February 18, 2002
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1. Two More Marketing Awards Entry Deadlines
2. Great Idea: Testimonials Flash Intro
3. Competitor Plagiarizes Google Ad Creative
4. AAAA Convention Finally Includes Web Ads
5. AuthorizeNet Disses Non-US Credit Card Buyers
6. Don't Assume Marketing Tech Terms Are Obvious
7. Looks Like Text -- But It's HTML!
8. Who is Your Email Campaign "From" Line From?
9. eFax Battles Fax Spammers
***** THIS WEEK'S BLOG
[02/18/02 10:04AM] TWO MORE MARKETING AWARDS ENTRY DEADLINES
Fr: Anne Holland
Two more awards to enter yourself for:
1) New Media Age Effectiveness Awards -- UK-Only Web sites and
online advertisers can enter in 20 different categories,
including (hurrah) B-to-B sites, ITV, retail, and advertising. Entry
deadline is March 15th (or as they say in the UK, 15 March.)
http://www.newmediazero.com/awards02/categories.html
2) The Direct Marketing Association's International Echo Awards -
- Both Internet and multichannel campaigns can enter. However for
some weird reason online campaigns marketing publications only
qualify to enter if the pubication itself is a print one. My
favorite bit of the rules to enter Web sites for awards,
"Printouts of screens are not acceptable, nor or mocked-up
versions of the site, as ease-of-navigation is a vital element of
any site." So true! Entry deadline is April 15th.
http://www.dma-echo.org
[02/15/02 6:02PM] GREAT IDEA: TESTIMONIALS FLASH INTRO
Fr: Anne Holland
If you've been reading me for a while, you'll know I absolutely
despise Flash intros. I'm going to a site for a reason, and it's
not to sit through your commercial twiddling my fingers waiting
for your home page to load so I can get done whatever I went
there to do!
That said, I am exceptionally impressed by the Flash intro at
CorporatePlanners.com because they've used the Flash to present
the most powerful marketing tactic of all -- happy client
testimonials.
It goes on for a bit too long, and the site afterwards is pretty
blah (I'm so bored of that handshake clip-art) but then you can't
expect me to be 100% enthused about everything can you? Anyway,
if they cookie visitors so you only see the Flash intro the first
time you enter (and don't have to sit through it again and again
as an ongoing client or prospect) then this would qualify as one
of the Best Flash Intros I've ever seen.
http://www.corporateplanners.com
[02/14/02 6:25PM] COMPETITOR PLAGIARIZES GOOGLE AD CREATIVE
Fr: Anne Holland
Search engine optimization marketers have complained for years
now about "meta tag theft" whereby a competitor will deck out
their site's title and meta tags using all the same keywords that
you do, in hopes of stealing your ranking and your traffic. This
afternoon, Sherpa reader Meyer Baron of 1SmartPuppy emailed in a
warning that there's a new kinda problem to watch out for --
Google AdWords copy theft.
Turns out a direct competitor of Meyer's liked his paid Google
listing creative so much, that he/she decided to lift it
practically wholesale for their own AdWords paid placements that
compete with 1SmartPuppy. Meyer says, "Why do I care?
1. Because I create and implement marketing strategies for a
living, and don't tolerate people using my work without
permission.
2. Because I'm paying for my AdWords campaign, and if someone
else is going to benefit from it, they should at least pay me for
it. They certainly should not reap any benefit from it without my
knowledge and consent.
3. Because my company's name appearing in their listing implied
an association that doesn't exist."
Years ago when a direct competitor reprinted a direct mail
package that I'd done, word-for-word (except they inserted their
product name in place of mine, and changed the toll free order
number), it took one simple, polite, phone call to get them to
cease and desist. I kinda considered it a compliment and left it
at that. This AdWords campaign theft is a whole different
ballgame.
http://www.1smartpuppy.com
[02/14/02 6:17PM] AAAA CONVENTION FINALLY INCLUDES WEB ADS
Fr: Anne Holland
Wahoo! I don't get to go to the big AAAA conference because the
attendees are gargantuan advertisers who spend billions offline
and close to el zippo online. However, journalist Masha Geller of
MediaPost conned her boss into a free ticket, and reports that
for the first time in history, this year at AAAA there are
actually sessions on Internet advertising! Two in fact. Which may
sound piddly to us Web marketing insiders, but we all must bear
in mind that we have myopic vision. So, this is long-overdue
happy dance time!
http://www.aaaa.org
[02/14/02 12:07AM] AUTHORIZENET DISSES NON-US CREDIT CARD BUYERS
Fr: Anne Holland
AuthorizeNet, a merchant account processor for thousands of
online retailers, decided recently that credit cards issued by
banks outside the US are not a good risk this week. So this
evening at 9pm ET, they turned off the ability for every single
one of their merchant customers to accept non-US cards. Luckily
they did send three email bulletins to customers prior to this.
But it was still a major inconvenience.
Here at Sherpa we had to send someone back to the office three
hours after closing, to go online and manually turn our
AuthorizeNet settings back to accept non-US cards again. During
the few minutes that took, three Sherpa shoppers from Canada all
had their perfectly good credit cards declined. I understand the
need for security online these days, but come on! Are Canadians
less trustworthy than Americans? I think not.
[02/13/02 10:53AM] DON'T ASSUME MARKETING TECH TERMS ARE OBVIOUS
Fr: Alexis Gutzman
Do you know what a "locator" is? How about "PRM software?" I'm
relatively technical, and while I could guess them both, neither
is a top of mind term/acronym for me. Yet, two companies that
sell these two products have sent out e-mail marketing in the
last week or so assuming that I was just thinking about their
solution. Neither bothered to offer an alternative description of
the product in the opening lines, so that I could read the first
paragraph and surmise what their solution did, even if I didn't
know their term for it.
Apositives were created for just this purpose. Try this:
"Thinking of revamping your locator, the tool on your site that
visitors use to find the store closest to them?" Or this: "Self
Important Research Associates reports that 47% of companies that
need PRM software don't have it. Are you one of the 47% that
isn't managing its partner relationships well enough?"
If you think you're marketing to such a qualified audience that
you don't need to define the terms, you're wrong. The fact that I
once had a conversation with your PR guy about your term or
acronym doesn't mean it's been stored away for easy recall. Make
it easy for your audience to nod along with you -- define your
terms and your product early in your messages.
[02/12/02 2:24PM] LOOKS LIKE TEXT - BUT IT'S HTML!
Fr: Anne Holland
And, I just got a smart email campaign from Business 2.0! Why
smart? I guess they've heard that a lot of businesspeople these
days assume anything HTML is junk mail and dispose accordingly.
But they wanted to be able to track their email campaign's open
rate, which you can't do if you're sending a plain text message.
So, Business 2.0's marketers did the best of both worlds. They
sent an email letter that looks like plain text, but it's
actually HTML.
The campaign is in the form of a thank-you letter from the editor
to the magazine's readers. And I gotta say, although I know
intellectually that it's a mass email, I still felt an emotional
impact from receiving something that looked personal -- a regular
typed note, vs. something with graphics and colors. Well done.
[02/12/02 2:05PM] WHO IS YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGN "FROM" LINE FROM?
Fr: Anne Holland
Ouch! Leading industry publication DM News (who publish
iMarketingNews) just shot themselves in the foot. They're renting
their opt-in email list out to various vendors. Which isn't a
mistake. The mistake is the "From" line on the messages. The
message I just got said it was from "Edith Roman".
This is a fairly common mistake these days, so lemme clear it up.
According to focus group results, up to 50% of email recipients
look at the "from" line to decide whether or not they will open
an email or delete it. If the "from" line is not from someone
they remember asking to get email from, many will promptly assume
that company is spamming them -- even if it's not officially
spam. And in the world of spam, everything is in the eye of the
beholder.
When you rent a list, the "from" line should be the brand name or
company name that the opt-in names will remember as the place or
company they gave permission to email them from. Your only other
choice -- and this falls into the debatable grey area -- is a
brand name that's really, really famous, so recipients would be
inclined to trust and open email from that brand even though they
can't remember asking for that brand to specifically email them
personally.
In the case of this campaign, The smarter bet would have been to
use a From line saying, "DM News."
[02/11/02 2:34PM] EFAX BATTLES FAX SPAMMERS
Fr: Anne Holland
Per my Blog from a few months ago, eFax has begun to fight harder
against fax spam. Today they announced a service, all eFax
customers who receive faxes they suspect to be spam can report
them to abuse@mail.efax.com.
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