MarketingSherpa Blog

A Sherpa reader who’d like to be known as “KC,” just cc:ed me on a letter he/she emailed to a business vendor he/she was considering using. KC is definitely a highly qualified sales prospect for this vendor, and after surfing the vendor’s site for a while, KC decided to click to see a demo of the vendor’s service in action.

That’s where the trouble happened, like many B2B marketers, this vendor’s marketing department put a free online registration form up as a barrier between the sales prospect and the juicy stuff so they could collect more data on prospects. Again, like many B2B marketers, the vendor forgot to include a link to their privacy policy next to their request for prospects’ email addresses.

KC wrote, “I got as far as [the registration page] before I high tailed outta there! I wonder how many other visitors bail out at this page? Have you ever considered posting a privacy policy? Your pitch is good and I would have really liked to take the test drive. But without some assurances that my personally identifiable information is not going to be sold, rented, or given to third parties once I sign up, I am afraid I cannot take the chance.

I am truly amazed that you have not gotten on board with the other quadzillion websites and positioned your company as one that can be trusted to conduct business forthrightly and treat their visitors with respect.”

Now, I happen to know folks at the vendor in question personally and I know they are cool about privacy; they would never do anything untoward with an email address they collected from their site. But, their prospects don’t know that. And in this spam-crazed environment, people are getting warier about handing their emails out daily. (I’m picturing a ‘Wariness Chart’ and that arrow is shooting up off the top edge of it.)

Often a quiet little text link will do better for you than a big blaring rich media ad.

This concept first came to the forefront when researchers found text-information gets noticed by the eye of the average surfer, while they tend to skip over color and graphics. Folks are surfing online for information, after all. It makes sense informative marketing versus interruptive marketing would work better online.

Then last year when search engine optimization and paid listings began to be the hot thing in online marketing, again it pointed out that effective creative is using words (text), not images. Very few marketers tell me anymore about the banners they bought against key search terms. Nearly everybody tells me about their PPC campaign.

Last night while surfing for house blueprints (dream a big dream), I noticed an unusual little text-ad “hidden” at the bottom of a site’s copyright fine print at the end of the page. I don’t remember a single ad from that site, or any other ad from the approximate two hours I was surfing. But that little text ad sure leapt out at me, even though it’s not for anything I’m interested in.

My theory: The (near) future of Internet marketing is text.

for the United Way of Greater Toronto (look for a Case Study we’re doing on them in SherpaWeekly this week), emailed in a reaction to my postings about how Blogs are becoming the next hot marketing communications tool:

“Come to think of it: I think that is how Blogger got started in the first place–as a cheapo tool for Evan and Co. to update each other on the ‘real’ software’ project they were building. One day it dawned on them that Blogger was better than the project, and the rest is history. At least, that’s what I heard. It is funny to think people are now proposing that other companies use it (in-house) for what it was originally designed for: interoffice communication and posting project milestones.”

This weekend the weather was stunning, glorious, incredible. I know because I ran outside briefly twice; once to get caffiene and once to stop a cat fight.

The rest of the time I was utterly, completely engrossed in Mary Wells Lawrence’s brand new autobiography A Big Life (in advertising). If you are either working for an ad agency yourself, or a woman heading any sort of company, or anyone interested in the ad biz, I highly recommend it. Some of the lessons I learned:

I was just answering a Washington Post reporter’s questions on how the spam epidemic is affecting the way consumers trust email newsletter publishers, and realized that it may, ultimately, help our sponsorship CPM. After all, if consumers are so disgusted with spam that they *only* open email from people they know and trust and have a longstanding there-will-be-value-in-this-email relationship with, then broadcast email newsletters will get higher open rates than other broadcast email. That’s gotta filter down to higher trust and clicks at a lower CPM for sponsors.

About a year ago I saw a study showing that ezine sponsorships were getting (an average) a 1-2% click rate and cost 1/4-1/2 CPM of whatever banners did at the time. Now I’d love to see some numbers on ezine sponsorship clicks currently, and compare them to broadcasts to rented opt-in lists. Oooh, maybe I’ll have to commission a researcher to look into that for Sherpa!

I’ve begun noticing a new Web design trend that I’m calling “the dot-dot-dot thing.” Remember when everybody’s site background was black? Then when everybody got frames? (Then dumped them.) Next, when you couldn’t swing a dead cat without getting stuck in a Flash intro?

Now it’s the dot-dot-dot thing to give some structure to a logo or navigation bar, without the harshness of actual ruled lines. Check it out on these three sites, and I’ll bet soon you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

http://www.creative-mail.com/

http://www.uwgt.org

Big question: if you already publish an email newsletter (or several) and you launch a new one on a similar topic, can you automatically subscribe all your other readers to the new newsletter too?

Last week a publisher I know well launched a new daily and started sending it to everyone who got their other letters. There was a note at the top saying words to the effect of “We’re sending you this because you subscribe to our other stuff. If you don’t want it then click here to opt-out.”

I was annoyed. I didn’t want another daily clogging my overloaded in-box.

Tis week we launched a new newsletter ourselves. It’s called MarketingSherpa and it was developed specifically in response to our reader survey results. People said they wanted something like it, so here we are serving their voiced need. Potential advertisers emailed us like crazy – can we have your media kit??

Only problem, we had almost zero circulation. So, yeah I felt the yearning burning to slide some names from our other lists into that new subscriber file. But I got all moral and didn’t.

Maybe that’s stupid and unbusinesslike. But I’m building relationships with our readers for the long haul. Plus each reader is worth a few bucks a year to us. Why do something that might annoy them? So we’re going to build the list for MarketingSherpa the same slow, painful way we did for everything else. One opt-in at a time.

When can you get away with doing something your readership might consider spam? If you have a terribly strong relationship with them and you do it in an awfully charming way. Witness the letter F***dCompany Publisher Phil Caplan broadcast to his list today which started:

Subject: FC Sporadic for Friday, May 10, 2002 Ha ha tricked you! It’s just spam. Well sort of. Anyway, if you could do me a favor and either (a) signup, or (b) forward this to somebody who will, that would rock. It’s a new service I came up called “RUMOR ALERTS” that I think a lot of businesses would
(should) be interested in…”

http://www.MarketingSherpa.com (super subtle plug, huh?)

Several business newsletters I’ve opted in for send their issue afterhours for the next day. For example, eMarketer Daily seems to always send around 4-5am. I’m sure they’re thinking, hey we’ll be the first thing in your email box when you come in in the morning. I’d urge all publishers who do this to rethink it because of the spam problem.

I leave work at each night having emptied my email in-box. When I get in the next morning, there’s a whole bunch of mail. As in more than 100 messages. A tiny handful are from insomniac or Australian readers. The rest are spam, spam, spam, spam.

Then, nestled into the heart of dozens of messages urging me to improve my sex life or buy insurance, is eMarketer. Many’s the time I’ve swept the “delete” button over the whole mess (after plucking forth the Aussies) and canned it.

I’m betting if late-night mailers changed their send time to say 9:30am when recipients get lots of mail from human beings (vs just mass mailers) they might increase their issue open rate. If anyone’s tested this, lemme know. AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

[BTW: Yeah I’m aware of the incongruence of this note as compared to the time I usually send out this Blog as an ezine to opt-ins on Friday evenings. Bad me.]

[Note: ContentBlog reader Henrik Torstensson of tradedoubler.com emailed in a response the the Blog above, “With regards to the timing of eMarketer Daily. I, living in Sweden, recieve the eMarketer Daily between 11 and 12 AM (CET). This is an excellent time as there aren’t any/few other newsletters at this time (compared with afternoons and the flow of newsletters from 2 PM to 5.30 PM) and if things aren’t completely messed up the few minutes it takes to read the newsletter are usually worth it. Time zones make timing of newsletters more difficult.”]

Ok – that’s it. English is the common language – let’s make NYC the common time zone! Or would someplace in China take precedence? 🙂 http://www.tradedoubler.com http://www.emarketer.com (Pls. don’t take it personally, ok?)

Arrgh! We’re launching a new newsletter, MarketingSherpa, at noon today so I was up most of the night getting it ready. Then when I stumbled into the office bleary-eyed this morning, I did the final test: Signing several of my alternate email accounts up to check the welcome message, etc. That’s when I noticed something really uncool. Our welcome messages don’t come “from” the list name, or “from” us, even if we input all of that correctly into the Lyris-based system who hosts us.

Instead, the welcome message comes “from” our host. In this case a vendor called SparkLIST. That means brand new subscribers think a company who’s not us is sending them mail. This is an even worse problem when you realize that I often “play” with my subject lines to get maximum viral pass-along effect from new subscribers.

Instead of “Welcome to Listname” which is so boring most people delete without reading, I try things like “Your free Top 10 Case Studies… Pls. forward” (referring to a hotlink to one of our best-of articles).

I didn’t realize (until now) that when I did that, recipients had no idea that this message was from the list they just signed up for. Instead, they probably think SparkLIST is spamming them.

Tech support was sort-of helpful. Turns out that unless you pop bigger bucks for a custom version of Lyris, you don’t get your name in the Welcome “from” line, although it can appear on all your issues. Weird but true. So, if you’re on an outsourced Lyris server, check your own Welcome From today.

[NOTE: After I posted this, SparkLIST CEO Chris Knight emailed over that he’s been in touch with the Lyris folks about this exact issue and they are definitely considering doing something about it. Go Chris!]

Some reader notes from last week’s emailed compilation of Blogs:

Martin Roell wrote in from Dresden to tell us about the Blog he uses to promote his eBusiness consultancy at Roell.net. Martin sees Blogs as a natural extension of online communications practices first espoused in the cluetrain Manifesto a few years ago.

He adds (in English much better than my German will ever be), “I am sure that in the future, more and more weblogs will pop up that come from employees of companies and are endorsed by the company. Managers will actively promote participation of their employees in the internet community. Perhaps, small teams of companies will publish weblogs while working on a project. Think of a product developing team, that is designing a new toothbrush and blogging about their work and their progress while they are at it. 🙂

The important point is that these moves have to stay authentic. If the PR-Division starts publishing a weblog, which is, in effect, not

personal but the old marketing-ideas in new HTML, it will not be successful. People have a sense of when somebody is ‘real’ or not.”

Ankesh A Kothari of MaxMailer wrote in to say that despite the fact that right hand navigation is easier for Web surfers to click on, “there is one reason why many people prefer left hand side navigational panel; Screen Resolution.

“This is the case even when the window is minimized half way; or when the site is opened through a popup window. The site won’t give a good first impression to visitors who will have to scroll to the right to view the navigational panel. On the web first impression is everything, if the visitor is not hooked to your site within 10-15 seconds, he will usually exit. Also, if he has to scroll to the right to view the navigational panel, lo! 3 seconds went in scrolling.”