etc., all the fun with tech and design you have with email is becomming verbotten. Yes we can do it, and officially most people can receive it, but unofficially their mailboxes are too full. Bounce!

Former stock analyst Phil Leigh launched his own independent media company, Inside Digital Media, this week and I for one am psyched. He told me he’s planning to interview people who are doing “cutting-edge stuff in audio and video over your PC.”

So far he’s done exclusives with execs at RealNetworks music, DRM-leaders Macrovision, Live365.com, Movielink and more. The interviews are mainly audio, so you have to plunk yourself down at your PC and be prepared to listen rather than read.

To be alerted when Phil runs another interview (tends to be about weekly) send a blank email to
interviews-subscribe@insidedigitalmedia.com
http://www.insidedigitalmedia.com/

GotMarketing announced last week that they will be running all uploaded lists through a variety of tests to determine whether the list might not be an opt-in list.

Since this is being done with software (and software follows rules), there are a few ways that come immediately to mind:

• Compare uploaded list to CD of “email marketing addresses,” which someone at GotMarketing purchased from… hmmmmm
  
• Look for what might be a dictionary attack, where email addresses that have a high probability of being valid (john@aol.com, john1@aol.com, john2@aol.com, etc) are all on the list
  
• Authenticate all the email addresses as they are uploaded, and if too many are invalid, then there’s a good possibility that this is an old or bad list
  
• Look for too many webmaster@, info@, and support@ addresses on the list, indicating it was harvested by a spider

Clearly, this is a good thing for GotMarketing clients if it catches any potential spammers or even anyone trying to mail to an old list. If recipients of the mailing complain because they don’t remember opting in ages ago, then GotMarketing’s sending IP address could be blacklisted.

Will this really do any good?

No.

Spammers don’t use commercial services at pennies a message when they can buy software to do this from home for $40.

The kind of spam that’s still going to get through is mail from a sales rep who types in the email addresses of everyone he met at a trade show or mail from a company that appends their existing customer file and adds all those names to its list without the consent of the customers.

Did MindArrow get the patent of the year (or even decade)? You bet.

I don’t know why it didn’t get more coverage than it did. Thinking this was going to be another patent on something only they were doing, I called over there.

Jay at MindArrow told me that their patent for delivering streamed video covers the process of delivering a small portion of the video with the message, to reduce the lag time before the message starts to play, then streaming the rest in real time. He said it does not cover technology that requires a recipient to press the play button to begin the video.

Most interestingly, it even covers software that permits individuals to stream video to their friends.

I don’t think George Jettson’s video phone is ever going to catch on, but streaming video to friends can’t be that far off. Taking digital photos, then emailing them to friends is mainstream.

MindArrow’s patent could turn out to be huge. Because it doesn’t attempt to patent something that is already happening in the offline world, it may even be enforceable, unlike, say, Amazon.com’s “Put it on my Tab” er, uh “1-Click Shopping” patent.

In last week’s issue, we reported that no vendors had come forward to tell us about the way they encrypt email addresses in their databases.

This week, AdBumb haughtily announced that their vendor, CoolerEmail, did. I dashed off a note to Lars at CoolerEmail, asking whether they did, in fact, encrypt email in the database. Here is his response:

“We use a very light in-house encryption, which makes it difficult for someone who doesn’t know much about encryption to be able to read the data. The problem is that it can’t be that heavy of an encryption scheme, or our database slows WAY down.”

Either Lars is not in sales, or he knew we were going to come asking. “Very light in-house encryption?” Is that like pig Latin?

To me, very light encryption means that once you decipher one address, and have the secret decoder ring, you’ve can easily deciper them all.

We heard from another vendor this week. After I grill him, I’ll report back here about what they’re doing.