William B. Ready - Interactive Marketing and Sales

I have always acted in a more formal style in business. I have always worn suits to customer meetings, rarely used curse words (except when I worked in New York early in my career), and addressed my letters starting with the salutation "Dear So and So". In the growing world of email marketing, the salutation, "Dear" actually gets picked up by SPAM, Junk and UCE filters as a positive indication for SPAM. I guess formal is out in Email. Did you ever wonder what else triggers those filters and how is the scoring accomplished? Well actually, emails, in particular, are inspected from Head to toe, or "Header" to "/HTML" for indications of suspicious behavior. Some examples include: 1. Does it look like the Nigerian Banking Spoof? ("I Simply need a bank account to place $20Million in for a few days and I will pay you $100,000 as a fee for doing this..."); 2. Is the body text a strange color? 3. Is the word Click Here in all CAP...

We firmly believe that online Chat will be an important tool for Interactive B2B marketing. Karen and Joanna set the right tone with this article. In our initial assessments and tests of Live chat for B2B, we are seeing some great success. Nothing better than engaging suspects while they are browsing and trying to solve a problem or fill a need. Look for WarpDrive chat soon. B2B E-Mail Marketing

Heidi is one of ClickZ's best. She provides a strong set of learnings on what works in newsletters to current customers as well as some process considerations on what makes a newsletter successful. The biggest take a away? Always test, test, and test to improve How to Do an E-Newsletter Really, Really Well

Some practical perspectives on B2B lead generation and getting focused about your story to make connections with prospects faster. Its common sense mixed with experience from Ray Jutkins. "13 Platinum B-2-B Lead Generation Ideas" by Ray Jutkins "...Business-to-business direct marketing came 'alive' in the '90s." See the article here: PowerPointers.com :

Rich Media appears to be gaining stride as a bonafide method of branding and marketing, and just now starting to address sales. Here is a new twist. It's not just a flash presentation. Interactive, Avatar based characters are catching people. Read about it here. MediaDailyNews 05-10-04 . What is your perspective on this?