MarketingSherpa Blog

Spam Alert #2 A marketer at a very large opt-in-only emailer (who asked to remain anonymous) just told me that spammers are ripping off his opt-out line at the bottom of his email, in addition to his “from” line. Now, “from” lines pretending to be somebody else are nothing new, but I hadn’t heard this opt-out line rip-off before.

In effect these spammers are sending millions of people email that looks just like it comes from the brand name opt-in emailer. The only difference is when the viewer clicks through to purchase on the offer, they go to the spammer’s Web site. However, if they try to opt-out of the list, or complain that they’ve been spammed, their email goes to the brand-name’s customer service department.

My source told me that the attacks are frequent enough that his company has set procedures in place to cope. These are:

“First, we track down the spammer and send the spammer a Cease and Desist letter. Then we notify the spammer’s ISP and ask the ISP to shutdown the site. Then we contact Yahoo, Hotmail, or whomever the spammer sent the spam from and let them know that it was not us and ask them to shutdown that ‘from’ account… Next, we contact the merchant account/credit card processor and let them know what happened and ask them to take action if spam is against their policies…then we answer each complaint and tell them that is was not us. Lastly we contact each RBL and explain what happened.”

I suspect this will not be the last we hear of problems of this nature, and urge every regular emailer to set up a contingency plan now to handle problems like this in the future. Bah humbug!

This morning I received an email from LL Bean with the unusual holiday subject line,“Shipping Confirmation (may contain gift information)” Then the confirmation email itself started with the following note:

PLEASE NOTE: The following message may contain information about gifts to be delivered from L.L.Bean. If you share this email address with someone else–and have not recently placed an order at L.L.Bean–please do not read on. We don’t want to spoil a surprise!

All too often, especially in quest of growing sales though personalization tech, e-retailers and e-marketers forget that sometimes two or more people use the same computer, the same store account log-in, and even the same email account. LL Bean hits the mark with this thoughtful note.

How NOT to do a holiday card — if you’re planning on sending an eCard to your list of customers and prospects, send the card in the email itself as an HTML or rich media email, instead of using an eCard service that requires that people click through to “pick up” their card.

Why? Well, I’ll bet few people will bother click through. Especially once they have gotten more than 3 messages from various vendors and businesses telling them, “Click here to see our card for you.” Instead of looking warm and caring, you look cookie-cutter and chintzy. You’ve just told me I’m not worth the expense of a printed card, and you’re going to make me work to go pick something up that’s obviously being mass distributed to everyone who’s not worth the expense of a printed card.

This type of eCard does have its place when used on dates of personal significance such as birthdays or to congratulate someone on something they’ve just accomplished (a new baby, winning an account, a great SEC filing, whatever). But when used to mark mass holidays they completely miss the boat.

Spam alert! A Sherpa reader, who requested to remain anonymous, just phoned me to say his company’s Web site’s search engine rankings have been hurt because competitors have spammed the search engines pretending to be from his site. As search engine optimization (SEO) experts will tell you, many search engines, will actually drop your site from their results if you’ve submitted it repeatedly during a short time period (such as once every few weeks). Unfortunately search engines don’t offer any security precautions to be sure the person submitting a site actually works for that site, or an authorized SEO firm working for that site.

Are you putting together your year-end issues now? Our top 10 stories of the year, etc. Gotta love them, they are so easy to toss together editorially and readers adore them.

Instead of choosing his personal top 10 faves for his year end issue, Brian Livingston, Editor of InfoWorld’s E-Business Secrets
newsletter, asked his techie for a report showing the issues and the individual stories that got the highest clicks from readers in the past year. The results surprised him:

1. Issue open rates (the percent of readers who opened an issue in their email) repeatedly and consistently varied by as much as 100% on a weekly basis. Although National holidays definitely affected readership, “newsy” times also made a difference. Livingston’s most opened issue ever was his first published after 9/11.

Because of these dramatic variances, Livingston finds it more useful to track open rates on an averaged eight-week basis than on an issue-by-issue basis to determine how successful he is in pleasing readers.

2. Livingston’s email newsletter features story summaries with links to read more back at the site. So, he also tracked the
clicks on these stories. He found that although “serious stories like ‘How to Avoid the Top Five E-Business Mistakes'” were
heavily clicked on, “the click throughs for these things were dwarfed by the numbers for the more wild and crazy Web links,” such as Steve Ballmer’s now infamous monkey boy video.

Armed with this data, he’s now planning a reader survey to ask, “Do my readers want me to produce a Wacky Web Week report, or do
they just have a healthy interest in the lighter side of e-business?”

3. Livingston also discovered that for him position did not affect a link’s click rate. In fact, often stories at the very bottom of a newsletter were 45% more likely to be clicked on than stories at the very top or middle! I suspect this is the case because his issues are always structured into three sections: top
stories, tech reviews and top 10 links. As readers get used to the sections, they naturally scroll to their favorite each week,
ignoring the others.

This is good news for newsletter ad sales because it gives you data you can use to convince advertisers to take a lower position
than the much-vaunted top one.

A super clever idea for a big brand name Web site — Fedex.com features an interactive form that visitors can use to request that a Fedex executive speak at their conference or meeting. I like this not only because it probably eases their PR staff’s workload and streamlines the whole getting speakers out there process, but also it helps promote the very idea of having a Fedex exec speak at your meeting when you see it as an option on the About Us navigation bar. I may even steal this idea for the Sherpa site someday.

An email marketer called me up today to let me know he was testing “from” lines and since I’d written a blog about it (see below) he wanted to let me know how it worked out.

He tested a male name, a female name, and the term “customer service” to a 100% opt-in house list of mostly IT pros. Turns out all three “froms” did about equally well. But it made me think of two things. One was that he should test sending from his brand name instead of a personal name, and see if that improves response. (He says he’ll do that and get back to me). The second, was I wonder if female “from” names will start underperforming soon.

It’s not that I’m sexist, it’s that the VAAAAAAST majority of yucky porn-related spam I receive in various email boxes all comes from female names. Often, these days the subject lines are fairly innocuous. The spammers are hoping I’ll click thinking that I know this person. So, nowadays I view email from female names I don’t know more and more suspiciously. Anyway, it’s a theory.

If you’ve also tested “from” lines, email me at AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com with your results and let me know if I should keep them anonymous or not. Thanks!

Not a paid commercial announcement: I’ve been a big admirer of Leslie Laredo of Laredo Group for some time now. She’s one of the top ad sales consultants in the online content industry. (Folks such as Variety.com bring her in for occasional 1-2 day training sessions for their sales team and then they all go forth and sell heaps more).

Anyway Leslie just posted a fabulous note on the Online- Advertising discussion group, in which she talks about what she learned hosting the online ad sales panel discussion at NYC’s Internet World this week. Best quote:

“One of the most important issues that is not often discussed is how media companies design their sites. Most sales professionals/executives I speak with have sites designed without their input. I continue to ask, ‘How many site designers have ever sold an ad, went into a sales meeting with clients/agencies?’

“From my small and unscientific survey, the answer is none and the fact is most designers come out of editorial, technical, graphics fields….which is not bad, nor my complaint. But if site designers and UI specialists continue to do their work without the understanding what the media issues are or what the media buying community is concerned about, we will continue to aim the gun at the banner and not at the site.”

To read the rest of her post you’ll need to go to the link below and type “Laredo” into the search box:

http://www.o-a.com/archives-frame.html

You know how ad sales people always pitch you on buying multiple ads because they work better? Being from a direct mail background myself, I didn’t have much experience in space advertising so I always secretly wondered if that pitch was more about selling more ads versus response reality.

Well now I’m singing like one of the Monkeys, “I’m a believer!”

For three weeks now, I’ve been running the same ad over and over again in Ezine Tips, a daily email newsletter to the email newsletter publishing community. At first we got an order or two from it. Then we start getting more. Now it’s a steady stream of orders. Why would the same ad seen by the same people every day still bring in orders after three weeks? (In fact still be going just as strong.) Maybe trust built up over time, maybe they are just now ready to buy, maybe they don’t open and read every single daily issue, maybe the headline is so pounded into their heads that now they take notice of it. I dunno.

All I know is, I’m still getting orders. Every day. This is why advertising regularly in email newsletters works way better than a single direct mail shot, or a big splashy one-time print ad. Happy dance.

Internal co-reg heaven. Sam Michel, publisher of a variety of email newsletters and discussion groups targeting British Internet-related professionals, emails in that, “Since using co- reg internally (i.e. when you sign up for one of our lists, promoting our others) we’ve seen registrations increase by 40% overall. On average 75% of subscribers are signing up for more than one list. We will be selling co-registration space to other media owners and clients from the start of 2002.”

He also noted his biggest challenge is the term “co-registration” itself as many potential buyers still have no idea what he’s
talking about.