When Jonathan Fields spotted William Shatner waiting to board a JetBlue flight at New York’s JFK in May, he did what any other self-respecting blogger would do. He popped open his Apple (AAPL) Mac, connected to the Web using the free Wi-Fi provided by JetBlue, and used Twitter to share the sighting with pals. “JetBlue terminal,” Fields wrote on the blog service that lets users send short messages of 140 characters with status updates to groups of friends. “William Shatner waiting in pinstripe suit and shades to board flight to Burbank. Why’s he flying JetBlue? Free, maybe?”

But he was caught off guard by what happened next. Within 10 seconds he got an e-mail informing him that JetBlue (JBLU) was following him on Twitter.

“It totally startled me,” says the 42-year-old author, who initially worried that JetBlue might be monitoring his use of the Wi-Fi connection. JetBlue employee Morgan Johnston quickly explained that wasn’t the case. JetBlue keeps tabs on what Twitter users say about it, using a scanning tool, to find customers who might need information, say, on flight delays or cancellations, Johnston said.

Read the entire article here.

Uncategorized

Test For Formatting

Email can be rendered broken or even illegible on differing email clients. Test the formatting of your messages through test deliveries to major email software such as Hotmail, Outlook and others.

Be Selective In What You Send

Don’t overdo it! Legitimate email can be viewed as spam or junk if you’re indiscriminate in its volume. Cast a skeptical eye on every message before sending it to ensure that it offers real value to the recipient.

Allow For Options

Email marketers with a lot of information to share often allow recipients to choose their preferences (via links that are usually positioned at the bottom of the message). An example: “Do you wish to receive our email notifications weekly, or monthly?”

Ask For The Order!

If you seek a specific response from your email message, be sure to include a strong, clear call to action: “Phone us now to save 5%!” or “Click on this link for your free …”

If you’re directing an email recipient to a web page, consider the destination. It may be much more effective if you send them to an “offer-specific” landing page, rather than your web site’s “general content” home page.

Test For Effectiveness

Before initiating your campaign, it may pay to test it and several alternatives by crafting a couple of different messages and sending them to a limited audience to see which one draws the most responses.

Refine and repeat the process as needed until you’re sure you’re pressing all the right buttons!

Improving Deliverability

To ensure high deliverability of your emails even to those who have opted in for ongoing communications, you have to consider the spam filters that protect both individual mailboxes and internet service providers (ISPs).

In fact, ISPs will “black list” known suppliers of spam and routinely block their email. Conversely, ISPs “white list” those companies identified as senders of legitimate email and thereby allow their messages to pass through unimpeded.

Some tips improving deliverability:

Create Accurate Headers

The content in your email’s “From,” “To” and “Subject” fields are key. Use a legitimate email address in your From field. Place the recipient’s name and address in the To field. And, take care in composing your Subject field by avoiding common spam words (Free!).

An approach that identifies you and legitimizes your message may work best:” “This month’s Smith Company Outlook enewsletter.”

Test Your Email Against Spam Filters

Before distributing your emails, employ an online “content checker” to see how it scores according to commonly accepted anti-spam rules. If it scores high and is tagged as spam, you’ll want to reconsider your message.

Test Your Email At Popular Domains

Test your email against ISP spam filters by setting up email accounts at popular domains such AOL, Hotmail, MSN and Yahoo!. Then send your email to yourself to see if it gets through.

Additional Considerations:

Maintaining Your Mailing List

Email lists are dynamic in nature. As some recipients opt out or change their addresses, others will elect to opt in, and some may sign up more than once! List management software will help you maintain an up-to-date email list by eliminating unsubscribes, undeliverables (e.g., bounce backs) and duplicates.

Tracking Results

One beauty of email marketing is the ease with which it allows you to track results and measure the effectiveness. Software or your service provider can help you determine the number of emails sent, and the amount of responses you receive in return.

Do It Yourself – Or Enlist The Aid Of A Specialist?

The practices described in this white paper are well within the capabilities of many larger companies with dedicated IT or information technology departments, and certainly achievable by many smaller businesses who are not adverse to rolling up their sleeves and trying some new things.

That said, there is much to be gained by working with an interactive agency or ESP (email service provider) to achieve your goals. As specialists in the field, they should be able to point to a good track record at achieving results. And, with them on board, your marketing team or IT personnel may be better able to address your company’s other needs.

Uncategorized Campaigns, Email Marketing, White Papers

Best Practices for Email Deliverability:

The following is a list of best practices for increasing the deliverability of your email messages. Deliverability means that your legitimate email gets to the inbox of the recipient, and is not stuck in spam filters.

• Never buy a list of email addresses - That is the best way to get yourself blacklisted for lots of domains, and guarantee that your email will not be delivered.
• Send from a clean IP - If your sending mail from an IP that has sent spam email in the past, chances are your mail will be blocked. Also never use a SMTP server on a dynamic IP address, or on a dail-up, dsl, or cable modem.
• Remove bounced emails from your list - use some software to remove bad email addresses. Domain’s such as AOL will block you if you try to send to too many non-existent addresses. You should immediately remove all hard bounces.
• Use the same from address for all email - If a recipient is using a challenge response system they will typically add your newsletter address to their whitelist (a list of allowed email addresses) the first time you send them an email. If you send from a different email address every time the recipient may not keep adding your address to their whitelist.
• Setup SPF records in your DNS - Sender Policy Framework, or SPF are very simple records that you add to your DNS records. They identify which IP addresses may send email on behalf of your domain, many spam filters will give you positive points if you have these setup correctly. By creating an SPF record your also allowing Microsoft Sender-ID to be used.
• Validate HTML before sending - Invalid HTML or poorly formatted HTML can have negative effects on deliverability.
• Don’t use too much HTML - Some spam filters will give you a negative rating if the ratio of content to HTML markup is too small. Recommended file sizes not to exceed 50-75 kilobytes.
• Don’t link to too many different domains - Spammers often use several different domain names for each product they are pushing.
• Avoid punctuation in the subject line - Especially exclamation and question marks.
• Never use all caps - Besides being annoying many spam filters will pick flag this as spam.
• Don’t use currency signs (eg $) in subject
• Don’t use a large font size
• Don’t address your recipient with the word Dear - Especially not Dear Friend!
• Personalize content - If you give the user personalized content it is more likely to pass through their personal spam filters. For instance if my email address is pete@example.com and you use my last name, chances are I gave you my last name, and it is a valid email.
• Get Whitelisted - Some ISP’s such as AOL have whitelists that you may be able to get added to. Additionally you can pay to get added to some, such as BondedSender.
• Lowercase From address - make sure your from address is lower case
• Don’t have numbers in your from address
• Use a name in the From header - don’t just use your email address, also include a name. A large percentage of spam simply uses an email address in the from header.
• Don’t put the recipient’s name in the subject
• Include To, Subject, Date, Message-ID, headers
• Avoid words that commonly appear in spam – you should avoid the following words in your email, and especially in the subject such as:
  • enlarge
  • click here
  • big bucks
  • long distance
  • dear
  • loan
  • free
  • offer
  • money back
  • targeted
  • incredible
  • spam
  • drug related words - viagra, etc.
  • sex/porn related words

Notes from our President, Uncategorized

After spending a decent amount of time in this business and seeing a lot of twists and turns for the holy grail of marketing nirvana, I have a theory. I call it the “Indiana Jones” theory. You go through hell getting to the grail, and then it slips through your hands and you realize it will never be captured. But you also realize it is a good thing because if it is found, everyone will see it and win. I believe marketing is like the grail, you have wins and losses, you test emerging opportunities and “hype rewards”, and support “existing or safer” known areas. It is what is left after the hype is gone that you should truly put your time, energy, and money into, but you must understand what is emerging as you do want to be aware of market opportunities or other diamonds in the rough.

Web Sites are still going strong and each day about a billion more are launched, spin-off of web site models like micro-sites and landing pages continue to be a strong for marketers, and with applications going online the trend continues. Web Sites are “IN”

Email is still here and dominant while proponents of RSS feeds once touted the end of email, but, it just didn’t. Email marketing is still a very effective marketing tool, and continues to evolve in its own native environment.

Banner Advertisements are still kicking around with lower click-thru rates the once darling of the “surfing” days is really still a good way to market. Users are “session” or “task” oriented, so, when they do click on a banner ad, you better bet the click is more valuable than the days when you clicked to “shoot the duck”. The hype in recent years has to be Pay Per Click advertising, and Google made history and a few dollars buy building out contextual based advertising model. What an amazing company but I will save some time to talk about Google in the near future, and how their applications will once again change the way we live.

Recently a lot of hype has been flying around about Social Marketing…

Many people and now companies are saying “Check out my Tweet, Blog, FaceBook, MySpace, and LinkedIN page.

While it is a little early to comment, I can see where this model could be interesting in the near future, it is really tough to cut through the clutter. I recently read another blog which indicated Social Media allows brands to talk back and that Twitter was a PR persons dream…

I think a lot of it is really just riff-raff and provides no value, I actually just read a Tweet from a friend and colleague and he basically said, “Hey, I am doing nothing”. I think we are going to see a lot of this in the near future, but, these groups and networks will continue to evolve and only those who have time and something relevant to say will continue to support the “Social Networking” craze. Businesses will be able to capitalize by using such strategies to build loyal followers and begin to think of these users as stakeholders in the company who will be a great sounding board, test group, idea generator, de-bugger, and more. However, I suggest that you just don’t go guns a blazing because a false strategy will easily be snubbed by customers, spend time understanding what some other businesses that maybe more applicable for this media are doing… You don’t want to come off as hey, I found another way to sell to customers.

Stay tuned for another year or two, watch, test, play, and determine what approach if any is right for you and/or your business.

Notes from our President, Uncategorized Advertising, Internet, Marketing, Social Media