Month: August 2007

Categories
Great Marketing Swipe File The Marketeer

Great Marketing

Whenever I see some brilliant marketing I’m compelled to make a note and post it here.

I was getting my car washed yesterday and before you pull around to the entry there’s a self service kiosk where you can grab a trashbag or a heavy duty paper towel. There’s also a sort of gumball machine that has peanuts in it with a dopey slogan “We’re nuts about our customers!”. Don’t be fooled by the idiotic tagline. Easy marks (aka suckers) like myself grab some, soccer moms with kids in the minivan probably do the same to keep the kids quiet.

But what happens next? You start cracking open and peeling the peanuts. So unless you are compulsive like I am, eating right over your new free trashbag, you finish the carwash and look around the inside of your car, filled with peanut shells, and say “Damn, we should vacuum this mess out!”

And, lo and behold, there’s the vacuum right next to the exit.

Have a good weekend.

Categories
Brain Buster Email Marketing The Marketeer

Direct Marketing, you know, Mailing People Stuff

I started doing direct mail in 1997, and as hard as it is to believe, this was before email was huge. This was during my time at DCI (remember that whole tax fraud thing – see Breaking Rocks). Direct Marketing (DM) was king of all that it surveyed, and those in the know learned from DM News. DM News is the New York Times of direct marketing, the I-Ching, the bible, insert large important document reference here.

I was elated to see an article today that lead off with a quote of mine. The funny part is that probably 99.9% of my friends and family (and probably you too, dear readers) don’t even know it exists, but to me it’s a great honor.

But you didn’t come here to listen to my blather, and fear not – you should go back and click to the article and read it, it’s excellent stuff. It touches upon the difficulty of selecting a control group, using Half Life (which was new to me, and I love it), segmentation, long term results, and getting statistically valid results.

It crystallized another point for me too – testing is not like experimenting because the test itself affects and taints future results. There are a bunch of other topics this naturally leads to, such as B2B vs. B2C, and how to find the optimum emailing frequency, but those are thoughts for another day.

Categories
Daily Life Email Marketing Podcasting The Marketeer

3 Important Things

  1. America is drowning in processed sugar and flour, Jason speaks the truth, notice the power of marketing in step 4.
  2. The world’s greatest marketing podcast is going to take over your brain, resistance is futile. Lots of good stuff on email marketing
  3. All that too much to take? Look at my soothing Flickr Photos
Categories
Brain Buster The Marketeer

Tales from the Chasm

Mad Marv sent me a link to this post discussing Crossing the Chasm. I’ve talked about the Chasm in many podcasts, the soundbite is that there’s a gap between the adoption of technology by geeks from adoption by the rest of the world.

I’ve found the Chasm to be very helpful because it bundles a lot of concepts such as targeting niches, creating an error-free user experience (ok, reasonably error free), and usability, that can help grow a business.

Here’s a big idea from the post:

The problem is that compared to a few years ago, the speed with which new technologies are coming to the market has increased dramatically. All these technologies are aimed at the early adopters. And they love it and they try it. But the question is what happens when your early adopters run off to play with a new great thing before you have a chance to take your technology mainstream?

For example, some people who used to blog regularly, blog less now because they discovered Twittering (microblogging). Or, early adopters who have discovered Second Life might not have as much time to spend on MySpace anymore.

And from the conclusion:

Early adopters are enticed by new things much more often today than 15 years ago. Expanding on how to retain the early adopters would be good thing to do in the next edition

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of patience reading analysis that becomes more academic than practical. It’s interesting how the comments go from bubblegum pop (Blue Ocean and The Tipping Point), to academic textbooks (Castells).

Here’s my cranky old man assessments:

  1. If the early adopters run off it’s time to put the office furniture up on Craig’s list. You’re done.
  2. Don’t confuse social apps like MySpace with useful technologies, buzz and crowds are different from products that are sold to customers.
  3. You get your customers one at a time, this is a mindset you need to use to balance your plans for bridging the Chasm if you want to continue to make payroll.
  4. In my experience the VP of Sales gets the axe before Marketing, but your mileage may vary.

I’m off to record Marketing Over Coffee now. Marv, thanks for getting my brain warmed up!

Categories
Daily Life

BlogDay, August 31: 5 blogs to check out

Doug tagged me for BlogDay, so here goes:

Blog Day 2007First, the rules established by Jeff:

1. List five Blogs that you find interesting and if you can tell, include the city/country where they are from.
2. Identify five Bloggers to tag to join in this game with you. I recommend emailing the bloggers you tag to give them a heads up of you tagging them.
3. Use the tag: BlogDay2007 in your blog post.
4. (Optionally): Contact the owners of the blogs you shared as your “blogs to take a look at.”

A Lotta People Don’t Know That – This guy blogs about the idiot in the cube next to him

Retro-Remixes – 80’s tunes you can’t find

Mike Champion – My arch enemy, I am forced to track his every move

All Eyes on Jenny – With Sex and the City no longer on HBO, at least there’s something good to read, and it’s even real.

DS Fanboy – Nerd Alert.

The reading lists I want to see (I tag you) – Dr. Penn, Mike, Jenny, Barbara, and Clarence

Categories
Email Marketing

Email Deliverability

This is one of the sexiest topics a marketeer can work on. Just kidding.

But it is important. If you are doing any kind of mass email deliverability will become an issue sooner or later. In simple terms there are 4 points where an email can be blocked.

  1. The mail server itself can be blacklisted, at the ISP level all traffic can be denied for a specific IP address (these are named by numeric codes that look like this 123.23.54.12).
  2. Mail can be filtered and rejected through a spam filtering service before it hits an organizations mail server. The company I work for uses Postini which captures a lot of spam, but sometimes cages some of the ham too.
  3. There’s a pinch point at the corporate mail server. Your IS department may set up your mail system to reject everything from a specific IP address.
  4. The end user may set up filters to move your incoming mail to the trash, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Worse yet, they might mark you as spam causing you to be locked out further up the chain next time.

So, what do you do? The first thing to do is make sure you are managing expectations. Keep in mind that a good campaign will have around a 25% open rate and a 10% click through, so you are talking about 3 per 100 sent on a good day.

It’s very easy to test deliverability if your email system uses HTML messages to track opens. Keep in mind that if one person at a corporate location gets a message you can reasonably assume that you are it least getting past the first 3.

Resist the urge to mail yourself. This will work well in the beginning but as soon as you start having problems you are going to be the person trying to get yourself off a blacklist. Vendors that have hundreds of customers using their email services have established relationships with the ISPs that you don’t.

And for the love of God, if you are going to mail yourself, don’t use the same server as your regular corporate mail. There’s no faster path to the unemployment line than tanking email for your whole company because of a spam complaint.

Categories
Daily Life Podcasting

Where can I get a fake eyeball?

I’m back from another busy weekend. We were out in Western Mass and I’ll have some photos up on Flickr by tomorrow night.

If you want to get the story behind the fake eyeball and some other interesting and funny stuff, check out the latest M Show, which I must admit is a good one this week.