Lesson learned: I’ve gotten rid of the ability for visitors to post comments on this Blog because nobody ever used it. Instead, all of you continued to email me, lots and lots and lots. Which is not a bad thing. Just a learning thing. People would prefer to email their comments to another human being than to post them on a virtual bulletin board. At least ContentBiz people anyway.
Internet marketing consultant and speaker Philippa Gamse emailed in this to me from her computer just now while in a plane en route to Hawaii. (How cool is tech, huh?):
“I’m doing a lot of article submissions these days as part of my ‘get my name out’ campaign 😉 I also have articles on my website with a generic permission to publish as long as my copyright and byline is included. I’m definitely seeing good results from this.
However, my ISP recently received a spam complaint from a recipient of an e-zine that they alleged they’d never subscribed to. They used software (I think it was SpamCop) which generates complaints not only to the publisher, but to the ISP’s of all contributors and sponsors.
I’m not sure that I think this is fair – if we submit the article in good faith to what we believe is an opt-in newsletter, or if someone takes my article [from my site] with my generic permission, should I be responsible for any ensuing spam complaints? When we get the lawyers seriously involved in unsolicited e-mail suits, this could get serious.”
This is a very good point. If your content is syndicated for use in an emailed newsletter, does that mean you have to first check with the opt-in procedures of that publisher? What if someone picks up your headlines and sends those out without even telling you? Right now, and perhaps forever, you’ll be safe legally
because you’re not the list owner or sender. But that doesn’t mean a spamming newsletter using your content can’t hurt your brand name in the marketplace.
(BTW: Less you think I’m being over-the-top on this, in the past four days several more content owners have stepped forward with similar problems.)
Here’s a new twist on subscription marketing: Mad.co.uk, who publish trade magazines for marketers in the UK, just sent a broadcast email to their opt-in list offering “£100 FREE British Airways Holiday vouchers with every mad.co.uk subscription!” Unfortunately the email’s subject line was the stunningly-bland “Special Offer” but who knows – that might work in the UK.
I used to be the US copywriter for a very famous British publishing company and was always stunned at how utterly different a copy that got Brits to respond was from American copy. Veteran Al Goodloe of Publisher’s Multinational Direct once told me great American copy, when translated properly, would do very well in almost any country on earth, including Germany, France, Pac Rim, etc. Any country, that is, except Great Britain where you simply have to hire a native. Our “language barrier” is too deep.
Link to Mad.co.uk’s offer:
http://sales.centaur.co.uk/browserange.asp?rangeID=46
Link to Publisher’s Multinational Direct
http://www.publishersmultinational.com/PMD2.html
How loud should your rich media email be? I’ve heard some complaints this morning from folks who just received a new eTrade campaign in their in-boxes sent via RadicalMail. My advice, assume the recipient’s speakers are set on high and their office/cubicle is very quiet. Anything that would seem blaring is too loud. It’s not like TV or radio where there already was a constant noise level. Do you really want recipients first (and only) reaction to your lovely rich media campaign to be “Oh my god, how do I turn this thing off?!”
Freelance ad guy S. Tristan Hartley (who left the high life as Bozell’s Interactive Technology Director to return to the good life in Omaha NE) emailed in his current experience on the bad-names-in-b2c-“opt-in”-email-lists front:
“I’ve built several mail campaign management centers allowing my clients to send/manage/track their email campaigns. I started banning rented lists about 9 month ago. I have a similar policy to Ben, shutting their accounts down, yet a couple clients still try to sneak them by. Personally, other than my philosophical beliefs completely 100% against spam being compromised by association, I don’t get burned by them doing it as I go the extra step of putting each clients mail center behind its own domain with them listed as all but the technical contact. Thus resulting in them dealing with all the blacklist problems and complaints.
But I can definitely tell when a rented list has been used. Complaints easily run 15 – 1 versus an opt-in list (and the 15 – 1 ratio is conservative!!!)
To get around my shut down policy, I’ve seen clients hire temps to transcribe rented list addresses into their web-based personal address book or manually enter them through their opt-in sign-up form and even having a new hires claim that it is “his/her personal contact list” from a previous job. It is quite interesting to give them a lesson in reading a log file or showing them the datestamps on each record in the database–you had 60 sign-ups an hour for 8 hours a day the last 15 business days straight…hahaha.
Also, The Story of Nadine also hit home. I have one address on sh2.com that someone from the domain sh3.com mistakenly entered (which has been confirmed). That was about 3 years ago and today that address receives about 8 mails a day, some of which are even from ‘reputable’ marketers.”
Just got my first issue of the Data Conversion Laboratory newsletter. The Company converts content into digital formats such as XML, but the newsletter is definitely not one of those annoying look-how-great-we-are marketing pieces. In fact, if you’re remotely interested in digital content, or epublishing, there’s something for everyone.
In this issue, they reveal that Europeans are (far) more likely to pay for wireless content than Web site content, pens are going digital, and what the differences are between the three different types of PDFs. Also, for document conversion questions, check out their library at the link below.
(BTW: No that wasn’t a paid announcement, to my knowledge I’ve never met anyone from the Lab. However, if I ever do, I’ll definitely complain about the way they turn their name into an acronym and fling it about everywhere. Unless you are a very, very, very famous company and willing to put zillions behind branding an acronym, USE YOUR WHOLE NAME. It’s too hard for people to remember who or what the heck you are. Branding 101.)
Newsletter -> http://www.dclab.com/dclnews0402.asp
Technical Library -> http://www.dclab.com/dcllibrary.asp
Lydia Stark, Director Ad Sales Internet Wire, wrote this zippy and insightful response to my Blog of 1/25/02 when I suggested that publishers start spelling out CPA/CPC deal rules and regs in their media kits:
“Re: CPA deals — yes, they make my skin crawl too. What bothers me most is the smug attitude from some of these advertisers who come at me with ‘we really got ripped off when we bought on a CPM basis, so we’re only doing CPA’s now’.”
Perhaps long ago the CPM’s were excessively high (especially those charged by the major portals and sites). It was a case of jumping on the bandwagon without any attention to the details which determine whether an advertising campaign is successful or not. The ‘first movers’ threw $$$ into Internet advertising with abandon, until their investors started demanding accountability.
Then all of a sudden, these advertisers did the ‘marketing math’ only to discover they weren’t achieving a reasonable ROI.
The pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, in my humble opinion. Online publishers are being ‘punished’ by advertisers who feel they must regain the upper hand in media negotiations. I couldn’t agree more with your premise that publishers need to establish the ground rules for accepting CPA deals. At Internet Wire, we ask to see samples of creative, we ask what the offer is, what incentives are being offered, and how this advertiser differentiates himself from all the others in his category. As a smaller, niche site with only 500,000 subscribers, we can’t compete with the ‘big boys’, i.e. Yahoo, AOL, etc.
CPA and/or CPC deals appear to work when the subscriber base is large enough (in the tens of millions). It’s all volume driven. If you can deliver a sizable audience as a media owner, you at least have half a chance of making some money on one of these deals. Otherwise, you’re giving millions of impressions or deliveries away and not getting much in return. Trust me, I’ve seen this with countless CPA/CPC deals we’ve run or been presented with.
CRM Reality Check?
On Friday, I interviewed Coremetrics, NetIQ/WebTrends, and Responsys (which just acquired NetAcumen) about what they’re offering and what their clients are requesting with respect to metrics. One message came through loud and clear: Everyone is looking for the benefits of CRM without the hassle of implementation. All three are offering some kind of campaign measurement that goes beyond Web site analytics. All three offer implementation time measured in days, rather than months. Does the availability of, and demand for marketing campaign metrics mean that the demand for CRM is dead?
Of course, CRM isn’t dead anymore than the demand for the S-class Mercedes is dead. It’s just that in this economy, more people are opting for the C-class. The metrics they are offering include tying online marketing campaigns to sales, calculating ROI, and calculating lifetime customer value. What’s missing? 50+% failure rate of CRM implementation, multi-million dollar up-front investment cost, and multi-month implementation. Right now, there’s no multi-channel component, but all three systems will let you export your data for integration into your existing offline systems.
Interestingly, the key that most marketers are looking for from CRM — the ability to mail a subsequent campaign based on Web site activity and responses to previous marketing campaigns — is available in this CRM-light that these three companies are offering. CRM may provide a 360-degree view of the customer, but marketers are satisfied getting the view of the customer that relates to their ability to target the customer based on previously expressed interests, and frankly, I can’t blame them.
Boy – my Blog of 1/30/02 about the ugly underbelly of the email list rental business has generated a lot of positive feedback. I’m feeling like the Fox News of Internet marketing. But, hey, it’s all true and people should know. Here’s a letter you’ll enjoy from Sherpa reader Ben Chestnut of MailChimp:
I run a product that helps small companies deliver HTML emails. I’ve found that whenever a client uses a rented list (and not the list they collected on their own site), spam complaints skyrocket, and we get all kinds of warnings from the spamcops and blackhole list sites. They end up getting so burned, that they never go back to rental lists.
It got to the point where we now don’t allow rented lists anymore—our users have to check a box that verifies that “all recipients specifically requested this email from me.” Users in violation of this rule get their accounts shut down. My advice to all my clients is to stay the heck away from rented lists, and to collect your own. It’s the only way to get meaningful results, and the only way to NOT offend a bunch of people, and taint your brand.”
Ben also forwarded a link to The Story of Nadine, which I swear you absolutely have to click on. This real story starts when a woman mis-enters her email address into an opt-in form on a sweepstakes site in March 2000. The head of the ISP that the confirmation was sent to, noted that it was a bad address and alerted the list owner. The name was then sold on to be used by more than a dozen email marketers including Harris Polls, OurHouse, SmarterKids, AT&T and Topica. As of February 2, 2002 almost two years after the initial mis-spelled opt-in, this email address has received 100s of messages from marketers.
Worst of all, although the ISP has repeatedly requested various list owners and list users to remove the name from their lists, the mail keeps on coming. Plus some of the players involved – who either rented the list or allowed their list host systems to be used to send messages to that name– include several proponents of the new Truste anti-spam certificate: 24/7, Bigfoot Interactive and Virtumundo.
My advice after reading the many letters readers sent in is, check every single opt-in source yourself before renting a list. I know if you have to get messages out to millions of names a week to meet your goals, that’s almost impossible. But it’s the only way to be safe.
