• Every year an average of 30 percent of the people who signed up for your e-mail marketing list will not get your e-mails because their ISP will incorrectly block them.
• 85 percent of the people on your e-mail list will stop reading your e-mails (without unsubscribing) after the third message your company sends to them (yes, company, not just your group inside the company).
• 25 percent of the people on your list who receive your e-mails and never open them will be among the top 10 percent of your best customers.
• An average of 39 percent of your current year subscribers will either unsubscribe, or stop reading/engaging with your e-mails by the end of the year.
• Over 10 percent of people who initially read your e-mail on their handheld device will file it away, intending to take action, but never doing so.
• About 15 percent of your list will read your e-mails and look to a social network like Facebook or Twitter to see if others are buzzing about the message or offer before taking action.
• Over 49 percent of people who are happy with their recent purchase from your company will open future e-mails seven times faster than those who have not made a purchase in over three months.

Read the rest of her post here…

Here are their top 10:

1. Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
2. Tradeshows – Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
3. Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
4. Send an opt-in email to your address book asking them to join your list.
5. Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.
6. Host your own event – Art galleries, software companies (one here has a party every quarter and invites the neighboring businesses), retail shops, consultants (lunch & learn) can all host an event and request attendees to sign up.
7. Offer a birthday club where you give something special to people who sign up.
8. Incentivize your employees – Give them $ for collecting VALID email addresses.
9. Giving something for free like a PDF? Make visitors sign up to your opt-in form before you let them download it.
10. Referrals – Ask you customers to refer you, and in exchange you’ll give them a discount.

Are you already paying for postcards or other mailers? What if we could do your direct mail, PLUS our exponentially better email marketing program as well – for the SAME PRICE you’re paying now?

Interested?

Stay tuned, our new toolkit, DM² for marketers will be launching in July 2009!

Ad dollars are leaving print… and fast!

Their Q1 losses for 2009 were worse than expected, around a 27% loss in advertising revenue. This outpaced their efforts to cut costs (not surprising, good journalism is expensive).

Seth Godin, on his blog, is predicting that by 2012 there will be, “no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US.”

WOW! and entire vertical market will be gone, or almost gone in less than three years!

These are both interesting reads and worth the effort to see what’s coming for online advertising.

We have seen with with our clients, and in our past, efforts to cut “traditional” media spending and emphasize online strategies. We’re helping our client get better results through email and PPC marketing; things that are measurable and quickly executable.

What are local advertisers to do, though? They don’t have the large budgets to go to a “big agency,” they don’t have the technical knowledge (in many cases) to prevent being taken advantage of by small agencies, there are too many options for free or almost free web based services, etc…
They have to do research and they have to trust their network. What do successful small agencies have to do, then?

They have to be good at working with small businesses, they have to treat each of their customers well, they have to be successful, because small businesses can’t afford the expense of a failed marketing effort, no matter how small.
Email campaigns and PPC campaigns are the best entry into online marketing for most small businesses, after getting themselves a quality web site. However, they should definitely use a someone to help them, they do not want to upset their targets with violations of CAN-SPAM, or just over communication.

Read the whole article Small Businesses Seek Solutions Online – eMarketer.

“Retailers ratcheted up their e-mail marketing campaigns to aggressively compete for consumers’ dwindling spending dollars,” says Jeff Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Retail E-Mail: Online Marketing Strategies. “That was due largely to the fact that e-mail is cheap to administer and delivers an ROI far superior to paid search, catalogs and other marketing media.”

Still, with all of the increased volume in email marketing, it still only accounts for 1.5% of direct marketing budgets in the US!

However, between email marketing and PPC marketing, that is changing rapidly. Spends in both categories so far in 2009 are up versus the same period in 2008. Why, you ask? Because email and PPC marketing are measurable, testable, traceable, more cost effective, and much more customizable than traditional marketing (both brand marketing and direct marketing) and advertisers can do more for less.

1. Prospect created a "group" on their own mail server called clients@PROSPECTNAME.com
2. Prospect used a well know, and reputable, blast provider to create an email blast to their entire list.

Nothing wrong yet…but then:

1. Prospect sends the test blast (without any personalization or opt out information) to the clients@PROSPECTNAME.com group.
2. This "blast" of a single email is then FORWARDED by their system to the entire clients@PROSPECTNAME.com group.
3. One of the users in the group has an auto-reply out-of-office enabled.

Still no problem…until:

1. The FROM: address for the blast was …  Yep, you guessed it … clients@PROSPECTNAME.com.
2. This caused that first out-of office to get sent to the entire group.
3. Since that original email, there have been more than 150 messages from the members of the group about PROSPECTNAME‘s inability to know what they’re doing, about someone "hacking" their email and sending messages, etc…

It was an interesting view into the types of people that are in certain kinds of businesses.  Their lack of knowledge about the internet, etc.

The WORST is yet to come, however:

1. PROSPECTNAME representative A begins to send messages to each of the respondents who’re asking to opt-out saying that they’ll be removed, but, their reply is going to the created group too…
2. Then representative B sent out the message following the break… making things worse!

The drama continues:

1. The email is from representative B:
   • Subject Line:  Sorry for Any Inconvenience this
   • To:  newsletter@PROSPECTNAME.com - NOT clients@PROSPECTNAME.com
   • Body:
     • "Do
       not forward or respond to any e-mail messages that show up in the Subject area
       with the following:
        

        

        

       clients@tenpercentdown.com

       FW: James F Curley/RWS/Raytheon/US is out of   the office on business trav…

       S O R R Y about this technological disorder and Inconvenience!!

       (fw: Re: James F Curley/RWS/Raytheon/US is out of the office on business
       travel th…) Please do not open any more e-mails with this subject.

       It seems that this fellow James F Curley has some kind of forwarding address
       and it keeps sending e-mails back to everyone as if we are sending it.
       Believe me, if you are not a registered member then we do not want you to
       have our information. We will have this solved tomorrow with the company that
       is handling our e-mail system. The original e-mail only went out to people who
       have registered on our website and therefore agreed to receive notices and
       e-mails. Thank you for your patience.

       Website Security"

   • As you can clearly see, they’re lying to their customers about what is happening.
2. Then, again at 8:30 PM they sent the same message to the appropriate distribution list.
3. This morning at 5:00 AM representative C sent the following:
   • "Sorry; All email that went to James
     F Curley has been hacked and forwarded many times to our clients. We have been
     inundated with emails. Please don’t open anything from him as it is not from
     us. I think it has run its route and will stop. Email gone wild for sure. We
     did not create it and Curley is not a client of mine and not on our email list.
     Sorry, enjoy your trip. C"
   • Again a complete lie about the problem.

So, what did they do wrong?

• They attempted to defraud their email solutions provider by sending a single email that was re-directed to their entire list.  Probably a violation of their terms of use.
• They sent out an email to a list without clear and easy opt-out ability, clearly a CAN-SPAM violation.
• They were unable to prevent some VERY negative feedback about their business from being seen by their entire customer base.

This is an investment company that people entrust with their money… How much of their client base have they lost?  If you figure every negative email is worth 5 (conservatively) more negative impressions, then, they lost nearly 1000 of their clients.  In a down market, this was one of the WORST possible scenarios.
What should they do now?  They need a follow-up mia-culpa campaign, executed properly, apologizing to their clients and asking them to opt-in to future communications.  Yes, that’s right, all of these people tried to opt-out, they need to confirm with them that they still want to opt-out after this CF of a "campaign."  We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Email

• 67% of respondents prefer email as a communications channel over
  other online vehicles, and 65% say they believe that will remain the
  preference in five years.
• Consumer opinion of the future importance of email registers far
  above future expectations for video conferencing (19%), instant
  messaging (17%), SMS text messages (12%) and Web meetings (12%).
• 65% of the demographic ages 18-34 – those most comfortable with IM,
  SMS and emerging communications methods – say they will likely favor
  email to communicate with businesses in five years.

Online Threats

• 69% of those surveyed expressed concern about being victimized by
  email fraud scams, an increase from the 62% finding in the 2007 Habeas
  report.
• 43% of respondents voice concern over the spam and virus threat to
  mobile devices, up from 2007′s 36% – and a reflection of the increasing
  use of the "mobile inbox" through smartphone and internet-enabled phone
  devices.
• As many as 35% of those surveyed do not know what to look for when
  trying to sift through emails that might potentially be dangerous.

1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee – Here is his blog, and his predictions for the future of the WWW.
2. Professor Nigel Shadbolt
3. Professor Wendy Hall – Her homepage.
4. Kai-Fu Lee
5. Dr. David Belanger
6. Mitchell Baker – Her blog.
7. Mark Bernstein
8. Robert Cailliau – His website.
9. Robert Scoble – His blog.
10. Tim O’Reilly – His homepage.

Not a list to laugh at, at all.  So, where was I among all of this?  Well, thirteen years ago, while Netscape was undergoing its IPO and starting the first "boom," of what we now call, "New Media," I was working in IT at a large advertising agency in Los Angeles.  We decided it would be a good time to demonstrate, to our clients, at the time names like, Vons, Flamingo Hilton, Honda Motorcycles, that we should be doing something with this "WWW" thing.  Well, we built some small products in JavaScript (well, back then we called it LiveScript); we went to the first Netscape Developers Conference in NYC; we impressed our clients with flashy branding stuff.  Then I moved on to a classified service, headquartered in Orange County, CA… We began putting classified ads online, we migrated their flat-file system to a dynamic, server-side database system, then, we moved in on to a Microsoft based database application…
The point of the story, though, is that what was misunderstood fifteen years ago is still misunderstood by a great many people.  Click through to find out what and why…

Misunderstandings…
Well it’s not hard to understand why the WWW is misunderstood by many people in marketing and advertising…
Is it a place for brand advertising?
Is it a place for direct marketing?

What is interactive marketing?
Well, I guess it’s both, if it is used correctly.  It provides marketers with the ability to build their brand in new and unique ways.
Most importantly, however, is that it brings the reality of one-to-one marketing to marketers.
It’s up to us, then, the agencies that provide strategies for our clients, to use the "New Media" environment to most effectively build their brand and communicate with their target markets.  We must coach them with the right marketing mix.  When is it appropriate to have a blog, when is it appropriate to have a MySpace site, when is an online survey a good idea, when should a marketer send email, how many, how often, etc….  Here at DMIdeas that is what we know and that is the experience and skill set we bring to our clients.