It is always nice to have our quarterly email study referenced against another agency. Even better when that agency measures it against thier own country. If you are curious as to what is going on in Canada this is a must read.
I found my flavor, What Kind of Kettle Chip are You?
We worked with Kettle Foods (LOVE THE CHIPS) again to put together a great new Crave Club Site. Hats off to Kettle as they are great designers and to Maxwell PR for the direction.
I am Bold, Grown-up Cheese.
I’m a bold, big city person. Museums, theater, fine dining and cool shops… I can even appreciate performance art. I’ve got grown-up tastes but I’m not stuffy or stiff. I know how to have fun and I’m just as comfortable at a white linen-laid table as I am at the hot dog cart. I’ve got style. An individualist who isn’t afraid to show my true colors or to stand out in a crowd.
Will RSS eat e-mail marketing’s lunch? It’s a provocative topic and one, by the way, that OMMA magazine takes up in a feature package in the July issue–which we’re producing even as I write this column.
In any event, the Nielsen Norman Group has a new report out on the subject. The report examines RSS feeds from mainstream users’ point of view and compares them to e-mail newsletters to find that businesses forge closer relationships with customers through e-newsletters than through RSS feeds. Surprised?
We’re not. E-mail newsletters have become warm and familiar forms of communication, landing in our boxes with precision and regularity–at least when there are no technical or server issues. When the content and headlines are well-crafted, e-mail newsletters are artful creations. They can even be personalized to an extent. They serve niche audiences. They foster loyalty.
From: Just An Online Minute…
Posted June 14th, 2006 by Tobi Elkin
Yes, you, the walking carpet. Get over to barberbrigade.com and do something about the surplus of protein strands sticking out of your facial epidermis.
At barberbrigade.com you’ll find heaven for the click-happy site visitor. Almost everything in this well-made flash movie of a site is interactive. I really enjoyed the many different audio clips of people with crazy accents telling me I either look great or that I could use a shave. One of the my favorite pieces of the site had me creating my own message, from a list of provided phrases, to send to a friend/loved one to hint to them that it’s time to do some weed whacking and hedge trimming. I spent a good hour clicking through this site, which is a long time for my 10-second attention span.
The product itself is intriguing enough. Personally, I’m not one to purchase a hair or skin care product that costs more than a 10-spot but apparently Barber Brigade research says that other men do. More than likely, after I show her the site, my wife will see some of their grooming goop at Target and pick it up for me. She will tell me to use it to rid myself of the prickly pubes on my face and keep my skin looking youthful and smooth. Maybe in her wildest dreams I’ll start caring about the way I look. Ah but probably not. Marriage has made me a bit of a sloth. However, the single, or not quite as involved, man will undoubtedly latch onto any grooming product that keeps him looking good while not making him feel too much like teenage girl. These guys have that market dialed in.
Overall, I give the site an A-.
Docked points for not having ecommerce and for being so flash heavy that SEO will be difficult. Big props for the use of the word ‘manimal’.
In the past 4 days I have fielded many calls from PACs and political campaigns looking for an email platform to send from 1 million to 100 million emails a month. Not too shocking right. But as with any other client prospect (or partner as I like to refer to them) I have a series of questions.
1. What is your group or candidate?
2. How often will you be mailing?
3. How large is your list?
4. Where did you get this list?
Well number 4 seems to throw all of them off. Like I just can accept that they ALL have lists this parge after the last campaign season. I know that we are all pretty passionate today about our country’s governement given the state that it is in, but where did the rules and laws go, let alone the common sense of spam? It seems to me that many of these groups have either procured or bought lists from other campaigns or groups out there and are ready to send too many emails to those that have not opt in.
There does exist a loophole in the law around politics and goverment, but I think personally that it is crap. I have seeded past campaigns with special emails that will help me to see where they get used this time around. I can tell you from personal client experience in this realm, that many unscrupilous would be candidates make requests to current elected officials list with the Freedom of Information Act. And then spam the hell out of them, even when they are on the other side of the issue or RED/BLUE line.
I welcome your feedback on this as I expect that you will all soon see an increase in unsolicited emails from candidates, campaigns and PACs. God bless America right?
An interesting idea surfaced today in a blog, entitled : E-mail 2.0.
To paraphrase that old adage about the weather, everyone complains about e-mail, but no one ever does anything about it. E-mail has become a technology that we couldn’t live without in our business and personal lives… yet it’s rife with spam, viruses and fraud. In fact, one estimate places the amount of spam at 90% of all e-mail traffic!
In response, Kelly Martin of SecurityFocus makes the modest proposal that the backbone of our e-mail system, Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), is fundamentally broken and should be scrapped. Designed to be used by a handful of engineers and geeks, SMTP was excellent at what it was designed for — and is, indeed, the reason why e-mail has evolved into such a successful medium. But it wasn’t designed for security or accountability, and patchwork attempts to make it so can’t keep up with the threats.
I have subscribed to an unknown amount of emails in my time and one thing that frustrates me is not being able to tell people more about yourself so that they can deliver not only relevant content, but know who you are. Now some privacy maniacs might think that they don’t want to tell any company more than they need to. Well you don’t HAVE TO. But for those of us who like to get emails that match up with our needs from companies, I salute The North Face and other companies for doing this.
My personal favorite (although I find it odd that they cannot tell this from their internal DB of online purchases, I understand the offline) is that they ask where you have bought their products. Like REI they are really trying to meld the online/offline worlds and drive customers to points of interaction that they want to shop.
This is a really interesting idea. I got this as we just put two of our team on a plane this week to the Internet Retailer Conference. I think that this has merit as I have seen some other conferences sell or give their attendee lists to all the vendors that are coming. This has resulted in unsolicted emails from every vendor dropping into the inbox. Now it is nice to be able to communicate with everyone that is coming to see your booth, drop emails during the event and follow up afterwards with those that you met or might not have met, but giving them an event driven email really protects the attendee.
Now on the flip side, I wonder how many attendees will really go and check this email address? I would hope that they see the value in it, and I would assume that those that want more info and to learn more from who was there (that they did not give a business card to) will use it.
I personally love this action by Internet Retailer. Nice work and a really creative solution to the challenge.
You might not really be aware of what email clients are blocking the images in your email campaigns. Do you know when you send an email if the images you have embedded are really going to show up by default? Many people do not think about this prior to sending a campaign.
Now if you want to take a precaution, I suggest that you make sure to name the image exactly what it is as well as use ALT tags to let it display with text as to what should be in the suppressed image box. Just a good practice.
If you are not aware of it, ISPs and blacklists can impact your email delivery simply based on URLs you might reference in an email campaign. I know that it might seem odd, but even giants like Yahoo/Flickr hit the blocklist from time to time. I noticed this in a SpamAssasin Score this past week.
Make note that you check URLs you might have as a link in your email against lists like URBL and SORBS before you send.
Even though this chart is from 2004, it seems useful to see where we were back 1 and a half years ago. I find that this study is a good metric to look at and really benchmark your delivery against. Although many ESPs have really stepped up the relations and management at the ISP level, it is still good to watch what is occuring with your lists.
Does you ESP show you exactly what they are delivering? eROI does with emailROI.
Not sure if this is a good or bad report. But what it tells me is that we need to be aware of the common person, and not think about ourselves, when we are creating email campaigns. If the majority cannot tell the difference, will this impact your campaign from being flagged as spam, reported as Junk, or just deleted? Make sure that you are taking the high road and working on client communication from the start, the opt in page. Let them know what is being sent, when it will be sent and whom to expect it from.
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) — Though many Web users believe they can recognize legitimate e-mail from spam, many of them are overly suspicious, according to a study by the National Cyber Security Alliance.
The study, ‘Online Fraud Report,’ was released Wednesday by the NCSA and Bank of America. It found that 87 percent of respondents expressed confidence that they could tell real from fraudulent e-mails.
However, when given screen shots of three e-mails (one legit, two spam), more than 60 percent failed to identify the legitimate e-mail. Most respondents classified all three as fraudulent.
Ron Teixeira, executive directory of the NCSA, said that this over-suspiciousness is a dangerous trend.
I an twist that was not really a twist, just a matter of time, MSN has rolled out testing of text ads in your inbox. I mean it was a given that they would start to monetize EVERYTHING in LIVE sooner or later. With the LIVE interface being in “BETA” for a while now, and looking way to clean and usable, it was time to mix it up.
What this means to you is like Gmail, you need to be aware that your competitors can now compete against you with every email you send based on keywords and names in your email. Think carefully about your copy, or buy against those keywords to protect your brand and your messaging.
Read more after the jump
AOL e-mail users were prevented from sending or receiving most of their e-mail for at least three hours Thursday morning, the online portal said.
“An e-mail software issue started to cause delays in the sending and receiving of AOL e-mails for our members and AOL.com users, said company spokesman Nicholas Graham. “We are in the process of implementing a fix and investigating its cause.”
Read More:
http://news.com.com/AOL+suffering+e-mail+glitch/2100-1032_3-6079074.html?tag=nefd.top
==AOL UPDATE=================
Thursday, June 1, 2006. 5:30 PM Eastern.
Dear Clients,
Earlier we sent out a notice (please see below) advising you of problems at AOL and included AOL’s request that all mailers stop mailing into AOL while they fixed the problem. For those of you who were able to stop mailing into AOL, many thanks on behalf of AOL as a reduction in mail was extremely helpful to them. If you did mail into AOL, you may have observed intermittent delivery problems.
The good news is that AOL has just contacted us and advised us that mailers now have the
“ALL CLEAR” to mail again beginning after 3am Eastern Standard Time, Friday June 2.
Thus, please contact all parties responsible for sending emails on your behalf and let them know that AOL recommends they begin mailing again Friday morning after 3am Eastern Standard Time.
If you have any questions or need any assistance on this issue or any other, please do not hesitate to contact us!
Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, had her son the other day. Congrats! However, I don’t think Read more...
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