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

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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...

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