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RGJ.com: Communication taking turn toward technology
Dave LaPlante, CEO of the Reno-based marketing firm Twelve Horses, embraces new technology, and uses his cellphone to do everything from communicate with clients and co-workers, to updating his blog. He said the type of communication is less important tha
Archive for the 'Email' Category
links for 2007-06-26
Posted on June 25th, 2007 in Email, How to Communicate with 3 Comments
Of Mechanical Bulls and Mobile Marketing’s Best Practices in Denver
Posted on March 16th, 2007 in Email, Marketing, Mobile with No Comments
Mobile marketing continues its rapid growth in to a mainstream marketing channel. In December, I attended 3rd Mobile Marketing Association’s Consumer Best Practices Forum in Denver. It’s amazing that in three short years this consumer best practices meeting, which originally was just a small get together in Vail, Colorado has mushroomed to over 200+ participants. All for a one‑day forum on the best practices for consumers, how marketers must conduct themselves, and how to maximize the mobile marketing channel with regard to consumer best practices on behalf of the marketers and the carriers and everyone in the global marketing food chain. This industry is not only alive, it is aggressive in its desire to not screw up this channel like fax, voice and email have with an old-school disregard for relevance and permission-based marketing.
You have to remember I’m comparing this to having grown up within the e‑mail marketing world where even in 1998 the dialogue around spam and best practices was virtually non-existent. Remember in 1998 when marketers were asking if e‑mail marketing would ever be a a valid channel?! And will businesses ever use it? And here we are today and e‑mail marketing is simultaneously hugely successful and yet that success has been tremendously trampled from a lack of best practices and self-regulation.
We marketers are coming up on 10 years to machinate the definition of spam…and there’s not a State legislature that’s not dealing with this today. We’ve got probably every state in the union this year introducing even more legislation on how to manage e‑mail and what marketers can and can’t do…mobile marketing still holds promise as a pristine environment.
Anyway…back to the MMA’s CBP Forum: Chaired by Verizon’s Dave Oberholzer, what was at first a small gathering of twelve people in 2005 has mushroomed in to over 200 participants this year…even drawing a dozen or so international participants.
The Mobile Marketing Association’s relevance worldwide is huge right now. There’s not a major brand that does not have some form of a mobile marketing initiative operating or about to be implemented.
While the temperatures in Denver were cold, the forum discussion was hot, especially around preventing the devaluation of the channel through aggressive (and perhaps by some views predatory) marketing promotions that are akin to the “1-900″ number marketing of the late 80’s/early90’s.
One of the hottest topics still is the logistical issues around shortcodes. I would have relished more of that discussion, however, at this meeting it was bittersweet as I announced my resignation from co-chairing the Common Short Code Working Group.
John DeFranco of Weiner and Flein gave an outstanding presentation on the FTC’s concerns with many of the mobile marketing promotions that are suspect in value. The so-called “ringtones and chat” subscription fees are most definitely on the FTC, CTIA the carriers and the MMA’s radar.
Top Five Issues for Mobile Marketing Promotions
- Misrepresentations and deceptive omissions and misstatements are illegal.
- Use the word ‘Free’ with caution
- Disclaimers must be clear and conspicuously disclosed
- Prominence
- Presentation
- Placement
- Proximity
- Remember 900 numbers gaffe
- Total cost is flat fee
- Per minute rate is tx
- Range of fees
- Cost of transfer
Technorati tags: mobile, mobile marketing, best practices, consumer, spam, marketing
Confidentiality Notices are Annoying - Some better ways to let people know to keep it on the QT
Posted on February 20th, 2007 in Email, Humor with One Comments
You’ve seen them. Maybe you get only a few a day, I seem to get hundreds. Usually they come in the form of a one-sentence email from your attorney and a 300-1,000 word essay / legal briefing on confidentiality at the bottom. Below is a sooper-shorty one for example:
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE
The information contained in this e-mail correspondence is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed, and may contain information that is PRIVILEGED and CONFIDENTIAL. If you are not the named recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, duplication, distribution or the taking of any action in reliance upon this correspondence is strictly prohibited. If you received this correspondence in error, please notify the sender by phone, fax, or e-mail and destroy any and all copies of the correspondence. Thank you.
These are really annoying when you read most of your email on a cell phone. I think I’ve scrolled 10 miles thru these over the last year getting to the bottom of the thread.
Have you noticed they usually come from professionally anal people? Pretty much every attorney, accountants and HR professional I know has 200-1,000 words of fine print at the top, bottom and even embedded in the header. Especially email from those old men who smell like old spice and are always trying to recall one politician or another and love rambling on-and-on-and-on at public forums. They love appending their emails with all kinds of crazy stuff like this.
Here’s a couple Nevada-specific idea for a Confidentiality Notice that I’d like to see/use in my email. Short and sweet. Probably just as effective. Liven things up a little:
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE
I live in Nevada. We have lots of abandoned mineshafts and ample room for shallow graves. Keep this email to yourself.CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE
Just like those photos of you I took in Vegas, what happens in your Inbox stays in your Inbox.CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE
Like I trust my .40, I trust you to keep email this to yourself. I have a Basque/Italian family, BTW.
What kind of Confidentiality Notices would you like to fly?
Technorati : confidentiality, disclaimer, email, humor, legal, nevada, notice
Excellent article on why relationship messaging with email is a struggle
Posted on June 13th, 2006 in Email, How to Communicate, Marketing, Relationship Marketing with One Comments
Daniel Enemark wrote an outstanding article on email and its challenges in relationship messaging. In “It’s all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood“, he highlights that researchers are consistently pointing to the difficulty of expressing and conveying emotion as the chief culprit in misunderstood or ineffective dialog. (This applies to any text-based communication. SMS is often worse. IM at least has embedded emoticons.)
I am particularly aware of this from experience within my own inbox and the experiences of customers as they struggle with using email effectively in their marketing. Read a post of mine from May 3, 2004 on Bad Email Habits Observed.
Effective use of email in relationships management is a science. This article and the researchers it cites corroborates why we — Twelve Horses that is — went from being an email-centric business in 2002 to a relationship marketing and messaging management company where email is one of multiple channels of communication. We simply couldn’t ignore the fact that sometimes a follow-up phone call is what it took to make an effective email campaign convert at a higher rate.
The article cites this at the bottom of the story:
So if you want to buy something on Craig’s List, Morris says, “make a brief phone call, even if it’s not practical to do the whole negotiation by phone. You can establish a favorable bias with someone and then proceed in a less rich medium, but it’s very hard to just get right into the negotiation on a medium that isn’t rich.”
Email is extremely effective when used at the right time (T), with the right relevance (R), delivered to the appropriate location (L) and used with permission (P). TRL+P is the formula for any communication. As is any communication. The KEY is to recognize that it can’t always be about email. Sometimes a phone call, a text message, a fax, a letter, or even in in-person meeting makes the difference.
My favorite quote out of the article:
Though e-mail is a powerful and convenient medium, researchers have identified three major problems. First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.
Bingo. Could not have written it better. Here’s a link to the study by Profs. Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago that the article cites.
E-mail Open Rates
Posted on February 2nd, 2004 in Email, Marketing with No Comments
Someone wrote:
Can someone tell me what are respectable numbers for e-mail open rates and click through rates? I mainly write and design e-mails, so this is a new area for me.
You have probably asked one of the more difficult questions that face e-mail marketers. Not to be rhetorical, but “what do you want it to be?”
If you dispose yourself of the 30 percent of the list that has failed to open an e-mail in the last 12 communications, you’ll likely see a great jump. And you can argue that you saved money by not wasting the bits and bytes on those folks 
Ideally the question is: How can I segment my list to better understand, make relevant and dialog with the specific behavior groups to influence an ultimate result of [fill in the blank]? Where “fill in the blank” can be increased lead volume, sales, reduced support calls, etc.
Take a classroom analogy to your list, and you’re the teacher.
Segment that list in to As thru Fs. You most certainly don’t want to lose any As – so do something that 9/10 teachers fail to do: Ask them why they like you! Armed with that information, pick some Bs and Cs and turn them into As.
Now the hard part of being a teacher is knowing when to give up. “Never give up!” some fellow teachers will yell and scream. But if you allocate too much of your time and attention to the failing students (who never even show up), you may lose a few of those As and Bs.
Know when to give up. And know what your “graduation rates” are. That I got straight As in shop didn’t always mean I was well armed to graduate and be a future marketer!
Design and copy can play a great role in influencing segments to improve their group performance. However, there’s likely a dozen other influencers to contend with that may be beyond the control of Photoshop and some snappy copy. Break that list up and start experimenting.
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Push v. Pull and Why E-mail Will be Neither
Posted on August 23rd, 2003 in Email, Marketing, Mobile with No Comments
Russell Nelson, a.k.a “The Angry Economist” posted some thoughts on e-mail and its life expectancy. While I think he’s got some valid points, his solution is centered on a life-after-death experience of “pure pull e-mail”:
Right now, when you send e-mail to someone, you send a message from your client machine to their server. The e-mail is stored on the recipient’s machine until they read the e-mail. Under the new system, you would create a web page, and store it on a server. The URL would be something unguessable like http://example.com/~nelson/827134282173614682732.html. If I wanted to send that e-mail to someone, I would point them to that URL. If I wanted to send it to many someones, I would point a program to that URL, and it would create an index of available messages.
While this would work for “most of the time,” it’s not feasible for the communications that require the push of information. Granted, most e-mail servers would adopt mechanisms to manifest this pulling into a representation of pull. However, there will undoubtedly be the situations where the information must be pushed to recipients.
For pull to work 100 percent of the time, connectivity must be fairly ubiquitous. Which it is not. Furthermore, as much as we would hope pulling would be the ultimate filter, uncertainty of the simple point-in-time of when something was “sent” versus received introduces too many variables of alteration. That there’s a lesson in security we all know that is “unguessable” is not true.
Today, much e-mail is based on pull. In fact, 90 percent of commercial HTML e-mail sent (the legit kind) is based on pull. Images are primarily the culprit of the pull.
Ultimately I believe e-mail will evolve down a path of permission management and grants of rights, pinned by Social networks.
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