MarketingSherpa Blog

Hysterical. Our tech columnist, Alexis Gutzman, just emailed me her own personal spam filter list. She’s got her email set up so if any of the following terms appear, the email goes straight to her deleted items folder and she never even sees it. Alexis says, “I just kept pasting in subject lines…” whenever she gets spam.

Aside from being funny to skim – you’ll recognize so many familiar spam lines – it’s also a good list to match your own email campaign subject lines against. Are you inadvertantly using a subject line that looks like spam? That may hurt your results. Alexis’ list (it’s long):

penis, enlargement, debt free, debt-free, out of debt, million messages, million emails, ‘viagra, viagara, horny, breasts, between my legs, accept credit cards, your own merchant account, extra cash, they will spend more, slut, toner, boost your windows reliability, double your money, phone rates, long distance, rates are low, consolidate bills, life insurance, windows reliability, unsecured credit card, unsecured visa, unsecured mastercard, refinancing your house, refinancing your home, eliminate IRS tax problems, are you in debt, losing your job, work at home, free party line, stock pick, porn access, start accepting credit cards,ADV:, woman will love you, girlfriend will love you, kids will love you, women will love you, wife will love you, free cash grants, lock your rate, saw your site, dvd library, your own business, be free, pay your bills, look great, free vacation, you have won, money making, stock market news, news from day, real psycologists, real psychologists, rates have fallen, penny stock, unlimited calls, get cash, handpicked referrals, energy-levels, energy levels, financial success, new and improved, stop smoking, XXX, get a bigger hammer, gay sex, your ebook as per your posting, company merger

Peter Platt VP Marketing at SMART Internet Marketing taught me a valuable lesson in email newsletter publishing this week. We ran a text ad for them in one of our newsletters last week and it tanked, tanked, tanked. Plus we hurt our circulation. It was all my fault.

While we let the advertiser say anything they want in the 8 lines of space they’ve bought, we control the line above their ad where it describes who the sponsor is. Frankly, this comes in handy because I can sometimes help sponsors’ clicks by doing a very brief peppy intro. Peter’s ad copy had an offer that he worded, “enter our “Optimize your Vacation Budget” sweepstakes. I was in a rush, so without thinking I slammed a peppier version in the sponsor line, Win a Free Vacation from SMART Internet.

Peter got 35 clicks, total. Then over the next few days readers began complaining, “how come there’s no issue this week?”
Turns out my sponsor line was “caught” by many companies’ and some ISPs anti-spam programs. So the issue didn’t get through to a whole bunch of people.

Now that the content of your advertisements can affect your deliverability, should email publishers add a list of “forbidden terms” to their media kits? To learn more about what terms can get caught in spam filters, check out this short article by our Tech Columnist, Alexis Gutzman.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1932

Yeah! According to a story posted today at Online Publishing News, UpMyStreet, the UK’s leading online local information publisher, is having so much success signing co-branding content syndication deals that they expect their 3rd quarter revenues to rise by as much as 50%. It’s very nice to hear some good news after all these months of syndication sales doldrums worldwide.

http://www.onlinepublishingnews.com/htm/n20020419.294672.htm

I almost never link to white papers about online or email marketing because hey, they should pay us to advertise in our newsletter. But this time, even if it undercuts our profits I can’t help myself. This one is so good.

Catching Chameleons with Email, authored by MindArrow’s new head of marketing Jeanniey Mullen (formerly VP and GM of Grey Advertising), is a nine-page white paper that features some really useful metrics based on Jeanniey’s years of experience in email marketing for many clients. She describes what your open rate and click rates should be. Plus, she also gives hard numbers on how screwing up your email campaign can hurt your brand. Read it and feel fear!

Last night, freakishly, I took the night off from work and lolled about on my velvet sofa reading a novel instead. Bad me. Well at least it was a novel about the publishing world. In it, one of the characters, herself a novelist, says, “Why don’t more authors get their friends to post glowing reviews of their books at online bookstores?” Which indeed made me wonder, why not?

These days when I’m considering buying a book at Amazon, the first thing I look for are reviews. If there are none posted, then I scroll up to check the book’s publication date – is pre- Amazon old? Is it not out yet? If it’s been published in the last few years, without having accrued one single review, well then I assume it must not be any good.

Guilty before proven innocent.

In a recent interview in Online Community Report, the CEO of message board provider ezboard explains their switch from free to paid services, “We’ve had over 24,000 community subscriptions, 19,000 user subscriptions and 45,000 user donations over that time. This currently translates into monthly revenue in the low six figures, growing steadily at 5% per month.” Sounds great; who wouldn’t want six figure monthly online subscription revenues? (Aside from Yahoo who need much, much more than that.) But, you must bear in mind, ezboard had to boil these down from 8 million free registered users.

http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/features/nguyen2

PDF download hell. Our sister site SherpaWeekly just launched it’s first big promotion to get more opt-in subscribers.

We stole some ideas for the copy, which is unusually long for Web campaigns, from the copy for Web Position’s newsletter. They have more than 400,000 opt-ins so we figured they must be doing something right on their landing page! We also included not one but four opt-in boxes because old-fashioned direct mail rules say the more you ask for the order, the more orders you’ll get.

Then I wrote a little Publisher’s Note to our current subscribers to tell them about the offer (I figured it’s not fair to offer newbies a free offer that old-timers didn’t get, plus you never know how many pass-alongs are reading an issue too).

To encourage viral pass-alongs we also rewrote our new subscriber welcome letter almost completely. The subject line now says, “Free offer for your marketing buddies” instead of “Welcome.”

The body copy briefly welcomes them, but then immediately segues into a pass-along offer “Here’s a free offer for your marketing
buddies: (Please pass it on)

Your friends who are marketing, advertising and PR professionals are invited to receive their own copy of our new 44-page Report:

“Top 10 Online & Email Marketing Mistakes”

It includes notes on how you can avoid the most common marketing mistakes (almost everyone makes at least one of them). Plus 40 marketers, including Seth Godin and Oracle’s Mark Jarvis admit their own mistakes.

Please tell your friends to click here for their free copy:

http://www.marketingfame.com/topten.cfm

The results? I felt like a marketer at Victoria’s Secret during their live webcast runway model show. We kept slowing and crashing. Loads of emails from people saying, “Hey I got partway through but then I crashed.” “Hey I tried to download 3 x but it was so slow I crashed.” You get the picture. PDF Hell. So now we’re negotiating with our PDF web host; how much do they want to guarantee they won’t slow or stop requests when a zillion people all want the same PDF at once.

You know, in the old days, a successful marketing campaign was much more fun. The order entry department whined a bit, but I’d glance over the piles of order forms and smile with glee. The Internet? Bah humbug!

http://www.webposition.com/newsletter.htm

According to news posted today at The End of Free, American Express is discontinuing its free email service just as About.com and Altavista have recently.

While I don’t expect this to affect any ContentBiz readers’ opt-in lists much (I don’t think there were so many eager Amex mailbox users that it’s gonna take a discernable slice out of your hide), it’s a fascinating juxtaposition to the Case Study our sister publication ConsumerMarketingBiz published today on Care2.com (the portal for “light green” consumers).

You see Care2.com offers both free email boxes and free ecards (among other things). This past holiday season when major ecard sites such as BlueMountain shifted to a mostly paid subscription basis, Care2.com saw a directly-related 50% rise in their free ecard business.

So, duh, I can spot an email backlash coming too. Pretty soon anyone NOT charging for email boxes will be the exception and will benefit from it. Especially if they can guarantee to filter spam (hey, they’ll be gods walking on earth if they can do that).

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2005

One of the biggest problems with business sites (as I’ve said many a time before) is they often present lots of information, but never ASK FOR THE LEAD. Hence, my favorite site of the day is Bigdough, a site that offers high-priced information services to investor relations officers and investment bankers.

They’ve stuck a big red star on every single page of the site that says “Free Trial, Click here or Call…” And I mean every single page, the privacy policy page, the Help page, the about us, the home page, you name it, that star is there. When you are ready to act, no matter where on the site you are, their action button is right there in front of you.

ContentBlog reader Linda Nelson of Custom Craftworks writes in, “As a Yahoo user for personal emails, I am pleased to know that you have decided not to exclude us “free account” users. I started using Yahoo! when I was a marketing student in college (I didn’t want to pay for the software, or a dial-up account). I still use it for personal email emails at home because it is just too much trouble to change it with everyone (I also like how it screens out bulk mail for me to review and then delete).

Currently I am using my work email for the newsletters I receive from MarketingSherpa, but I live and work in recession-hit Oregon. Lots of jobs exactly like mine were downsized last fall and I had always thought I could have these newsletters sent to my Yahoo address if I were laid-off. I do receive newsletters at that address, and if I truly opted-in for them, they get read. I always unsubscribe to alleviate the clutter of unwanted or unsolicited information.”

It’s a good point; most people do have a free (or AOL) email address they keep for years just because it’s more trouble than it’s worth to keep telling all your contacts to change your address. I remember the days in 1995 when we used to throw out the sales leads, we got from the site I worked for, that used AOL email because they “must be consumers with no real money to buy our stuff.” We would never make that assumption now.

[Ha! About an hour after I posted this Blog, I went to get the mail. Guess what? The latest issue of Business2.0 Magazine had arrived, and polybagged inside it was a CD ROM to sign up for AOL. Weird but true.]