Cool link if you’re interested in how the Internet’s affected customer relations and expectations. CEO Express just released the results of a survey of 1,000 CEOs with fascinating results to questions such as how is the Internet affecting customers’ savvyness about pricing? One scary result, about 10% of CEOs said they “were not sure” if customer loyalty is important for their business. If more CEOs came from a marketing background that answer would have been a 100% “Darn Yes!”
Bethesda List Center just called to say they’re looking for a paid intern to start right away to help produce marketing materials. “We need someone 25-30 hours week who is experienced in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Illustrator, Word, Excel and Microsoft Access to keep our website well fed with new data cards, updates and other materials. “
The office is in Bethesda MD near the metro stop. Casual dress. Pay is $10/hour Contact:
Cathy@bethesda-list.com or Fax 301 907-4870
Kudos to the EU for showing some regulatory self-restraint. European lawmakers reversed a trend begun in 1973 (when they decided to regulate of the curvature of bananas that could be imported), when they decided today NOT to impose opt-in standards on cookies. The legislation they were considering would have required every Web site that wanted to plant any cookie; in order to put items in the shopping cart and permit check-out, in order to provide personalization, or in order to spare people from having to sign in every time; to get affirmative consent from a visitor before planting the cookie, presumably via a(n annoying) pop-up box; lawmakers have decided to let the industry regulate itself. One can only imagine the havoc this would have wrought on e-commerce world-wide. Most HTML newsletters plant cookies these days. Almost all Web sites do (in part, to track repeat visitors).
The banana-curvature rules, by the way, were overturned just yesterday. Let freedom ring.
Just learned that Jupiter Research/events was sold to INT Media (A.K.A. Internet.com; the folks who bought ClickZ for $16 mill in mid-2000, albiet the majority of that was now-very-differently-valued-stock) for $.25 million. Which is a pretentious way of saying “$250,000,” which in my neighborhood would buy you a nice one-bedroom condo. Of course if you decided to go for the ailing research firm option instead of the condo option, you also end up with 90 employee mouths to feed. Personally, I’d prefer something maybe with a balcony.
Got two emails from very different sources today both recommending I check out Cluelessmailers.org which reveals the experiences of one guy, Bob, who gets a lot of spam. The cool thing is that Bob has done some heavy research to show the supply chain of how the poor email marketer ended up renting Bob’s name from a spammer, whilst being under the impression that it was an opt-in, permission-based name. As Bob notes, he’s not trying to run a blacklist, but rather trying to educate email marketers. While you’re there, be sure to check out his Spamdemic Map ™ — it’s even more fun than The Story of Nadine!
I’m always whining about the lousy press contacts that most company’s sites have, so it’s nice to report when somebody does it right. ActiveBuddy’s press contacts are available both from their online press room and from their Contact Us page, both of which are on the main nav bar and just one click away from the home page.
Wait, there’s more. ActiveBuddy gives three different press contacts: One in New York for East Coast time zone reporters, one in Silicon Valley for West Coast time zone reporters, and one in marketing as a back-up. And if I don’t feel like calling any of these direct line phone numbers, I can email their PR address or use their handy online form. I went for the form just to see what it was like (too many questions and it didn’t ask what my deadline or time zone was).
Here’s the best part: After I submitted the form, instead of sending me a routine “thanks, we’ll get back to you” form letter via email, the form email letter ActiveBuddy sent started out by saying “If you’re on deadline, here are phone numbers for quick response” and then reiterated those phone contacts on both coasts again.
Very well done. Now, if only they would stop stripping out press contacts from releases when they post them on their site; everybody does that and it drives me crazy! If I print out or copy and paste a release from your site to my notes, there’s zero contact info if I have questions. Why? why? why is this the standard set-up? Ok, so I’ve lapsed into whining again. 🙂
NetCreations Founder Rosalind Resnick (now retired), who invented the idea of renting double opt-in email names quoted in AvantMarketer on Friday, “Internet users are getting emailed to death out there, both on the opt-in and unsolicited side. Also, permission has become so mainstream now that while in the past there was a real difference between acquisition email lists harvested from newsgroups and permission-based lists, being permission-based is no longer the differentiator it used to be for either the marketer or the user. So, what we see now is that many users are tuning out commercial email, or unsubscribing from it or blocking it, completely. In a strange way (that very few of us could have imagined in the earlier days) opt-in email has been too successful. It’s really become too pervasive.”
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.
I’ve noticed that my own email newsletter reading habits have changed dramatically as the influx of spam has increased and I have to spend more time battling to keep my in-box “clean” and less time reading the good stuff. Dailies: Forget ’em. Weeklies: Only sometimes when they have killer subject lines. However, strangely I am reading more monthlies now.
I used to sneer at email publishers who were only monthly because I thought in this super-speedy age, who’s going to remember or notice you with just one lone email a month? As of today I’m totally reversing my position. If your monthly has true value to the end reader, it’s not just self-promotional we-we-we talk, and you make it clear it’s a monthly (perhaps in the name or subtitle), then even if your subject line sucks I’ll probably open it.
Why? Partially because I’m so grateful you’re not clogging my email box with loads of stuff. You’re respecting my email time. Also partly because I’m aware that if I delete this one, I gotta wait a whole month for another. It’s not “replaceable” with another issue in a few days. It gains inherent value.
My advice now is: If you’re doing a newsletter as a marketing tool to impress people, high quality content matters more than frequency. Don’t slam out a bunch of good-enough frequent issues. Instead, work on a really-great less frequent issues.
According to an excellent article in last Sunday’s Washington Post, there’s been a 600% increase in spam over the last year. In April 2001, vendor Brightmail counted 700,000 spam “attacks” (that’s not individual pieces of spam, but spam campaigns which might include millions of names). In April 2002, they counted 4.3 million attacks. Wow.
This affects legitimate marketers tremendously because your recipients are inundated with email and less likely to pay attention to yours (see my blog below), and their ISPs and IT departments are using filters that might stop legitimate email along with spam.
Plus, it gives rise to yet more movements; such as state and Federal legislation as well as vigilante black-list/blackhole organizations; which can also catch legitimate marketers in their net. Kind of like dolphins getting caught along with tuna.
What can you do? Expect your results metrics to continue to decrease while this spam avalanche is going on; track legislation carefully; monitor your own broadcast email delivery reports constantly to make sure there’s no sudden upsurge in bounces that might be an ISP rejecting your message outright; and make sure the email vendor you use to send out broadcast messages has a full-time privacy and spam officer who has strong personal relationships with major ISPs, including AOL. Also, (shameless self-promotion) be sure to read our new newsletter EmailSherpa every week which covers this stuff in more detail.
