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What’s that, you say?
Stealth, very stealth. You don’t even know it’s happening to you. I’m
talking about many "powers that be" on the Internet that have decided what
mail you can receive. It’s not just about spam, it’s bigger than SpamCop,
and worst of all it’s currently completely out of your control to change.
Last month as I was preparing this newsletter I waited all evening for my
test e-mail to copies to come in from our e-mail marketing company. We
missed our deadline waiting for these tests. Only when we tried to send a
test copy to an e-mail address on a different server, did the test arrive.
That’s the first way we were able to detect that some of our mail was
being blocked. And to follow suit, when we sent out our newsletter a day
late, we didn’t receive any copies in our main e-mail box, but we did at
Yahoo, AOL, and on RCN.
After days of investigation, actually weeks of hammering top management
and interviews with systems engineers, our hosting company told us it
subscribes to 9 blackhole lists. Our e-mail marketing company was on those
lists and therefore blocked.
I’m not a black hole list expert, but what I’ve learned from others
in the industry is that these lists are not necessarily prepared with any
rules of fairness nor do they provide any objective procedure for removing
oneself from the list.
But here’s the real kicker to the entire story. I discovered, going
through files I save to write this newsletter that I had stopped receiving
e-mail newsletters such as DMNews and Directnewsline.
I asked the web hosting company why wasn’t I getting mail I had opted-in
for?
Both of these publishers use third party e-mail companies to send out
their issues. If the sender’s name in the return path does not match the
name registered as the owner of the sender’s IP address, this hosting
company interprets that as "spoofing" and dumps the mail.
There was no arguing with this web hosting company. Stealth filtering is
practically impossible to stop. Presently there are no laws or law suits
that will give you a leg up on your e-mail handlers. Sadly, the lesson we’ve
learned is that it’s better to switch than fight.
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An undercover investigation by the Federal Trade Commission revealed that
visiting certain popular places on the Web is a sure way to wind up on
spammer e-mail lists, the FTC said yesterday. The six-week investigation
found that registering for Internet chat rooms, news groups and Web pages
and free personal Web pages were most likely to result in consumers
receiving unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam. The FTC conducted
its investigation by planting 175 locations on the Internet with 250
invented e-mail addresses. According to the FTC, 100 percent of e-mail
addresses posted to chat rooms subsequently received spam, in one case eight
minutes after the address was posted.
For news groups and pages, 86 percent of e-mail addresses received spam,
along with 50 percent of addresses registered for free personal Web pages.
Some places on the Internet are safer from spammers, the FTC said. Only
27 percent of addresses posted to message boards received unsolicited
commercial e-mails, while 9 percent posted to e-mail service directories
received spam (DMNews Nov 14).
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A Silverpop study titled, The Broken Link – What Do Recipients
Really See?, shows that 42% of the HTML e-mails reviewed were difficult
to read due to errors, such as missing graphics and raw code displayed. 13%
of these e-mails had extremely disruptive errors or were completely
indecipherable.
Over 400 companies were initially included in the study, and nearly 1400
e-mails were analyzed in 9 of the most popular e-mail programs. Of the
nearly 700 HTML e-mails reviewed, almost half contained major errors such as
missing graphics or raw HTML code.
A key take-away from this study is that properly formatted HTML messages
can improve response rates from 10% to as high as 40%." (MediaPost,
Nov 12).
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While more ads might appear like a good thing, clutter kills --
advertising’s effectiveness. A recent survey by Burst! Media of
nearly 3,000 web users found that while 30% of respondents could tolerate up
to two ads on a page, the limit for another 33% is only a single ad per web
page.
When a web page surpassed the respondents’ ad limits, 36% told the
Burlington, MA-based internet advertising network that they would
immediately leave the site. "This finding is nearly identical for men
and women, and for all income segments analyzed," writes MediaPost.
"Teens (13-17) are more likely than other age segments to abandon a
site perceived as cluttered."
Even more lost to the advertiser, in a way, than those who abandon a
website are those users who remain on a site they consider cluttered, since
70% of them simply pay less attention to the ads. Worst of all, "58% of
survey respondents said they have a less favorable opinion of an advertiser’s
product or service when it appeared on a web page they perceived as
cluttered." That’s why Burst! Media concluded its survey by saying
that "clutter is a hidden cost that will impact not only the
effectiveness, but also the return on the media dollars you spend."
From an individual perspective, "surfers face an internet average of
three ads per page view, making message delivery tough for marketers,"
according to Nielsen//NetRatings. (Emarketer, Nov 5)
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Bloated front pages are the rule at online news sites, but they are no
easier to read online than they are in print, according to industry observer
Steve Outing. He highlights the washingtonpost.com home page, which on a
particular day had 217 links, including 42 headlines and 52 section
headings, as well as four photos, two ads, a popup menu, four text fields
and other assorted items. "How has it come to this? Does a news site
really need several hundred elements on its home page?" asked Outing.
"Are design rules for the Web so different from print that online
publishers can routinely toss hundreds of elements on a single page and not
overwhelm the audience?"
Print-style editorial decision-making could help tame these "link
farms" by presenting only a few headlines that editors think are the
most important, he said. Assuming 10 percent of a Web site's content
generates 90 percent of traffic, Outing said perhaps "10 percent of the
most popular content is what's best to include on a home page." (Editor
& Publisher 30 Oct. 2002) as reported in IFRA Trendreport
Nov 6.
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I learned more about how well innovative marketing techniques work at the
two sessions I attended. The presentation by Jane Chen of YaYa shed
new light on how effective advergaming is in creating brand awareness. In
2001, Video games surpassed the movie business. Video game sales were $9.4
billion compared to $8.4 billion in movie box office and growing to $16.9B
by end of 2003 (IDC)
Yaya’s learned that personalty tests are very popular with women
online. YaYa helped Chrysler meet its marketing objective of increasing
awareness of females between 34-49 of various Chrysler models. The
results of YaYa’s online personality test it did for Chrysler revealed
 | Average game play of 7.6 minutes. 32% of players spent 10-20 minutes
playing |
| Viral compounding rate of 22% |
| Viral e-mails sent to a friend had open rates of 66%, far exceeding
the industry average of 39.4% for typical acquisition e-mails |
| 15% of game players, requested vehicle brochures vs. the website which
has a 0.7% brochure request rate |
| 49% of the players were female and the median age for all players was
40-49 |
ELLEgirl Magazine worked with ActiveBuddy.com
to create an Interactive agent, called ELLEgirl buddy that resided on
Instant Messaging lists and was programmed to talk like a 15 year old girl
living in San Francisco. The agent is capable of speaking to 50,000 people
at once.
In six months over 1.5 million users interacted with ELLEgirl buddy
sending 9.5 million messages. Sixty-five percent were repeat users and the
average session was 7 minutes. The agent increased traffic by 83% and trial
subscriptions to the magazine by 500%.
Stephen Klein, CEO for
ActiveBuddy said the agent lifted click through rates for sponsors by 10-13%
and click through rates were 10 – 15 times higher than web sites
with no interactive agent.
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