William B. Ready - Interactive Marketing and Sales

As a B2B marketer or sales leader, are you ensuring that your mail is getting through? Based on this short informative article and research, more than 61% of North American companies interviewed were using Commercial Filtering Applications and Appliances . That affects important documents like contract renewals, security updates, newsletters, user group correspondence, and more. How much of your mail is actually getting through? Corporations are trying to reduce the SPAM coming in and individuals are trying to reduce the SPAM they have to read to get to their "important" email. Your correspondence may be filtered out with all the junk and not getting there. Here are some ideas on how to improve deliverability: 1. Ask your customers to "Whitelist" your domain and email address. Ask them in your emails, newsletters, or any other correspondence. 2. Ensure that you have a mail system that is working on technolog implementation such as sender authenticati...

If you have or will have any California Consumers for your business... take heed. See the specific instructions regarding type size and location of privacy links that this law "Requires". I am surprised to see that California isnt trying to impose specific Color Standards on the Privacy banners as well..... Nevertheless, this is critical to avoiding liability. California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003

Karen and Joanna do it again. Very good article on compelling subject lines for B2B marketing. As you know, a good subject line can swing the open rate of an email piece by 40%. This article provides some good tips on successful subject lines and ones to avoid. Winning Subject Lines

It is startling how difficult it is for marketing and sales executives to get web changes accomplished. We have seen broad swings in the time it takes to prep a website for WarpDrive by different IT organizations. In one case it took two calendar days and 45 minutes of labor time to prepare a website with approximately 1,000 pages. The same task by another large company, took Two Months . The most important issue here is that 50% of the attached Jupiter Research study participants plan on spending significant budget towards top line initiatives like WarpDrive. Hooooray. Who�s the Boss? - Metrics - CMO Magazine

Suprisingly, target marketing is being practiced, without regard to relative performance and results. Our observations for the hundreds of email marketing campaigns our customers perform monthly, is that they are focused on messages to specific sub-segments of their customer bases, with unique content and offers. See what a few experts say about Target marketing and segmentation and its value. MediaDailyNews 07-06-04

Here is a current view of the great progress being made to Stop or at least hinder SPAM. It speaks to authentication again and registration with safelist vendors. Read this carefully. While many of the players are consumer oriented, the momentum will most certainly assist B2B companies as well. Yahoo! Media Relations - Press Release

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