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Archive for October, 2005

Permission Marketing : Sending Out e-Mails

15 Oct 2005

So, you have this wonderful, new, very cool product or newsletter you want to send out to the world. How should you do that? How to prevent your message from getting lost in the bulk? How to avoid spam filters and junk-selectors from marking your email as ‘bad’? Or even better… how to find, select and invite potential buyers to join your list? All of these questions – and a lot more than just these -need a decent answer and some careful considerations in order to succeed in sending, launching or guiding a good opt-in email campaign.

“Studies have shown that the greater number of personalization elements to an email, the higher the response rates.

There’s a lot of things you have to keep in mind, and listing them all would take a lot of time and a lot of writing. Fortunately, somebody else [emailgarage.com] already has taken the time to put this online in the form of a ‘weekly tip’ to which I’ve subscribed a while ago. Here are some valuable links to their tip-archive, I hope you learn as much from it as I did

If you have found a newsletter format that is easy to read, grabs the reader’s attention and makes him click through to your site, that’s no reason to celebrate and lean back contentedly.

  1. Take your time
  2. What is the right frequency for e-mail?
  3. Focus on the first few lines
  4. Act before an e-mail address changes
  5. Tell the user what you’re planning to do with his personal information
  6. Make your e-mail list sign-up visible
  7. Thank your customers for their registration
  8. Explain the benefits of becoming an email subscriber
  9. Where to put the unsubscribe link
  10. Check for spam-like content and spam filter data
  11. Verify all links and check if images appear correctly
  12. Reinforce traditional branding with a consistent e-branding
  13. Never falsify the subject line
  14. Keep the number of mandatory fields as low as possible
  15. How to use a landing page
  16. Don’t sell, sell, sell
  17. Don’t design an email program without looking at the web site
  18. Use e-cards to update your database
  19. Test the layout of your newsletter with different email clients
  20. Defining Soft and Hard Bounces
  21. Apply the 5-30 rule
  22. Using a CMS to manage your HTML email templates
  23. Call to Action
  24. Make HTML and Plain Text Have Corresponding Content
  25. How to get people signing up for your email list?
  26. How to treat images in html emails?
  27. Email regularly
  28. Split lists to enable subject line testing
  29. How to obtain your email list?
  30. Offer something valuable
  31. Be careful using the word FREE
  32. Don’t send advertising
  33. The best time of the day to send out your campaign
  34. Get added to recipients’ address book
  35. Make sure your e-mail is consistent with your corporate image
  36. Six spam filter tips
  37. Don’t use email forms
  38. HTML vs. Plain Text
  39. Don’t forget the preview pane
  40. Plan your e-mail campaigns
  41. Focus on building the relationship
  42. Write good, clear and relevant copy
  43. Christmas, an opportunity to …
  44. Use customer data to personalize emails
  45. Test your e-mail on a small percentage of your opt-in list
  46. Offer multiple response mechanisms
  47. Get to the point
  48. Personalize your FROM field
  49. Make first URL & CTA visible without scrolling
  50. Don’t send B2B emails on weekends
  51. Keep subject lines short and hyperlinks plentiful
  52. Don’t send file attachments

Liked what you’ve just read? Want to receive these useful links too?
Subscribe to the Knowledge Station NewsLetters Dept.

Still haven’t found what you’re looking for? [Try EmailLabs]

 

FutureGoogle

14 Oct 2005

Randy Siegel in The New York Times speculates on what the Google homepage might look like in the far future. Not only will all your bureaucratic movements be digitally indexed, you’d also be able to see who’s spying on you, whilst spying anyone you can think of yourself. Want to know what your co-workers are up to? Your ex-wife? All I miss here is the full integration on maps to see where this ‘living’ data physically resides.

FutureGoogle

via [Philipp]

 
 

Tuning Your Frequencies To Youngsters

13 Oct 2005

Yahoo Life Series search marketing event is a half-day event hosted by Yahoo and is the first of a series dedicated to taking a look at the relationship between life-altering events and search behavior.Topics : ‘Having a baby’ and ‘going off to college’ (though not necessarily in that order).

Erin Bradley was there and has keynotes and thoughts. [Go Read]

  • The current decision-making process is fundamentally flawed.
    “Identify problem, conduct extensive research of solutions, make decision” is not really the way people do things. Similarly, the way people use search is much less straightforward than marketers might think – they bounce from search to search and site to site and result to result.
  • The decision-making process is mysterious and most often unconscious.
    The best tennis coaches can quickly and accurately identify a good shot from a foul but cannot pinpoint exactly how or why they know this information. Applied to search this means that traditional methods of study, such as focus groups, are limited in what they can tell you about search behavior.
  • Our decision-making skills are fragile and emotions get in the way.
    A person’s ability to make appropriate decisions decreases when factors such personal bias and an overwhelming number of options get in the way. In search this means that it’s important not to confuse or mislead the consumer, lest the “noise” negatively impacts the purchase/conversion decision.
  • Frugality is a virtue.
    Maybe not in a date, but with major decisions people typically assume that the more time and effort put into making one, the better the results will be. Gladwell says false. For search marketers this means it’s best to create as few variables possible in order to speed the pathway toward a successful decision.

Additional key findings from the research include:

- 86% of new parents-to-be said they use the Internet to search about information on pregnancy, as compared to books (68%), friends/family (53%), and magazines (37%).
- 54% of new parents said search simplified their lives more so than magazines (17%) or TV (10%)
- 81% of college students rate search as their best source of information, followed by friends and family (64%), newspaper (36%) and TV (24%)

via [SearchEngineLowdown]

Mena Trott, Founder & President of Six Apart wrote down some notes of the time she’s spent at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco

“The most enjoyable panel, by far, was the teenager consumption panel moderated by Safa Rashtchy, of Piper Jaffray. In watching these kids talk, I realized how infrequently we come in contact with teenagers — [...]
They were candid and honest with their answers because they weren’t on message or thought that there might be a “right” answer. [...] we need to see more people from the non-technical world talk about what they do with the Internet. Someone suggested that a panel just like this one, but with mothers and fathers, would be incredibly insightful. [...]”

This Teenager Consumption Panel is quite the thing :)

Here’s an excerpt of the conversation (where ‘Q’ is Safa Rashtchy) :


Q: Want you to buy a new phone online, where would you go?

Sean: Verizon, I want the one with Vcast, “I don’t watch much TV but watching it on your phone is pretty cool.”
Steph: Sprint because of her friends and family use it.

Q: Let’s say you want to buy a CD player, where would you go?
Sean: ummm, a CD player…? (laugher) [- Coolz0r : heheh, research... ain't that great :) ]


Q: OK, how about a digital camera

Sean: Froogle is awesome.
Steph: no idea, because I have one, maybe go to Best Buy.
Sasha: search, go to ebay or amazon to do comparative shopping.
Jake: Amazon, Best Buy, CompUSA, I’d search using Froogle (“Froogle rocks!”)

[Ed: setting context for making a purchase is key here. I'd bet that what these teens say they'd do isn't what they'd actually do, so drawing conclusions from their answers probably isn't the wisest.]

Q: What would you like to do with the web that you can’t do now?
Jake: “Get rid of all that spyware, Ad-Aware doesn’t do it for me, so get on it please!” (laugher)
Sasha “The more free stuff you can come up with.”
[Ed: this illustrates that quantum leaps in innovation are hard for an end-user to imagine.]

Taken from [Kareem Mayan's Blog] who lives in LA and works for FOX Interactive Media.
Read the full transcript overthere and learn from it.

Also read :
Young Consumers – Understanding them and cracking the code, on [Customer World]

 

The Big Moo & Being Remarkable

12 Oct 2005

I just finished reading a copy of the pre-release of ‘The Big Moo’. – they’re in fact ‘advance uncorrected proofs’, and the book itself is on sale starting Oct. 20th – It took me a few days to read it, because I really had a lot of things to do and fewer time to blog, but once I got started, I tended to sacrifice all the precious free moments I had to reading this remarkable book. I’ll try to make up for not blogging… by blogging about this book.

The Big Moo is an unprecedented collaboration of 33 of the world’s smartest business thinkers, blending their best ideas on how you can remarkablize your organization. Being remarkable means: stop being ordinary, stop trying to be perfect. Desire change. Act now !

Two excerpts from the book :

“There isn’t a logical, proven, step-by-step formula you can follow. Instead, there’s a chaotic path through the woods, a path that includes side routes encompassing customer service, unconventional dedication, unparallelled leadership, and daring to dream. Is this a path worth staying on? Only if you want to grow. Only if you’re tired of being a cog in a dehumanizing machine. Only if you are willing to embrace the quest for the big moo.”

Golden rules to become a failure :

  1. Keep secrets.
  2. Be certain you’re right and ignore those that disagree with you.
  3. Set agressive deadlines fot others to get by in – then change them when they aren’t met.
  4. Resist testing you theories.
  5. Focus more on what other people think and less on whether your idea is as good as it could be.
  6. Assume that a critical mass must embrace your idea for it to work.
  7. Choose an idea where number 6 is a requirement.
  8. Realize that people who don’t instantly get your idea are bullheaded, shortsighted or even stupid.
  9. Don’t bother to dramatically increase the quality of your presentation style.
  10. Insist that you’ve got to go straight to the top of the organization to get something done.
  11. Always go for the big win.

Thank you : [Marco] from [MarketingFacts] to connect me to [Roy Van Veen] who sent me a copy of this brilliant book. I’ll pass it on.

[Seth Godin] – [Pre-Order a Copy] – join [Remarkabalize] and learn.

[Remarkabalize* is a new kind of network that helps organizations develop their stories and deliver on creating the next generation of business growth.]

 

Paying & Sleeping Around in The Web 2.0

09 Oct 2005

Paying web 2.0 style :

Google Video to Offer Paid Content

Jennifer Feikin, Director of Google Video, was at a We Media panel in which she said that “what has happened in the past 15 years is pretty phenomenal” and user-generated content “really is just the beginning.” The Internet enables new ways of building upon collaboration, and Google Video is part of that. Google Video has until now dealt with free content, but ‘there will be the ability for people to pay for content.” Google “will enable that payment mechanism” and it is “just another step in Google’s effort to try to enable access to more information.” “We’re really trying to facilitate that connection between users and the content owners.”

Produced by Jason Schramm for [AppleWatch] on the [BlogNewsChannel].

Sleeping around web 2.0 style :

go see where I nicked this

Produced by Shelley Powers on [BurningBird] – via [iBLOGthere4iM]

 

Blog Dinner v3.0, the Aftertalks

09 Oct 2005

Last friday, there was a bloggers dinner in Brussels, at the Residence Palace Press Center. The location was pretty awesome and impressive and despite the strike of the public transportation, a lot of bloggers showed up. Thanks to Eug, who picked me up on his way there, I made it to the meeting point. The trip to was filled with a lot of interesting stories from his part. – (I didn’t know Adam Curry used to live in Belgium, nor did I know Eug himself was into the internet for quite some time already) – I tried being a good co-pilot and we managed to get to Brussels without taking too many wrong turns. We parked in front of the big mosque and then walked for a few minutes to the Press Center where I gave my first real keynote presentation, about mobile marketing and the movil project.

Putting the presentation together wasn’t really a laugh, because I didn’t want to make it too boring by getting into the technical details of the things I wanted to talk about too much, so I tried to lightly touch a few subjects and point out the pros and cons of each technology. I really had to go through it over and over, dropping things until I arrived at something that still looked interesting enough, not too boring and as short as possible. I hope some people liked it. I can imagine not everybody was that pleased with a presentation on a topic like this, but hey, I figured I had some good things to tell about it. The hardest part was keeping it into the timeframe they had foreseen, but I was kind of nervous so I don’t really know how long I’ve been talking. There’s so much to tell about it, in such a short time…

I met a lot of interesting people from the central and southern part of the country, of whom I wasn’t aware of until then. Interesting conversations during dinner and in between presentations filled the few silences there were. I’ve added a lot of blogs in my favorites, and some in the sidebar of the blog. Good reads, even if some are in French and about topics I really don’t know that much about.

I felt a bit lost and honored at the same time for being able to give a short presentation in between Luc Van Braekel and Pascal Van Hecke, who were both talking about links. LVB talked about his Blogium Project and the ‘most popular linked link’ indicator of the Belgian blogospere, and PVH pointed out different approaches to del.icio.us and other social platforms alike, with the different visual outputs those tagged links could render. PVH also pointed out some benefits you might have when you try to do link-research, comparing categorized closed archives (linkblogs) with ‘living’ archives (tagged links).

The first presentation was from Peter Viellefont from Microsoft and was about the Community Server project, something he calls a nice open source bloggingtool that rapidly enables both small and large online communities. The current Community Server platform includes: a discussion system, blogging system, photo gallery system, user profile management, advanced permissions system, extensible theme engine, and much more.

I think what they’re trying to do is merge MSNSpaces with some sort of shared blogging platform, something that sounds logical to me, but is a bit too complicated. Probably because I don’t know that much about it, but I’ll discuss it with some of my scripting friends to see what they think of it.

As you can see, a youngster like me who talks about mobile marketing doesn’t quite fit in there, but I mainly wanted to see where it’d bring me, I’ve always been told you need guts to get glory… and I needed an introduction to arrive at the part of the presentation that talked about movil.be. The contacts I made after the presentation were pretty good, I’ll send out some invites to interested people and introduce them to the community so they can help build and help develop this idea. To most of the readers of this blog, movil isn’t new. With our 70 users, the community might not be that big to be a heavy player, the point is we have a decent international base to develop and test new possibilities with mobile features. I’m looking forward to work with these new members, including you, Frédéric :) Your input will be highly appreciated.

Thanks to Peter Forret & Bart Vanherreweghe for putting this night together. I really enjoyed the setting and food for such an affordable price. It kicked ass. You can count me in next time, just let me know.

Perhaps the next meeting should start somewhere in the afternoon on a saturday or sunday, so everyone has more time to talk with each other, because I for one would have loved to talk to some more people I didn’t really had a chance to talk to (again) – it was the same at the blog dinner in Ghent. I liked the idea of putting people ‘disorganized’ at the table, so you were kind of forced to meet new people. Without that, I’d probably never met the guys from Shoob or the digital Mich (eMich)… and that would’ve been a pity.

I like the concept of the ‘will attend wiki‘ very much, for it gives the blogger the right feeling when he/she subscribes, namely the freedom to put down your url yourself and to be able to edit or remove things. A good plan that certainly needs to be done again. Mucho gusto !

Update : pics pics pics…

 

Interactive Shaping With TactaPad

09 Oct 2005

Today’s interfaces rely heavily on visual feedback. Because our visual attention quickly moves around the display as we work, it’s easy to miss something. The mouse exacerbates the problem by providing false feedback -it always goes ‘click’ even when your click does nothing. Since our sense of touch is directly connected to the actions we perform with our hands, tactile feedback is a great way to confirm user actions. And better feedback means fewer mistakes.

Introducing the TactaPad : The Tactile, Immersive, Two-Handed Input Device.

TactaPad
See
The TactaPad’s camera continually captures an image of your hands. Your hands are translucently overlaid on your display as live video.


Touch
The TactaPad is touched directly with the hands. The surface can be touched in multiple places at the same time. A cursor appears on your display for every touch.


Feel
The surface moves vertically when pressed, providing dynamic force feedback. Each touch has a unique feel which corresponds to the object being touched.
 

Productivity for Professionals

The TactaPad is designed for computer users whose productivity depends on how quickly and effectively they can interact with their computer. Learn more about how the tactile, immersive, two-handed input device can change the way you work.

Visit [Tactiva] – See [Cool Demo Movies] – via [Randy]

 

In The News On Oct. 8th

08 Oct 2005

Time to clean up my inbox and post the things I thought were worth reading about. Don’t you just love those sunny autumn saturdays? Let’s see what was interesting or funny this week that I didn’t blog due to a great lack of time. Some entries are fresh, others aren’t.

“From word-of-mouth, to papyrus scrawl, to Gutenberg press… we now bring you da Bible, in SMS 4m. [...] A member of the Bible Society in Australia has translated all 32,173 verses in just ‘four weeks’ (!) into SMS-style text. They even provide a free download from their site so you can send God nuggets like “In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth” to those in need of a little churchin’ up. [Warning: link may invoke choir singing and potential wrath of The Maker]” – [Engadget]

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 is now available for download. [iBLOGthere4iM]
Analog TV broadcasts to stop by 2009? – [Engadget]

Formula for Coca Cola Leaked -[iBLOGthere4iM]

ROKR Not Selling Well (the i-tunes Motorola phone) [...] the point is simple: you make a crappy phone, nobody’s going to want to buy it. – [TechDirt]

SearchForVideo.com is a new video search engine. [GoogleBlogoscoped]

AOL buys Weblogs.inc and that causes some fuzz about how this impacts all of Weblogs Inc. authors who are paid relatively little without any equity participation. [TechDirt]

VeriSign has bought weblogs.com from Dave Winer. [Podcasting.be]

BBC accidentally reveals video iPod? [Engadget]

Scoble switches over to WordPress this weekend. New URL? http://www.scobleizer.com — that redirects to http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/. — TODO : Change your RSS feed…

NewsGator is acquiring Ranchero Software, makers of NetNewsWire. [Scoble]

Export or Backup Your Gmail Contacts List with Just a Few Clicks – [SearchEngineWatch]

“The first all-inclusive wireless television content development and production studio opened for business recently in New York City. According to the management of Wireless TV & Studios, the wireless video live and pre-recorded content is created specifically to stream to all available wireless devices and networks. ” – [TheWirelessWeblog]

Plugged In, but Tuned Out: Getting Kids to Connect To the Non-Virtual World – [Textually]

Okay. Inbox and TOBLOG list cleared. I’m ready for another week. /links.