William B. Ready - Interactive Marketing and Sales

I am not sure what the number is, but approximately 5% of my normal day to day email never gets delivered. Either a corporate, ISP, or Personal Filter can get in the way, or a broken HTML to text converter. Bottom line is that you can't trust getting legitimate email through. I talked recently with an owner of a software company that sells great utilities for analyzing disk and computer problems. He sells his software online for under $100. To activate his software, and evolve from a demo to a full-working model, he sends a password and key identifier to his PAYING customers. He stated that the email delivery failure got so bad, he is considering sending the Password and ID through regular postal mail. CAN YOU Believe that an online merchant can't get vital information to his own customers? He has tried everything. This Article speaks to a backlash that is occurring. Expect to see more of these in the coming year. Until authentication gets into place, your mail m...

Are your salespeople sending emails to prospects and customers? Are they including physical email addresses in the email? Do they allow for a prospect to unsubscribe? Has someone they emailed ever requested to be removed from mailings from your company? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you could be violating CAN-SPAM laws. This article in Catalog Age is a good reminder of what to look for... William Ready Do Spammers Walk Among Us?

The real intent of Anti-Spyware bills are focused on helping to pursue con-artists from stealing business away from legitimate businesses. (Its actually funny, who would have that an entertainer and ex-partner of Cher would be leading the charge in this). The language of the bills and articulation from the politicians though is geared towards protecting the consumer from being switched or pop-ups presented without asking. I worry about the bill staying focused on the business objective. We have to ensure that when an internet user intends to get to General Motors, that they are not automatically routed to KIA. Lets look at the driver behind these bills Deception, Lying, Stealing are at the heart of these practices. I don't understand why these actions arent currently covered under our laws. But, if this is the only way to make that happen so be it. My greatest concern is that continuing regulation that gets focused on the use of the internet could impinge its gro...

The FTC announced that a "do not SPAM" registry would not curtail SPAM. Taking a lesson from the do not email process, they believe that SPAM would increase, like Email increases, even in a Do Not Email environment. The fallout and probably greater result of these strong statements and direction from the FTC, is that they believe that email authentication is needed to make any programs successful. Keep an eye out for advancements in authentication, including the "email-id" standards from Microsoft and initiatives by the big ISPs such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc. We believe that the Big ISPs could create a standard that may even work for business customers. Authentication is a big part of any of these efforts. See the article. Let me know your thoughts. William FTC DMNews.com Article June 16,2004

My Boss' nephew is very talented. Check out how he transforms animals into commercial vehicles. Learn More --> SamRosenDesign

This is wonderful! It is critical that the sleazy operators out there filling up everyone's mailboxes with e-crap be shown that they are not beyond the law. The practices of the spammers is causing anxiety and a lack of trust in email by most business and personal email recipients. This has got to stop. While this is a news article about enforcement, I am simply applauding Microsoft for using some of its profit War Chest to demonstrate that good wins over evil! Bill Microsoft Files More CAN-SPAM Suits

Marketing Sherpa did a good job of trying to rate and evaluate some of the best Blogs on the internet related to marketing. With more than 800 people voting they got a reasonable turnout. (Unfortunately, after living in Chicago in my past, I am skeptical about the real number of votes and voters. [The motto in Chicago is "Vote Early and Vote Often]). BTW, I was one of the voters. If you do any Interactive marketing, check out their list of blogs. I am sure you will find great value among these Blogs. BTW, next year, please vote for Mine! :-) .... See the article here --> MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR

I found this article on Authentication a little disturbing. Its thesis points out that there are three major options that users (email recipients) engage to manage SPAM or Phishing. However, it does not draw conclusions or suggestions. It does however, point out that there are some great challenges ahead for email marketing and campaigning. Just today I sent an email to my cousin from Outlook, and he received it as SPAM. Was it my graphic signature file? Was it the fact it was HTML? My Conclusion: 1. Keep tabs on your bounces and reply email box and respond to the authentication process. (even then you still have no guarantee of delivery or whether a contact will read it; 2. Continue to work the unopened emails; 3. Ask your customers to put you on their "white" list of email domains; 4. Monitor your web marketing open and click rates for negative trends; and 5. Manage a dialogue with your customers by phone, in-person where possible and don't jus...