I could easily join the gloom and doomers and proclaim the death of e-mail (which I think I did write about in my June issue.)

The more I think about it e-mail is an entity much like New York. The place gets overcrowded, goes through crises that threaten its long term viability and eventually survives, even resurging, at times, with greater brilliance than it had before. It’s a city we can’t afford to let go down tubes. Its denizens won’t give up on its cosmopolitan lifestyle that makes their lives vibrant and culturally advanced. (Okay, I’m a New Yorker and on the biased side!).

But think about it. The e-mail channel is certainly cluttered, e-mail boxes are overstuffed, and over-spammed. Yet people don’t want to give up on it. E-mail is just too great. It’s a way of life, with all the characteristics of a civilization. It streamlines project management, making it easy to communicate with groups of people in an instant, it lets you keep tabs on your son in college or in a foreign country. People even fall in love via e-mail,.

Software providers, users and ISPs are beginning to engage themselves more heavily in the war against spam while our government drags its heels. Powerful technologies are coming into the foreground that enable both senders and receivers to gain control over spam. Yahoo, MSN and AOL all have given filtering capabilities to their users. Even lesser ISP’s have followed suit. In addition, most have set up "bulk" e-mail boxes where they deposit e-mails the ISP’s detect as being sent in large waves of mail.

It’s time to join this war. Use filtering software or options your ISP provides, report spam, and don’t purchase items offered by a spammer. The less effective spammers become the more likely they will wither away with time.

E-mail is not like banner ads and pop-ups that have both fallen from grace, each in a few years’ time. Nobody needs a banner ad or pop-up to run his life or business. Advertisers might bemoan their loss of effectiveness and revenue earned from them. But we all need e-mail to be a viable channel. We just have to get through a bad run of polluting factors. And we’ll outsurvive them because spammers are riding the opportunistic tide. Eventually they’ll be beached.

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A September survey by the Patrick Marketing Group found nearly 50 percent of executives surveyed plan to boost marketing spending in the coming year. And while most increases will be modest—1 percent to 10 percent is the most popular estimate—the budgets mark an important shift in attitude.

PMG sees a shift in attitude -three times as many people anticipate spending increases as those who expect further cutbacks."

Marketing money will be spread out among a wide variety of tactics. The most popular tactic for 2003 is public relations. Direct mail, electronic marketing, and tradeshows are also at the top of the list.  Telemarketing and Web-based seminars will get less support.

While broad-based brand awareness campaigns are still part of the arsenal, most marketers say that next year they will be more likely to spend on targeted marketing, rather than efforts to drum up more broad appeal.

To see a table with all the stats on this go to the
E-Tactics’ Gallery

(As reported in SMM's Performance eNewsletter-Oct 21, 2002)

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According to a report from Return Path and NFO WorldGroup 49% of US adults changed at least one of their e-mail addresses. In fact, the companies report that the annual churn rate for e-mail addresses is 39%. The two main reasons that people say they change their personal e-mail address are to get away from SPAM (16%) and because they have changed internet service providers (48%). Most people who change their work e-mail address do so because of a job change (As reported in emarketer Oct 17, 2002)

"In addition to the impact on consumer relationships identified,there is a real and significant subsequent financial impact on reputable businesses that rely on e-mail to communicate with their customers," said Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg.

The survey, conducted in August, polled 1,015 consumers from NFO WorldGroup's online panel of U.S. e-mail users over the age of 18 and is representative of U.S. online households, the firm said. (as reported in Directnewsline Oct 18, 2002)

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If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t send out all your messages in HTML you should checkout this table we’ve put in our Gallery. You’d be surprised to see what e-mail systems and clients are holding folks back from seeing your beautifully formatted messages. To see this table at the E-Tactics’ Gallery, click here.

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According to a Quris.com survey of US e-mail users, 67% say they like the companies they know of that, in their opinion, do a good job with permission e-mail marketing. Additionally, 58% say they open those companies' e-mails and 53% say their personal buying decisions are affected by those companies' e-mail.

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All that said and done – how many people are clicking through these days? Looks like the days of double digit response are no longer with us (and according to this data haven’t really been with us at all). To see this table at the E-Tactics’ Gallery, click here.(As reported in emarketer on Oct. 16, 2002)

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"Spam has become a generic term for any intrusion that people don’t like," said Ray Everett-Church, a privacy and government relations consultant with ePrivacy and an anti-spam advocate.

Spam may be officially defined as "unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail," but more than semantics is at stake. The volume and breadth of new digital advertising strategies threaten to wipe out the line between legitimate and illegitimate marketing, some experts say, as people begin to view all interruptions on a computing or telecommunications device as out of bounds. The result could be a delay in the long hoped-for recovery in the battered online ad market as consumers dig in their heels. (As reported in CNET news.com on Oct 8, 2002)

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I came across this grass roots site that lists what the laws on spam are state by state. An excellent resouce that is a bit staggering. How to put it all together? Check this site out at http://www.spamlaws.com/state/index.html

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A recent Nielsen survey reported that 74% of users online conducted searches and 55% of those users clicked on paid search results. The U.S. Department of Commence says that product/service information search is the top online activity for 67% of online Americans, second only to e-mail at 87%. Moreover, Jupiter Media Metrix and Harris Interactive recently surveyed 2,000 U.S. online advertisers about their satisfaction with online advertising effectiveness and paid search and found that out of five ad formats (two types of banners, opt-in e-mail, paid inclusion, and pay-for-placement), pay-for-placement came out on top in four out of five satisfaction categories including overall satisfaction and satisfaction with average ROI.

A recent study completed by Princeton Survey Research Associates for Consumer WebWatch suggests that this will not be the case. When consumers were questioned about the likelihood of using a search engine if they knew some sites paid to be displayed more prominently, 66% responded with either a "more likely" or "no difference" answer. A significant 30% responded with the "less likely" response. The assumption here is that consumers will readily identify paid results. Bear in mind that a large group of consumers think "competing" truck brands (more or less identical) owned by the same company produce magnificently unique vehicles and contend that one is light-years ahead of the other

(as reported in MediaPost Oct 8, 2002)

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karTOO.(www.kartoo.com) is a different type of meta search engine that launched in April 2002. It has a neat interface with a Genie bobbing up and down.  It queries other search engines. The best part, is the unique way it displays the results graphically! It presents a map of results. KarTOO uses Flash interface and XML communicating capabilities of Flash for caching of data – you just have to try it --- you’ll LOVE it!

MyWay.com is the new portal that is taking direct aim at Yahoo by offering a homepage free of pop-ups and display ads. Instead, the portal offers only text-only ads. Its creators' aim: grab on to consumers' rising frustration with intrusive online advertising. MyWay generates revenue from advertising that appears as text-only links in search results. Google provides the portal's searches.

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