MarketingSherpa Blog

A West-coast mailing list processing company is offering a new service — they append email names to business names and addresses. Although this is legal, the process makes spamming possible which could be incredibly harmful for the naive business marketers buying the service.

When we called the company to find out where they were getting these business executives email information from, they told us they had about 25 sources whose names they wouldn’t reveal, but yes many were trade magazine publishers. It’s common practice for trades to rent out snail mail lists and even phone numbers, so perhaps these publishers don’t realize the damage they are inflicting by also renting email names they’ve collected from subscribers. Folks, renting email lists is COMPLETELY different from other lists. You are setting yourself up for negative repercussions if you are doing so without clearly stated permission from each subscriber and without triple checking the purpose for which each renter will use the name. If one of your subscribers gets spammed because you rented out their name, they could blame you. And emotions run very high when it comes to spamming these days.

So, from now on be sure you strip out email addresses BEFORE you let any lists or databases out of house.

MarketItRight.com & EXP.com; AdOUtlet & SpotTaxi; RealTIME Media & StoreRunner …etc., etc. Is it the cool Fall weather that makes everybody want to hop in to bed together? Just joking — actually we think there are two factors behind the partnership frenzy currently dominating the Internet advertising and marketing services industry:

1) On the client side, “Integrated Marketing” is the dominant trend. Campaigns in just one media aren’t effective enough, everyone wants to coordinate the banner with the direct mail with the space ad, with the radio campaign, with the ezine, and so on and so on. Vendors who can make overstressed marketers’ jobs easier by providing multiple-channel solutions are winning accounts these days.

2) On the vendor side, despite the fact that the industry as a whole continues healthy growth (especially with so many traditional offline marketers adding online to their budget these days and unabated international interest), everybody sees consolidation ahead. Smack dab ahead. As in Engage fires 175 people last week ahead. The more partners you’ve got, the more friends to see you through it.

How did virtual concierge VIPdesk create a Web site that their big business clients such as Mastercard and Citibank love to use? Mary Naylor, VIPDesk’s Founder and CEO told us, “when you’re selling business-to-business online, you should put together a client advisory board. Ask them what’s important to you? What information do you need to make decisions? Even through your inside team — business development, marketing and site design — has great site improvement ideas, you still need to get feedback from clients before making changes.” Naylor’s team runs proposed site upgrades by clients by sending them a canned demo on a CD-ROM or via email and then scheduling a meeting (often on-site) to go through the proposed changes one-on-one. Even though these meetings take a full two-three hours each, Naylor says, “Clients very much want to give input and are happy to provide it. Revising a Web site should be a two-way partnership where you’re both solving problems in a mutually beneficial fashion.”

From our London Correspondent:

Web site usability is the number one factor in your success – in fact, let’s face it, it’s probably the top TEN factors. Forget banners; forget free offers, and all that malarkey – if you’ve driven traffic to your site but your users can’t work it out, then you’re in big trouble.

Want to check your usability? Take our quick quiz:

1. Starting from your home page, how many clicks does it take to get to customer service? How many to get to an opt-in feature of some sort (a newsletter sign-up, a membership form, crikey – how about an order form)? The answer to those questions wouldn’t be “too many” would it…?

2. Check your traffic logs to find out which ‘side doors’ (pages that aren’t your home page) visitors use most frequently to visit your site. When you go to those pages, do they have the navigational features that enable people to find their way around the rest of your site as easily as if they’d come in through the FRONT door? Are you SURE…?

3. Look up your home page on a really crappy old computer with a slow modem. Try old versions of IE and Netscape. Try an old Mac. Does it load in under 30 seconds (or, ideally, 20)? Does everything look right no matter which browser or computer you use?

4. Scale down the size of your browser window a little so that it doesn’t fill your monitor, and view your pages through it. Many visitors don’t open windows all the way. Does the small version contain the critical items a visitor would need to find his or her way around your site? Or is that ultra-critical part cut off somewhere at the side?

How did you do? Good, we hope. Either way, we thought we’d point out some of the best usability resources we’ve found…

1. http://www.UseIt.com: Usability God Jakob Nielsen’s Web site, includes news, useful links and site reviews. Bookmark this one.

2. ‘Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity’ – Jakob Nielsen’s book, a global bestseller. You should have a copy on your desk (and maybe one on your bedside table as well)…

3. http://www.dashdot.org/: News and usability information for wireless designers. Updated by designers from six countries.

4. ‘The WebWord.com Usability Interviews’ by John Rhodes. This collection of interviews with the world’s top 24 experts in usability and design features useful tips for techies and marketers alike. It’s only available as a PDF file from MightyWords.com (a snip at US$3.95 we think you’ll agree)… http://www1.mightywords.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp?theisbn=EB00001426

5. Nielsen Norman Group User Experience World Tour: This seminar is coming to London in late November (and, boy, do we hope we can score a press pass!) For information go to: http://www.nngroup.com/worldtour

6. http://www.WebSitesThatSuck.com: The idea is you can learn good design from seeing what’s bad. Be sure to sign up for the Daily Sucker while you’re there!!

7. And for the true test… ask your parents!! Yes, ask your parents to go to your Web site and accomplish a task (you know – order something, contact customer service, sign up for a newsletter, find information… whatever you decide is critical to your site’s success). Sit beside them while they do this but do NOT speak, point with your finger or even wiggle (it will be difficult, we know). Everything they can’t figure out quickly and easily by themselves is something you’ve got to change. Sorry, but it’s true!! No, it doesn’t matter if your target audience is more Web savvy than your parents. They have less patience and motivation than your parents do to surf your stuff. At the end of the day, it’s all about pleasing the lowest common denominator. If a site’s good enough for Mum and Dad, it’s probably good enough for everyone!

This week’s Faux Pas comes to us from the US of A. We hope you don’t mind – it’s such a BIG Faux Pas we couldn’t possibly have let it slip by without telling you…

eCountries (the ‘Global Business Network’) is a B-to-B publishing and e-commerce service that has recently launched following several months of previews. Just prior to their launch, eager to publicise the forthcoming big day (as you might expect), eCountries sent an email to over 500 of the top Internet executives worldwide. Can you guess what they did? That’s right – they put every single email address in the ‘To’ field, totally forgetting about that handy little ‘Bcc’ option. Well, we’ve just three words for them – mistake, mistake, mistake…

Did any of the aforementioned top Internet executives complain about this breach of privacy? Most heartily!! And, as if to add fuel to the fire, the complaints were seen by everybody on the list too! We hear it was some days before eCompanies had the heart to approach the list again, this time with an embarrassed apology…

People are making more international telephone calls right now, it seems. Apparently, it has something to do with that big sports thing going on in Australia at the moment. In order to exploit this, and knowing that, for most people in the UK, such calls are jolly expensive, online telephone company Quip.co.uk are currently offering a 30-minute international call for one penny to anyone who registers at their Web site.

How’s it doing? So far so good, says Quip’s Tricia Tomiyoshi-Marsom – hundreds of new users signed up on the first day before any marketing took place (thanks to good old word-of-mouth). In fact, the promotion should have ended yesterday but it has been so successful that Quip have decided to extend it for a further week.

Of course, what’s REALLY important with promotions like this is how many of the new users it has encouraged come BACK after they’ve had their (almost) freebie.

“There are probably quite a few dmoz.org editors among us, and most will be familiar with techniques such as duplicate submissions and keyword loading (submitting the same site to multiple categories under different names/URLs and using lots of keywords in the submitted title/description, respectively). What some newbie marketers think they will get away with in this area is often dumbfounding, but boy, do I have a ripper for you!

“Recently I checked out a submitted ‘Win on the Web’ site and found it to be the AllAdvantage sweepstakes page. Shome mistake, shurely? No, I went in and checked – and there it was. Someone had actually submitted this competition page from the AllAdvantage site to the directory under a different name, complete with his or her affiliated link as the URL!

“AllAdvantage users are well known for their unique combination of naivety and greed, but could this trend actually be accelerating? It’s already gone way beyond ‘acquaintance spam’ and is currently a constant – and growing – irritation to community groups across the Web. The trademark of an amateur site used to be web awards, now it’s an AllAdvantage banner.

“Forget viral marketing – this is a rash that’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

…says our ranter Tim Ireland, Director of Marketing at http://www.designercity.com

For the past five months, The Industry Standard has been touting it’s free rooftop parties as something that not every Tom Dick and Harry can get into. You have to apply for an invitation, and the site clearly states, “By requesting an invitation … This does NOT mean you are invited to a specific party. You must receive an email invitation from John Battelle, Chairman and CEO of The Standard in order to attend a Rooftop party.”

So, naturally we were psyched to be selected to receive an invitation from John Battelle himself for the DC party this week. When we clicked through to RSVP, it sounded deliciously exclusive, stating “Your invitation is for you and one guest only, and is non-transferable. Please rsvp for yourself and your guest. If you do not rsvp for your guest on this page, your guest will only be admitted if he/she arrives with you. Please note that we will be checking our original invitation list at the door.”

That night we abandoned our jeans for something more suit-like and ventured forth … into an enormous crowd made up of everybody from millionaire dot-com CEOs to sales guys from teensy local Web design shops! If somebody was excluded, we’d like to know who. We also suspect the more snooty of the crowd may not show at the next DC Standard event (but we could be wrong.)

Never mind. The crowd represented an unusually broad cross section of the DC Internet crowd. From Stackig media directors to beltway bandit techies. Plus you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a member of the press. Everybody was in a good mood (possibly because food and drinks were free, plentiful and exotic.) Networking was happening and interesting connections were made.

Best tchotchke? Well not the way-overused-by-others little metal box of extra-strong mints from the Washington Post. Banana Republic wins this time, for handing out grey, stretch t-shirts to everyone … without a logo! We were most impressed by the fact that the shirts were still individually encased in plastic so no pawing hands could sully them, and all sizes were available, even XS.

On the heels of its comprehensive ecommerce study (see our 8/03/00 issue), the School, Home, & Office Products Association (SHOPA) plans to expand its research services for members marketing online. According to SHOPA President, Steven L. Jacober, member companies are finding that B-to-B online marketing can be “a very cost effective way to market” with similar margins to offline marketing channels. But in the excitement to market online, technology shouldn’t get in the way. Campaigns that are “clear, concise and uncluttered are the most successful,” Jacober says. The more cutting edge technology can be difficult for some business owners to use. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) “is the way to go.”

There are those who suggest that, things being what they are with bandwidth, slow connections, and costly Internet calls, rich media campaigns do not belong on the Internet right now. This week we made this suggestion to Marc Lewis, CEO of Web Marketing (who do a nice line in Video Banners), just to see what the reaction was:

“There is no excuse for the drivel we see day in, day out. Bandwidth is more than sufficient for rich media advertising. A year ago we were promised better ads when we got to 56Kbps. We’re simply making excuses. We know, from tests with Video Banners, that the consumer is 500% more likely to respond to a Video Banner than a GIF banner. We know that 60% of our audience can already watch a Video Banner, and that number is rising by the day. We know that the Internet is already a rich media environment. We know that narrow minded, shortsighted, uninformed old-school agencies automatically assume the only execution for a banner ad is a GIF.

“Not to worry though – it only took them 5 years to wake up to the fact that the Internet existed…”