January 31, 2002

  • Thought

    Have you Googlewhacked? This News.com article points to a new online sport — “Googlewhacking” — which is the art of finding search terms that give a “1 of 1” result on Google.com.

    Here’s one I just did “meatball rangerover”.

January 25, 2002

  • Thought

    This E-Commerce News article called “E-mail Campaigns: From Trash to Cash” is brilliant. AMR Research did an indepth analysis of what is happening in permission-based e-mail marketing and came up with some answers that we’ve been saying all along.

    Here are some highlights:

    1. “The world of e-mail marketing is constantly changing,” the report said.

    2. AMR concluded that the outsourced model is the best choice for at least some, if not all, of a company’s e-mail campaign needs.

    3. AMR found that response rates to targeted campaigns are seven to 12 times higher than response rates to mass mailings.

    4. Fifty-five percent of respondents reported response rates of 11 percent or more when mailing to in-house lists, while just 26 percent said they had the same level of success with purchased lists.

    5. Unfortunately, what works today will be old by next week. The word “free,” for example, used to result in high response rates. Now, unless it is coupled with “shipping,” it is a surefire way to make sure the e-mail gets trashed, according to AMR.

    6. “Marketers need to make sure the e-mail systems they choose can not only send both types of messages [HTML and text], but they must also be able to detect what format the recipient is capable of receiving. This functionality is known as sniffing, and it should be a key criterion of your selection process,” AMR said.

    (Internet.com did a good article on this study as well. Similar story but some different quotes and stats make it worth a look.)

  • Thought

    November 17th? How did that happen?

    Pardon the two month gap in postings. I doubt we’ll get any insights from that time online anytime soon.

    Such is life.

    We now resume regular transmissions.