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Archive for June, 2007
Hello World
June 19, 2007To anyone who hasn’t yet discovered Scribe Fire, the Mozilla FireFox blogging plug-in, the key is to bang the two rocks together guys…
Powered by ScribeFire.
Yahoo Boss Quits
June 19, 2007Yahoo Chairperson Terry Semel has quit, ending his increasingly ineffectual pursuit of online search leader Google – so reports http://www.news24.co.za
“Mountain View-based Google now makes more money in a single quarter than Yahoo does in an entire year. The contrast represents a harsh comedown for Yahoo, which was the larger of the two companies when Google went public in August 2004.
Since then, Google has steadily expanded upon the internet’s largest advertising network to create nearly $140bn in shareholder wealth as its stock price increased by more than sixfold. Yahoo’s stock, meanwhile, is worth a little bit less than when Google went public.
Google’s meteoric rise is an especially hard pill for Semel to swallow because he once flirted with the idea of buying Google. In mid-2002, Semel reportedly terminated negotiations when Google set its sales price at $5bn.
Google’s success since then has decimated the employee morale at Yahoo, leading to a recent wave of executive departures that raised concerns about whether the company would be able to retain the talent it needs to regain its stride.
Just last week, Semel assured shareholders attending Yahoo’s annual meeting that he had the fortitude to lead a comeback. He has been counting on recent improvements to Yahoo’s online advertising system and a series of key partnerships to boost profits after the company suffered an 11% drop in its first-quarter earnings.”
My Mission is to protect
June 17, 2007These messages get the point across very effectively – a good example of non-profit communication hitting home hard.
And they did this in one take
June 17, 2007There is no reason why we can’t have fun when marketing – especially when we’re marketing ourselves. These guys over at Connected Ventures did a really great video for the web, completely in-house, with zero budget, to advertise the fact that they were hiring.
Watch and learn how good marketing can cost nothing.
Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo
Email Marketing: Image blocking
June 16, 2007
Email Marketing: Image blocking
A recent Silver Pop study on the retail industry created quite a stir. What do your customers really see when they open your emails?
Bad news, probably not a whole lot. When you send out a message that cannot be read, it becomes your problem, and if your customer is technologically challenged and does not know how to turn image blocking off, your message is lost.
The Silver Pop study was based on over 500 email campaigns sent out by well known retailers.
Early spam filters looked out for the usual spam triggers, like “free” or “special offer” – so marketers changed tack and put these types of messages within images embedded in the email. With image blocking, this technique doesn’t work any more.
Email creative has become more and more image based – more and more customers have fast Internet connections that can handle images in emails.
However, modern email programs or providers, such as Gmail, disable images by DEFAULT for a number of reasons:
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Unsavoury images included in emails by spammers, that you wouldn’t want your kids to see
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Web beacons or pixel tracking – email open rates are measured by including a 1×1 pixel image in the email – major ISPs discourage this practice by spammers by blocking all images by default
Email has grown immensely and is being used more and more by online marketers – especially in the last three years.
The good news is that deliverability has actually improved over the last few years. Today, only about 10% of messages are dumped in the Junk or Bulk folders by Yahoo and Hotmail, thanks mainly because spam filters are becoming more intelligent and not blocking as many legitimate emails.
The Silver Pop study also revealed that HTML-based email has become standard. HTML looks better, and marketers are not offering customers a choice between text and HTML like they used to. Most email programs now support HTML. HTML has a greater visual appeal than text.
Generally speaking, HTML has a higher ranking in spam scores, but ISPs are using VOTING by customers a lot more to judge what emails are spam, than the actual content of emails.
Sadly, 40% of emails are not being rendered properly today. There are a number of culprits causing this.
Email can break in a number of different ways. The message can become an attachment – and will be largely ignored by the recipient. The images can be completely blocked – 100% image suppression. Ironically, sometimes the only message that remains in an email is the unsubscribe link.
There is hope. Here are a couple of tips to help ensure that your emails are displayed properly.
Get the recipient to add you to your address book
Email clients will recognize your email as being safe and wanted by the recipient if you are in their address book/white listed. This will prevent your images from being suppressed.
Teach customer’s how to add you to their address book – send them to a site with screenshots that explain step by step how to do this, for the major email providers.
Keep your FROM address consistent
If you change your FROM address to regularly, customer’s cannot white list you.
ADD a LINK to the top of your email that says…
“If you cannot view this message correctly, click here to view an uploaded version of this email”. This should click through to a generic, unpersonalised version of your email.
Design messages that look OK with images
Include images in your email by all means, but keep in mind that if the images are completely suppressed, your email should still get the message across.
Pivotal Veracity and ReturnPath have products that allow you to check what our images look like without images. You can of course also check this yourself if you have the time.
DO NOT use Cascading Style Sheets in your emails
Embedded images and CSS code will be ignored by many email providers, making your email look ghastly and unattractive. If in doubt, check your emails in various email providers.
Conclusions
Many emails are not rendered correctly.
Some simple steps can be taken to ensure your emails are presented in all their glory and get the right message across.
Make sure your emails are relevant and anticipated, so that customers do not simply mark them as SPAM.
VISIT www.silverpop.com to find out more about email marketing.
Read Bill Nussey’s blog at http://emailmarketing.silverpop.com/
