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?

Groove has put together an interesting guideline to encourage and focus employees' weblogs and personal websites. Its worth reading to know how to leverage communications from a company's greatest assets, its people. Groove Networks - Weblog Policy

A Pretty good tutorial on Blogging. Check it out here... Blogging and RSS � The "What's It?" and "How To" of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators

SPAM is driving everyone crazy, and Adding Extreme measures in the challenge to fight it. This article speaks to the pendulum swinging to the right where Yahoo is blocking 37% of its inbound email from reaching its users? WOW. The greatest challenge is that the ISPs don't have to report to the sender that their mail has been blocked. This has to cause a backlash. Who said the ISP has the right to filter my mail, based on their judgment? A colleague spent two days trying to receive a PPT presentation from one of her customers without success. Their own spam filter was blocking the email. She ordered her IT department to turn the filter off... Permanently. What scares me is that postal mail seems to be more effective today. (And your speaking to someone who lived in Chicago where a cartload of my neighbors and my own mail was found in someone's house and car trunk). There are better solutions here... right? MediaDailyNews 03-26-04

Another strong indication about the value of email marketing in customer acquisition. E-mail Marketing Spending to Jump to $6.1 Billion by 2008: Report

Good article on effective online marketing. Some great pointers to watch for as SPAM filters continue to block legitimate emails. More don'ts than do's, but worthwhile reading to ensure great delivery statistics for email marketing. I.Merchant: Watch Your Language

A very Effective and thorough article on complying with CAN-SPAM laws. Neil, Thank you. Is Your Company CAN-SPAM Compliant?

Great rounded perspectives on CAN-SPAM from Ziff-Davis Canning Spam

While business to business sales may not appear to be constrained by e-commerce, consumer issues, many catalog companies we deal with have this same problem. See this story about respones times to customer inquiries. We believe you should be in the under 15 minute catageroy like RedEnvelope. Survey: E-mail Response Times Flagging

This confirms my concerns about CAN Spam impact. If a prospect or customers has unsubscribed from ANY of your emailings, then a single Email from anyone such as a sales person, could be cause for a lawsuit! MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR What to do? 1. Ensure that all emails have your physical email address. 2. Establish email lists and manage personal and enterprise campaigns. 3. Get a commercial eMail marketing system to manage the dialogue with your customers and GET permission from your prospects and customers confirmed with Double Opt-in methods. 4. Not a big deal, but these steps will give you peace of mind and freedom from our litigious society. Regards, William.

Check out this interesting analysis. CDT CanSpam Analysis The CAN-Spam Law can effect any salesperson trying to cold call a prospect in even B2B sales. CDT in this review is carefully outlining their perspective on the impact and rules that individuals and companies must follow to comply. Unfortunately, CAN-Spam is not affecting the Spammers that you and I would love to rid the world of, selling Viagra, P#$is stuff, or Breast stuff. I still get more everyday. AND these spammers are coming in from Asia and Eastern Europe and not readily trackable. (I constantly try Neo-Trace to identify the ISP and WHOIS of the senders). It just blows my mind that legitimate marketers, with products of value can get sued for a single email. Beware. Times are shifting and compliance is critical. Coordinate your email efforts and track your communications with your customer and prospect lists. Using systems like WarpDrive from Acrelic Interactive will be necessary and mandated