Ok it’s time for the official BAN on email marketing campaigns using generic holiday messages. Yes, your lovely email campaign may be the only one you send this year saying, “Holiday Special”, “Holiday savings!” or “Celebrate the Season”, but it’s the 199th with that style subject line that your recipients will get. (Today alone I got at least a half dozen.)
So, make sure you get some far less generic terms in your campaign subject lines — and put them as high up as possible (vs. at the end of the line) so they are not cut off by email systems that only accept 20 character subject lines.
Thanks to MarketingSherpa reader Tim Scheel who sent in this update on the AT&T switchover on the 850,000 accounts they bought from Excite in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere:
“AT & T has promised that addresses would only change from the @ sign on. Our address was tscheele@home.com but has now changed to tscheele@attbi.com. So newsletter publishers can probably take all of their bounces and change them using the formula above and at least be able to reach AT & T @home customers.
, Associate Editor of Ezine-Tips, has posted a useful overview article on what’s going on with Excite @home email addresses, as well as some nasty problems for email newsletter publishers who use bCentral’s system to send out their issues. Check out her article here.
http://ezine-tips.com/articles/management/20011204.shtml
Sherpa reader Barbara Kaplowitz just emailed in her favorite bad-web-design page:thispagecannotbedisplayed.com, which reminds me of the advice EVERY Internet marketing consultant on this planet has given in their newsletters and/or speechs since the beginning of time (and yet still most of us blithely ignore it – including bad-me) which is:
When your users try to access a page on your site that’s not there anymore, or their link was slightly wrong, don’t just send them to an ordinary “Error 404: File not found” page that your techies out up when they built the site. Instead, use the page to redirect the visitors to … well, wherever you want them to go!
[Note: after I posted this, Hollis Thomases of WebAdvantage.net emailed in, “Give it time and let it go for as long as you can stand it: http://www.binaryinc.org/404.html“
Here I am at the @d:tech online marketing conference in NYC. I just ran into Craig Sherman, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer at Ancestry.com– and he was very psyched, “We just hit 500,000 paid subscribers yesterday!”
Way cool — and three weeks ahead of his budgeted deadline too. Ancestry charges consumers an average of $49-59 a year to access their HUGE content database on American family histories.
Craig has been behind the marketing wheel there for just over a year now, and has helped turn the red-ink dot-com into a profitable sub site. I expect Ancestry will be in the running to beat WSJ.com and ConsumerReports.org’s sub numbers soon — it’s gonna be a neck and neck race.
If you’re like me, no matter how your company site is improved, the glass is always half empty and all you see is the stuff that’s not as good as it could be. So, today why not go look at some really, truly awful Web sites, and then you can think, “Hey, we’re not so bad after all.”
My three favorite spots to surf bad Web design:
1. The Web Awards— Sad but true. These awards are the result of creative Web designers run amuck. Loooong Flash intros with pounding canned music, navigation bars that use cutesy icons instead of obvious text terms, black or colored backgrounds with white text … you know the drill. (BTW: yes I did ask them if a usability or marketing expert were included on the panel of judges. No reply.)
2. Web Pages That Suck and Bad Designs are usability guru Jakob Neilsen’s favorite sites to surf for awful design.
3. pDom’s 10 Worst Celebrity Sites reveals the ugly side of Hollywood. (Feel really sorry for Maureen McCormick.)
Sad news on the Excite @Home email address transition front — it appears that Excite will NOT be forwarding messages sent to its address to the new emails customers are assigned. For Sherpa this means we could lose as much of 5% of our hard-won opt-in list this week. (Ouch!) I’m sending an emergency message to my subscribers to let them know if they have Excite-related accounts, they must switch the addresses immediately or lose
service.
In the meantime, here’s an update from Ben Isaacson, Executive Director of AIM the Association for Interactive Media :
“After hearing back from AT&T, it looks like this is Excite@Home’s issue not forwarding on the emails. AT&T didn’t seem to take that much interest in it, but referred me to the Excite people in a way that says that things are pretty bad between the company. It sounds like they’re just trying to milk a few more $$ from AT&T before going under.
I’ve left a message with my contact at Cox as well and will get back to you about it.
As far as I’m concerned, this represents a stronger need for ECOA services. While Veripost-Return Path, Fresh Address, and others are building their companies, it’s times like these when we wished that they were set up at the same time as the email list
business many years ago. I would imagine that in future ISP consolidations, ECOA will be a critical factor.
Best,
Ben
Ever had your phone ring and then when you picked it up, it went dead? It may have been a fax spammer’s collection technology which dials numbers seeking fax machine responses. When they get the fax signal instead of a human (or voice mail) they add the number to their database and sell it to other spammers.
The fax spam problem is now turning into an email spam problem because so many people use email accounts to receive digitized faxes these days. Jeff Adelman, VP General Counsel of J2 Communications (which owns emailed fax systems eFax and J2.com) grouses,“Every day we get hit by this. It’s a huge problem” Not the least because recipients like me (see my 11/16 blog) think it’s eFax that’s spamming us when this stuff shows up in our email in-boxes.
eFax is fighting back aggressively by collecting as many offender faxes as possible and reporting them to the FCC. Plus this month they are unveiling a new Web page that eFax and J2 customers can use to report unsolicited faxes. Bravo!
Looks like we can definitely expect to see a lot more online and email marketing by magazines in the coming year. Nearly every single one of the more than two dozen circulation marketing experts interviewed in Nov 2001’s Circulation Management Magazine, said their big challenge was replacing costly (and increasingly less responsive) direct postal mail campaigns with something else such as email/Internet marketing.
Chip Block, currently publishing strategist for Ziff Davis and Vice Chair USAPubs (a subscription agency), who is one of the deans of circulation marketing, said in the issue that he wonders if paid circulation is dead. He noted, “If annual consumer magazine circulation revenue is now about $10 billion as the MPA’s data indicate, is it possible that we’re spending $9.5 billion or somewhere in that ballpark to produce that revenue?”
My take is — hey consumers are paying $10 billion per year for magazine subscriptions. Whoopee! Let’s not abandon those $10 billion just because they cost a lot to make via traditional marketing campaigns. Let’s explore every way possible to get a lower cost per acquisition. Got some feedback? Email me at editor@contentbiz.com
Warning email newsletter publishers! With the bankruptcy of Excite, related email addresses (including @home addresses) are being changed to new emails. The users’ new email address will depend on whatever cable system is taking their account (Comcast, Cox, AT&T and others are taking over depending on region.) The changeover is staggered. I have some subscribers who say their @home addresses no longer work, while others are unaware of the change.
Unfortunately you can’t just guess what your @home subscribers’ new emails will be because the address is changing in some cases more radically than just appending a new @ ending. (That’s because the cable cos may have conflicting customers who’ve already claimed some email addresses.)
So, this week you probably should send a message to the @home names on your file … or at least pop a message at the top of your issues, that folks need to remember to change their email addresses in your system!!!!
In the meantime, Ben Isaacson who heads AIM , is calling related members such as Cox, AT&T Broadband, Veripost and ReturnPath.net to learn how they will be assisting list owners and the public with the change. He’ll get back to me with more news later and I’ll post it here.
