Golden Leads

With all the news over the last few weeks of the cyber acquisitions — Hitwise, Third Screen Media, DoubleClick, aQuantive — it’s easy to get lulled into the feeling that the whole world has gone interactive.

Not so.

This week I’m up at the ACCM (Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants), and in many ways it is like traveling back in time. This is a place where call centers rule and publications are printed the way God intended: on paper.

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A special thanks to Deirdre Baird, CEO of Pivotal Veracity, for sharing this breaking news with us VIA the Email Experience Council

Today, May 22, AOL officially introduced and rolled-out a new interface for customers who access their email using AOL.com & AIM.com. In addition to a number of other changes to the interface, AOL has decided to disable images in both of these web based email clients.

As a reminder, images have always been OFF by default for AOL 9.0 (AOL’s desktop email software) but, prior to today, images were ON by default in AOL.com and AIM.com. The new interfaces for AOL.com and AIM.com now turn images OFF by default exactly like AOL 9.

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Two smart people had helpful comments about “lost” subscribers in response to a recent article, “You’re (Probably) Not Mailing All Your Subscribers.”

Ben Chestnut from MailChimp suggested that mailers revisit their soft bounce rules if subscribers complain about unwanted unsubscribes. If an address is deemed unmailable after a certain number soft bounces, that number may be out of sync with your mail cycle. The more frequently a publication is sent, the more soft bounces that should be allowed. Ben suggests that you increase the number of allowed soft bounces until you find the right number. These bounces must be kept separate from the “court of last resort” unsubscribe file, or they’ll never be mailed, even if the address again becomes deliverable.

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This article below was in one of my Google alerts. It’s real. Seriously. I am not sure what she is even talking about at sometimes. I posted this so you can remember that we are always fighting crazy spammers like this.

This may be my favorite quote….sounds like a mix of George W. Bush or maybe the evil Cobra Kai teacher from Karate Kid.

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What does the following formula mean to you?

V_s = A / A_t

In case you are not familiar with these variables, let me explain. They are a measurement of your share of voice in advertising, thus:
V_s = your share of voice, expressed in percentage terms
A = your advertising for a given product
A_t = Total advertising for a given product

How to calculate it? Suppose $100 million is spent on ads for portable music players overall and your company spends $5 million to promote its own player. Your share of voice would be 5%.

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• Google buys DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.
• Yahoo buys Right Media for $725 million.
• WPP buys 24/7 Media for $650 million.
• Silverlake Partners buys Acxiom (which owns the old Digital Impact) for $3 billion.
• The Blackstone Group buys Alliance Data Systems (which owns the old Bigfoot and Dartmail) for $7 billion.
• Microsoft buys aQuantive (which owns Avenue A/Razorfish and the Atlas ad network) for $6 billion.

Tens of billions of dollars change hands in a matter of weeks. The laggards become leaders. Public companies become private companies. The entire online marketing industry gets turned on its head. And who knows what will happen next week. (more…)

“Content is no longer king,” Craig Spiezle, director of online safety strategies and technologies at Microsoft, told Email Insider Summit attendees last week. “If you don’t have email authentication, your emails are going to be throttled.”

Unfortunately, email authentication and deliverability are growing issues that were much talked about at the Summit — unfortunate because these kinds of issues push email back down into the IT realm instead of elevating it to a more strategic stature that’s at home in C-suite discussions. Email authentication is an automated process that verifies an email sender’s identity and is designed to eliminate spoofing and reduce spam.

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I’m back from another Email Insider Summit. I think, without a doubt, this was the most successful Summit to date. Nearly 90% of the audience was first-time attendees, which I think bodes well for the future of the conference. I heard repeatedly how much everyone learned — and that attendees left the conference standing a little taller and feeling a renewed sense of pride about what they do.

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“Spamtrap” is an interactive installation piece the prints, shreds and blacklists spam email. It interacts with spammers by monitoring several email addresses the artist has created specifically to lure in spam. He does not use these email addresses for any other communication. He posts individual email addresses on websites and online bulletin boards that cause them to be harvested by spambots and then to start receiving spam.

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Not to bang this headline and study TOOOOO much with a dumber title in my own blog,

Newsflash: People Use Email to Communicate

A new study shows that despite the growth of other tools, so-called influencers still use email to maintain relationships, reports eMarketer.

The study comes from CNet, which looked at the communication habits of these influencers.

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