Online Marketing for Marketers

One out of five US email marketers send additional emails to subscribers after confirming an unsubscribe request, according to the new study Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After “Unsubscribe Me”  from Return Path.  A very poor practice, indeed, and a lesson for marketers in every nation. If someone requests off your file, please let them off without any troubles. Further the study found that 11% of the companies studied emailed subscribers more than 10 days after confirming an unsubscribe request - a violation of the US federal CAN-SPAM Act. Read more

Anybody feeling good about the economy these days?  With so much pressure to perform, it’s hard to “envision the future” or even get your arms around 2009 planning.

Here’s two things you can do now, in Q4, for immediate impact, that will not only help you improve results, but will help you feel good about your planning efforts (and keep your job safe).  Read more

When marketing planning gets complicated, I always suspect that, somehow, the essentials have gone wrong. I’ve seen elaborate edifices of media buying, graphic design, brand strategy and more built on the most threadbare understanding of fundamentals: who your customers are and what they want.

But when the fundamentals are solid — you know your customers and what makes them tick —  your actual execution can be quite simple.

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YouTube is growing at an outstanding rate - 13 hours of video being uploaded every minute. Facebook membership has soared past 100 million members and to put that into perspective the Wall Street Journal has a printed circulation of just 2 million. Yet many marketers are just waiting on the sidelines trying to figure out how to get into the game. Read more

Last June and July, the LA Times featured a few articles on internet marketing and spend.

Spending on online advertising surpasses TV, report says   …it’s growing so fast that in 2008 it is projected to surpass ad spending on TV, radio and movies combined for the first time ever.  Further, in another article: “In times of economic strain, marketers and agencies are under more pressure to prove their results,” he said. On the Web, advertisers know how many people clicked on their ads and how many people ignored them. That’s tougher to prove in, say, something like radio.  …Lest you think about abandoning your job and going to work in online advertising, here’s one note of caution: Spending on Internet advertising actually dropped slightly for the first time in 13 quarters. Read more

My recent poll results were very similar to the recent surveys on the topic “what people do with the promotional inserts which accompany your bills and statements in the mail”. My poll indicated that 56% of the respondents did not read any of the promotions (inserts or flyers) which accompanied their bills while 39% said they “sometimes” they read the flyers and only 6% said that they read the inserts.

Further supporting our poll, a recent Zoomerang study stated:

A staggering 86 percent of consumers said they have never purchased a product or service after receiving a separate promotional document with their monthly statements, with 40 percent of respondents mentioning that the inserts that accompany their monthly statements are always impersonal and irrelevant.  Read more

For most, a trip to Indiana is not on the top of their cool spots traveling list.  But, with Tony Dungy, a tour of Lukoil Field and a great education for me and 1200 other marketers, Exacttarget has changed my opinion of Indy.   

Case & Point:  Dinner, Drinks and Tony Dungy at the new Lukoil Stadium.  Last night we had a chance to hear from the legendary and life-inspiring coach Tony Dungy.     With beer, cheese steaks and good company (as you can see by photo) at hand, the night capped off a day of impressive online marketing education…
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On the eve of the DNC convention, I can not help but correlate the politics, the two candidates and of course how that all relates back to you and the world we marketing and business professionals live in.  So I decided to break it down and stir a little emotion to see if you guys are awake out there now that OMS Summer tour is over (save San  Diego on 9/25).  I decided to take a different approach to see if it would give us deeper insight into the men that wish to lead our country.  My approach was to look at the major domains of Online Marketing of: Social Media, Search, Email and Websites.   Read more

Yesterday I received a comment about the preview pane and it highlighted something that may be useful to talk about. Simply put, are you a WORM?

WORM stands for Write Once, Read Many – it is normally associated with print. E-mail was a wonderful technological advance that allowed us marketers to break free from having to send a lot of people the exact same message. However, I really don’t think as an industry we have gotten past WORM.  Read more

Different thoughts and themes in this blog entry…I had the distinct pleasure of sitting on the keynote panel at the OMS in Atlanta last week. We had some great topics, panelists and an open bar. In my book, that makes for a pretty good day out of the office. The passion and energy in the audience was what really grabbed me.  Read more