Another contest for marketers — Business 2.0 is asking for entries to their 2002 Sweet Spot Awards. You can enter in any of three categories:
– Most Innovative Campaign
– Biggest Bang for the Buck
– Best Viral Campaign
Entry deadline is Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2002. Entry info at: http://www.business2.com/sweetspot
I’m hearing a lot of unhappy stories from media buyers renting b2c email lists these days. Common grumblings include:
– List owners or brokers who lie about how many names they are renting you. Say you decide to run a test of 100k names. The broker tells you he/she sent your campaign to 100k when he/she actually sent it to 500k or more. You’re innocently thrilled with the % results, and agree to roll out to a much larger order — often millions of names — and pay cash up front. Then surprise, surprise, your response rate plummets beyond the boundaries of reason.
– List owners or brokers who refuse to offer services such as an a/b split, suppression of previously run names, or suppression against a marketer’s house file. These services are a requirement for doing business selling postal mail lists, but rarely seen in email, even though smart direct response marketers demand them.
– List owners or brokers who try to dictate the creative the client can run with them, even if the offer is appropriate for the list, non-competitive and legal. One agency media buyer just called me to rant, “My client’s repeatedly tested text versus HTML, and for him text works much better. Now this VP at [well known list brokerage] is dictating we have to run in HTML or she won’t take our order!”
– Clients who “turn & burn” by renting up to 10 million names at a shot for $1-2 CPM. The list owner still makes a fat profit because the list cost them little to build in a not-overly-permission-based manner, so their only real cost is a few cents per name to send the email. The marketer is happy because at CPMs this low, their response rate can be .0002% and still make the campaign profitable.
Why then should anyone care? Burn. The theory is that email names are getting burned out by an overload of this email, so folks are less likely to respond to anything. Which could hurt everyone. Also, spam cries rise to the heavens, where legislative and/or ISP “angels” can hear and may act on them in ways that could hurt regular permission-based marketers too. A media buyer who places orders in the millions at low prices for clients every day told me over dinner Monday night, “There’s a six month window open for this. After that people like SpamCop will shut this activity down.”
[Note: A high-ranking staffer at a fairly well-known email ad network, sent in this response to the Blog above: “I thought the part above it about the guy and his “window of six months” was funny. I’ve spoken pretty candidly with a lot of these people, and they all know the bubble will burst. They don’t care, because they’ll have made their millions and will just re-enter legitimately (not that what they’re doing is technically illegal, but it’s certainly in a grey area).
Think about it — it’s like a check floating scheme. They start with X amount of capital (as opposed to a bad check), but it’s a game against the clock – several games against several clocks. Keep feeding co-reg in one end fast enough to continue growing at a rate quicker than the unsubscribe rate, while pounding the list unmercifully until AOL bans it; move the names over to the other host (often re-supplying the new list with it’s pre-host unsubscribes) and start over.”
Thanks to everyone who came to Sherpa’s Lunch in Chicago last Wednesday. Here are my notes for those of you who couldn’t attend:
The discussion moved from tightened marketing budgets, to how to find quality B2B email rental lists, to the fact that the anthrax alert may mean “viral” marketing is too offputting a term.
– Big issue #1: Email going into bulk mail (or spam folders) at the largest ISPs.
– Big Issue #2: Agencies and interactive marketing-related vendors’ struggle with educating clients on why they should invest in online marketing. It seems that many marketers are reluctant to spend even if you can demonstrate ROI because they don’t “get” what the online channel has to offer, and they don’t understand how it differs from the offline channels.
– Big issue #3 : Double opt-in (and even sometimes single opt-in) seems not to be as common in the marketing industry as it is in marketing literature. None of the marketers in attendance indicated that they (or their clients) use double opt-in to build their own lists, but one list vendor indicated that some of their B2B lists were, in fact, double opt-in.
What was most shocking was the degree to which some marketers didn’t understand (or care about) permission marketing. One attendee explained her dilemma at telling a client they couldn’t simply guess e-mail addresses of recipients and add them to the list (without permission). Another attendee relayed that his client frequently received phone calls from other companies with opt-in lists, asking to swap lists! Is permission infinitely transferable? Certainly not!
Research shows the average American has something like 2.5 email addresses. I’ve got three accounts myself, but like most people, I don’t check all three all the time. One I check pretty much 24/7 (business) and the others I check every few days (personal). Since Hotmail has been cutting back on their free offerings — the amount of email you can keep in their system is more and more limited as they try to conserve server space — I popped $19.95 for the paid larger personal account.
And guess what advertisement I see now when I enter my personal account home page?? An ad for the $19.95 paid service. OK folks, it’s online, you know who I am. Just because you weren’t able to sell out that ad space doesn’t mean you should send me an ad meant for non-subscribers. Boy, I sure *don’t* feel special. (The power of one-to-millions marketing.)
Steve Outing, who covers the online media biz for Editor & Publisher and Poynter, just broke the news in his eMedia Tidbits group Blog that Blogger won’t be free for “commercial” users much longer. Still $35 a year is not much. I’ll gladly pay-up.
http://www.poynter.org/tidbits/2002_01_20_tidbitsarchive.htm#9050773
Want to get a radio show host or radio news program to mention your Web site? Check out this quick and useful article Eleven Do’s and Don’ts for Getting Free Radio Exposure by award-winning DJ Kimberly Henrie. My favorite tip is #4 Provide complete information on the website. Do not try to tease and make them call you to get the whole story. They probably won’t.
Scholarly publications have been hit hard over the past few years by free content on the Web, rising print production and fulfillment costs, and tight academic library budgets. For some the ability to sell subscriptions to online versions can mean the difference between staying alive or going under. Here’s a great Case Study that details how Sociological Research Online transitioned to a paid $150 per year electronic subscription model. Even if you’re not in scholarly publishing, you may find the technical details of how the journal handles IP authentication useful.
Best quote, “Subscriptions are a necessary evil. In order to maintain the quality and secure the future of the journal some income is required.” You can say that again.
Just got off the phone with the Chief Marketing Officer for Orbitz who told me they ONLY do ROI-based media buys (i.e. CPA). A thoroughly unprofessional anger rose in me on behalf of all the publishers who are fighting the fight to keep CPM alive online. (You know the arguments — branding’s not paid for, the publisher can’t control the conversion to sales or creative, it’s not fair
…. blah-de-blah ad nauseum.)
But then I forced myself to forget kneejerk reactions and really listen to his point of view (after all that’s my job.) He said something interesting, “Why should we treat online like traditional media, when it’s better than traditional media?” And I remembered our own experience recently when a newsletter publisher we run ads with decided to switch from an affiliate relationship with us to a straight pay-for-the-ad deal. After we
tallied results, that publisher would have made three times more money if they had stuck with the affiliate deal!
So, OK, thanks to Michael Sands at Orbitz, I’m now undecided on the whole CPA vs CPM front. There probably isn’t any right answer. The only real problematic spot I see is that less knowledgeable marketers than Sands may try to use his example to bludgeon media owners into accepting CPA when it’s not a good idea. Namely when the marketer’s creative or offer sucks, when the campaign is branding vs. direct response, when the landing page is a worthless conversion vehicle, or when they don’t have decent measurement systems in place.
Maybe what online publishers need to do is add a new section to their media kits specifically explaining what hoops a marketer must jump through to be considered for a CPA deal. What the ground rules are. So, if you can make more money in certain circumstances with CPA, you are set up to do so. But it’s clear up front what the ground rules are for accepting deals.
It would also be nice to see some guidance from any of the related associations to their members on which CPA deals to accept and how to do so safely. Plus an outreach educational campaign to CPA media buyers explaining what they have to live up to in terms of measurement, creative, etc., to make this work. All I see now is a lot of rearguard action — people screaming “No! No!
Today the UK’s MarketingMonitor newsletter published a really great Case Study on a viral marketing campaign that a UK-based interactive agency used over the holidays to get attention and new clients. If you’re remotely interested in viral marketing (and who isn’t?) then definitely
click here and scroll to the Case Study.
(BTW: A “cracker” is not a salty snack in the UK. It’s a brightly wrapped tube with a little gift inside. You pull at the ends, it makes a cracking noise and the gift pops out.)
OK I usually don’t do this (because it would take all day and is mean to boot), but I am outing a company for spamming us:
We just received this form letter which was mailed to an email address (ads@marketingsherpa.com) stripped from our Web site. I checked and nobody on the Sherpa side has ever personally met or contacted these people. I think in a day and age when ISPs are all desperate to stop spam, that it’s freakish that one would send an unsolicited sales note to an email harvested from our site. The note:
“National ISP Co. is a business class bulk email friendly ISP.
We are dedicated to supporting your company with your
email advertising program.
our website address is >>
WWW.NATIONAL-ISP.ORG
please call our office for more information and prices.
Phone: 336.841.5156 and ask for Paul or Len.
ask about our referral program”
