Unsubscribed email addresses are not necessarily bad: It’s simply someone telling you not to waste your time and money on marketing your product/service/donation asks through email to them anymore (a spam complaint is an entirely different story). Unsubscribes become a problem in an environment where people may be interested in your company or product, but find the emails they are receiving worthless or too frequent (but that is for all other email except mine, of course).

When this happens, valid prospects and customers that could be worth thousands of dollars in future revenue simply disappear because they get tired of the constant emails, never to return unless they notice they aren’t receiving your emails anymore and re-subscribe.

With the economy sucking marketing budgets dry in the past, many companies have started to rely on the web and email as a main form of communication with prospects and customers. Great for the email industry, not so great for deliverability, spam complaints, and the user. The past year has shown the importance of good data processes and structure and relevant messaging; email metrics increase when you send relevant messages (GASP!). The problem is balancing this messaging with corporate pressures to blast the entire email base for every marketing offer.

For some email marketers, the argument that open and clickthrough rates are dropping doesn’t cut the mustard with their marketing organizations. Many marketing organizations are judged on total leads produced. This makes sense: In the company cow, marketing produces the milk for sales to process. For that, they need leads. In a down economy where revenues sink and margins shrink, a sales team needs more leads to make calls as a prospect’s purchase time increases or disappears. Everyone says they want quality (which they do), but they also want quantity. These two very rarely coexist. Why? Messaging and segmentation takes time (quality), and with smaller teams and budgets, time is a commodity that is difficult to come by. In contrast, large blasts are easy and produce (quantity).

To review: Marketing budgets are smaller, revenues suck, and email is cheap. What to do? Email everyone in the database.

A normal email marketing manager doesn’t want to be responsible for bringing the company down, and most of the time doesn’t have the authority to say “No” to large sends. It comes down to metrics and data to make the argument for segmentation and smaller blasts. “Stay the course,” email marketing managers say. “Look at our dropping open and clickthrough rates.”

The problem with falling open and clickthrough rates is that they have no real meaning to VPs and C-Levels when revenues are falling faster. Large email blasts, no matter how inefficient, produce a larger number of leads more quickly than segmented emails. If your marketing department is judged on those leads, then good luck explaining that a 0.5% drop in clickthrough rates and a .05% increase in unsubscribe rates isn’t an acceptable tradeoff, unless you have some revenue numbers to back them up.

There is the kicker.

What is the opportunity cost of an unsubscribe for your company, both in present and future value? In 2009, that cost for my company is $172. That figure doesn’t include the future maintenance and support renewals those unsubscribes would potentially purchase over their lifetime- we’re not quite there yet. This isn’t to say that those who unsubscribed will never become customers, but they won’t be reached by email, the cheapest and most cost-efficient way to reach contacts.

You reach the opportunity cost of an unsubscribe by knowing how much a lead is worth and how many leads are generated from email. Once you know this information, it is then possible to know how much each open, click, and unsubscribe is worth, and then you can put the unsubscribe smack down on the list killers in your company.

The answer was “yes.” A thousand times “yes.” I want to shout it from the top of a mountain.

(not the line I was looking for, but good enough. Replace “Veronica” with “Internet on my phone” and that is how I feel)

Then I had to decide what to get: an iPhone and be an pretentious Apple customer with crappy AT&T or a Blackberry on verizon (with my 17% discount from my company) and then be a corporate douchebag?

Then the Rhapsody app came out for the iPhone, which almost put me over the top for the iPhone; I love Rhapsody. Love it.However, in the end, I went with the Blackberry Tour. Apparently I love money more.

The Tour is badass. Personally, I like the keyboard more then the touch screen and I like the way the Blackberry handles my multiple email accounts. While the iPhone is said to have a better browsing experience, the new Java-based browsers like Opera Mini and Bolt render pages almost perfectly. Bolt is especially impressive, as it works with almost all CSS perfectly and can play youtube videos. The phone memory can be expanded to 16GB with a microSD card.

And now, because I work in B2B, and corporate people have Blackberrys, I can see what all this fuss about rendering emails in BBs is all about.

There is also a game called “Word Mole” that comes on the phone that almost ended my relationship with my girlfriend when we were in paris because I played it so much. I had to sneak some mole sessions in when she wasn’t looking or went to the bathroom. I’m addicted.

The rollerball can be touchy, there aren’t as many “cool” apps for the Tour, and the lack of wifi on the Tour is annoying. That being said, I’ve never had wifi or the need to drink a fake beer or play a cowbell on a phone before, so I wouldn’t know the difference. For me, the Tour ended being the best choice.

And it works with Rhapsody, which was a complete surprise. It was like Christmas.

Posted from my Blackberry while I was messing around with it

To pass the time, I watched an entire season of Spaced (that is a great show) on my Blackberry and read anything and everything I could get my grubby little hands on. After finishing 9 Stories and exhausting every periodical provided by the airline, I moved to October issue of Harper’s I had in my bag. While I was perusing through the Harper’s Index, I came upon this little tidbit of information: According to Vern Paxson of the International Computer Science Center, 1 in 12,414,000 spam emails actually receives a response.

1 in 12,414,000. That is not a good clickthrough rate.

How “spam” is defined isn’t explained in the magazine (the definition depends on who you talk to and who is trying to sell you what), but ol’ Vern seems to know his stuff. He even writes papers on spam- Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion, so I will accept his numbers. If that number holds true, then my question is this:

Who is the moron who is the 1?

Here is some Spaced for you: Spaced | Return of the Jaffa

Here is a link to the Pong landing page (you’ll see) and the actual game of Pong.

Here is my (slightly edited) letter.

Why not. I appreciate crits too, hopefully you take mine for whatever they are.

All in the spirit of love, as I saw some of your guys’ work, and love it. (Specifically Crop Hair Boutique from Design Work Life).

In my opinion:

3 column layout on the web is too much. I’ve never seen a 3 column layout that was working as well as it should (Apple Store, Amazon, all of them could be better if they only had 2 columns IMO)..

Two sidebars means there isn’t a good editor to rip out the content you don’t need.

Enter the content mantras: less is more, clutter is the enemy.

If the average user spends seconds on any given page, this is not telling me anything about you in that amount of time. Showcase sexy work that I get at a glance, big type, lots o hierarchy, something cool, more concentrated area of focus.

Beefy margins and the stark nature of the home page create a lot of visual tension, and only one area to focus on (the radio video), which doesn’t have anything to say off the bat.

A lot o fuzzy and pixelated images.

• Every image on the homepage looks fuzzy.
• Grass bg on Our story is pixelated and a little fuzzy, as well as the image on the top
• All logos on Case Studies are fuzzy. These could all be PNG8s, there’s no good reason for these to be fuzzy
• There are probably more but I’ll leave it at that

The Work gallery is nice. Arrows on project page could be more obvious, as well as the buttons in the top right. All of the white space and small buttons make for important elements that I have to look for, instead of them being obvious.

Also, about the Work gallery, the initial page with the thumbnails, I think it needs to be proportionately more image heavy in the view. The text size is fine, but the thumbs should be bigger, and more eye-grabbing.

How to get a job is cool. Feels like it should be a blog though, and not a part of your professional “we want clients” site

Love the Job Openings clip look. Simple, witty and purty.

Under Fun, there’s only one item in that menu, why have a drop down menu for it? Just put Pong in the top menu

A Simple Use Case: The Journey to the Almighty Pong

On the Pong Landing Page

• Love the animation on the page, but it is a little distracting if you actually wanted me to read that text.
• Secondly, I don’t want to read that text. I was promised sweet sweet pong. The four paragraphs of text here is not a well used opportunity for branding, it’s an extra click and will likely never be read.
• “Play now” should be bigger and or more obvious
• The animation should be clickable
• My final point on this page, why does this page exist? Why doesn’t the Pong link in the menu take me directly to Pong?

The actual Pong

• Tooooo small!! Why isn’t it 100% by 100% and keep the scale mode proportional (don’t remember the actual parameter or value)
• ALL of the buttons on the opening Pong page are TERRIBLE. I have to click the stroke of the type that makes up the button. Let me repeat, the stroke of the type is the hit area.
• When I can hover over the play click area and play, I would expect that my mouse would disappear and i’d instantly be controlling the paddle no matter where my mouse was or what the state of the buttons are (nothing, hover, click, release)On second thought, click (anywhere since the mouse is invisible) could be pause.A simple listener and the smallest bit of math can make this happen. If you want it even sexier, the paddle could have a bit of a delay on it, rub on a polynomial equation of funk for this effect.

I feel robbed of the sweet promise of pong.

That’s it.

Again, love your work, hope you don’t think I’m trying to be a dick, congrats on the new site, and the awesome work

- Wes

]]> http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/a-letter-to-a-webmaster/feed/ 0 http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/a-letter-to-a-webmaster/ http://feeds.monkeyswithhandguns.com/~r/mwhg-blog/~3/pQvWBHpfEk8/ http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/cell-phones-kill-bees-but-i-love-my-iphone-or-data-ecosystems/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:18:57 +0000 JT http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/?p=337 I work for a largish international company focused on B2B sales with offices in North America, 16* European countries, and 8 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In the U.S., the company is divided into 6 autonomous Business Units and smaller offices focused on regional, partner, and public sector marketing and sales. Then throw in the fact that we pull all data from the same 9 pools and that contacts can have interests in multiple product areas and everyone wants to send email.

This is not always the best example for a good customer experience.

The data structure for a company of this size and complexity is very fragile. Every office wants to send to their “base,” not realizing that their base actually coincides in many cases with the other offices’ bases and sales. It’s a big Venn diagram (I can’t believe I actually referenced a Venn diagram) and acts like a big data ecosystem- when one section does something bad, it effects everything, like plankton in the ocean or when bees die because of everyone needing to check Facebook or Twitter every 5 seconds on their iPhones.

If business units/different offices/any entities with different goals and incentives share a database, a higher potential for DB exhaustion exists than in an environment where only one interest is focused upon. “No kidding,” you may say. To combat exhaustion and generally pissing off contacts, the users of a shared database must observe and respect recency and content relevancy. If not, contacts can receive multiple offers from different sources within the same company without the company even realizing. However, the contact notices and will let you know (HINT: this is bad).

For some companies, specifically those focused on B2C, email frequency doesn’t seem to matter. I get at least 1 Banana Republic/Gap/Piperlime/Old Navy email per day, sometimes 2 or 3. Same with Tiger Direct and Amazon. Some B2C companies are able to send frequently from different divisions to the same database (I’ve never signed up for Piperlime emails) because they are sending coupons and deal offers. I never unsubscribe, just always glance and delete- someday they may have a good deal.

B2B doesn’t have that kind of leeway; most sales decisions require more than a knee-jerk reaction that B2C businesses try to invoke. If the B2B marketer emails the same person more than 1 time in a week (or day), no matter if it is from a different division, expect a nasty email (best case), an unsubscribe (not terrible, but not optimal), or a spam complaint (oh shit). Once any of these scenarios occur in one division, it affects the entire company, from IP/domain reputation to contacts unsubscribing from all emails.

In this type of data ecosystem, it is important for the email marketing team (or whatever team is responsible for list pulls and segmentation) to completely understand any and all of the data they are required to obtain on behalf of requestors. In short, list generators must be proactive, not reactive, and given to the tools uphold standardized rules (such as recency) and the ability to make suggestions to optimize lists. And content must- MUST!- be relevant to each receiver.

In turn, email list developers must show the ability to add value to the list pulls by citing in-company testing and have knowledge of best practices for email as a whole, the industry, the company’s own database (this is accomplished through running statistically relevant tests to show the value of segmentation and cross-promotion, experience, and probably a little luck).

* In his book Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut specifically uses the number form for every numerical reference. Either because I enjoy that book immensely or because I am too lazy to remember back to my AP Style class to figure out when to use the number or spell it out, I will do the same. I have better things to do, like play Scrabble on Facebook.

The other day at around 4 pm, the lady partner and I were sitting in front of the Eiffel Tower (which is rust brown and looks like it needs a good sandblasting in professional opinion, by the by), drinking some wine- which according to this picture, is against the law (I tend to drink where I’m not supposed to in other countries).

After a glass or two, nature began to run its course, so I wandered off while the GF studied. I can handle going to the “toilette” all by myself. What I originally that was a bathroom was a marionette theater, so I continued to walk around. There had to facilities somewhere close- I’m at the Eiffel Tower in one of the biggest cities in the world. I found a sign that said:

And then walked to the “WC”. There was a dark, ominous tunnel only one door into the WC,

and I wasn’t going to just go marching into some foreign bathroom (what if I put my foot under the wrong stall or something?), so I walked the quarter mile back to the GF to get some clarification.

I definitely wasn’t going to relieve myself outdoors in a country where I couldn’t communicate with anyone (I attract police in foreign countries like white on rice), so I trekked back to the WC. At this point, I was beginning to think that I was permanently destroying my bladder.

When I finally got back to the WC, excited about the upcoming relief, a lady was standing down in the dark tunnel. She wags a finger at me and shakes her head. I thought she was cleaning the WC (what the hell does that even mean?), so I hung out for awhile. After 10 minutes, I went down and try the door and it was locked. Apparently, like everything else in France, the bathrooms close at 5 pm.

I was desperate, so I started toward the Eiffel Tower because there had to a WC there. This was another quarter mile away. It also required crossing at least 2 busy streets (and seeing the ridiculous number of men who run in biker shorts in Paris). Crossing streets takes awhile in Paris because French drivers don’t care if they hit pedestrians. It’s like Frogger. If it’s in the street- no matter what- the drivers are not slowing down, or even swerving- they have places to be.

The Eiffel Tower has four giant legs, all of which have elevators and schwag shops; only one has a bathroom. I chose the exact opposite direction to walk and had to walk to entire base of the tower. Finally- FINALLY- I saw a sign that said “Toilets” (in English even!). I ran down and took care of business, but not before I took an awkward picture (at least for the guy in the picture) of the bathroom:

The hand dryers were incredibly weak, so I found other ways to dry my hands. At this point, I had been gone for over a hour from the GFer, who got worried and left to find me.

France is difficult for me to maneuver in.

My job is to collect content. And I can see. I see in code.

So let’s talk about a common practice with alternate content that irks me to no end. Even though I don’t care about your cat blog, I do read it. And you people do some pretty skeazy stuff. Sometimes it’s ignorant, and sometimes it’s not.

I read in the SEO forums that people puff their chests out proudly when they say that SEO helps with accessibility. But then they’ll go and pull crap like this:

<img src="/images/killer-bats.jpg" alt="Killer bats" />

How is that helping someone who can’t see a killer bat? Great, a picture of bats on the page about bats. Thanks for the information, douche.

What were the killer bats doing? Are they fluffy? How does it relate to the content? What job was the image doing on the page? Those are the questions that you should be answering in the alt attribute. Not, “What is it?” For those of us who can’t see, “what is it?” is about as helpful as your grandmother’s prophylactic stash.

Want proof that this is called good practice? Read Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization by Rand Fishkin. Can you say “over-optimized?” I know what my cohorts do to content like this. We call it No Rank Town. Evidently management isn’t doing this guy so well.

And just because you have an image and the standards require an alt attribute, that doesn’t mean that you need to put something in the alt attribute. Again, how is this helping anyone out?

<img src="/images/spacer.gif" alt="spacer" />

C’mon, just do this so I can move along to actual content:

<img src="/images/spacer.gif" alt="" />

All in all, you guys suck at HTML. The next time you proudly call yourselves an “expert in accessibility” just because you know what an alt attribute is, you’ll know deep down how full of it you are. I hope that you whimper just a little bit at the end of your bragging. It may not be noticeable by others, but you’ll be aware, and that’s all that matters.

Spam is a problem, yes. It is dangerous due to trojans, viruses, 63 year old women who open and click on every piece of email they receive, and the morons who continually give money to Nigerian princes. That being said, spam filters and junk mail folders are getting better at capturing actual spam. Check out your Gmail spam folder next time you log on: rarely do those male anatomy enlargement offers or free Viagra pills actually get through. Nay, a vast majority of what gets through to the inboxes are newsletters and offers that people inadvertently signed up for when they got the “free” $5 Starbucks gift card or signed up to play Flash games on that website. That is not spam: No, good reader, that is you opting in, forgetting that you did, and then complaining.

Why do Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google offer “free” email services? They want your information and what you talk about in email so they market to you. The “payment” for you to use that service is ads. Yahoo! isn’t letting Netflix and Bank of America spam me with ads for free (by the way, where is my “This is Spam” button for the ads, hypocrites?).

Yahoo! wants me to pay for my ads in my email...for charity

Spam is a cost of doing business for ESPs. If Yahoo! forces everyone (including private senders) to pay actual currency for sending to their servers, then they are essentially asking senders to pay for the spam filtering and hosting of the message, which is part of the Yahoo! mail service and you STILL get the ads. Paint me pink and call me crazy, but with the price of memory dropping to almost zero and Yahoo! offering unlimited email storage, I doubt that it costs Yahoo! a penny to house that email.

Even though there are reports claiming that between 90-97% of all email sent globally is spam (which I don’t believe), 89-96% of that is harmless or ignored.* Spam costs the receiver essentially nothing, especially if they are using a free internet connection (in a public library or at work) and a free email service (such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail) except the annoyance of deleting or unsubscribing from the message. Spam is costing is the free email providers money, because they are housing all of that crap.

Conveniently, the email service providers, the authentication services, and the makers of spam filter software are the people funding and releasing the spam studies. Yahoo!, ReturnPath, Symantec, and Goodmail wouldn’t define spam as broadly as possibly to make another buck, would they?

“But charity gets that penny, and I love charity.” you say. But what if, in the future, Yahoo! needs cash? Also, in the United States, when getting something in return for a charitable donation, the value of the product received cannot be deducted from taxes. Will Yahoo! give an actual value for the cost of the storage of the email? This would be necessary for large B2C companies that marketing to Yahoo! mail users. And if so, why not just charge that $0.00000001 per email directly to the companies?

(Not only would businesses be pissed, but can you imagine the uproar and push back from the free email users if their friends stopped emailing them because it cost money? People leave Yahoo! because they have to pay for POP3 access- unless you go around the system. People were pissed when Facebook changes its look or its policies for free services rendered. Paying to get emails to a server? My Yahoo! friends would never get that YouTube clip** from me again. People would bolt for Gmail even faster than they currently are.)

While I am all for reducing spam, I don’t believe CentMail is the answer.  Since its inception, email has promoted free communication due to the economics and environment on which the Internet was created, for better or worse. Normal economic thought points out that monetizing sending would deter spammers, but it would also deter legitmate users and drive them to other options, and the internet has never really followed traditional economics. Other plans, such as Microsoft’s (yes, the Evil Empire) Penny Black plan are much better and don’t cost normal senders anything.

* this is from my personal research

** This YouTube Clip. My mom used to buy me GoBots because we were poor and couldn’t afford Transformers.

Monolithical Failure

We point this out because it is in the “ingenious” section and has been there for over a month.

Hint: Pivot tables are marketing GOLD, and no one knows how to use them.

Data is the Force of marketing- anyone who can retrieve the data AND understand the data and trends it provides becomes both valuable and important to their company. Why? Because there are a lot of people who can do one or the other, but the ability to execute both of these skills allows one to see the company’s big picture.

Email managers are in a unique position to be close to both the data and results, and the ability to retrieve and decipher both gives way to the opportunity to be at the forefront of knowing the data and deciphering results, allowing strategic thinking and insights before anyone else. This assumes the email manager doesn’t have to go through someone else to get it (which is what a majority of the email managers currently do- which explains to proliferation of consultants and outsourcing of email services when companies already employ an email or internet manager).

To better explain, look at this cow:

Bessie, the Marketing Cow

Dairy cows are gigantic animals whose value to humanity comes down to their teats. That 1200 pound, 4 stomach-having, methane/ozone-killing fart-producing, blank-staring stupid animal’s value comes down to its 4-6 little openings on its nipples because that is where the milk comes from. And as beverage, you can drink your soy, your wine, your expensive acai juice, but as a beverage, you don’t much cheaper per ounce with more benefit than milk.

There is a point to this. Stay with me, friends.

If the farmer can both feed and milk the cow without help, the milk is cheaper. If the milk is bad, they can find the problem and fix it. If the email manager can both retrieve data AND decipher the data, using other resources isn’t necessary and email becomes VERY cheap (or the ROI increases). Who reaps the benefit of cheaper products and increased ROI? The farmer and (hopefully) the email manager.

More and more frequently, especially in today’s economic environment, companies are relying on their in-house databases and email as their main outreach vehicle to prospects and customers. Yes, budget money is still being spread around to paid search, ad buys, list buys and all that jazz, but email is relied upon to keep reaching contacts and move them through marketing and sales cycles. It’s cheap, it’s effective, and it has trackable results. Henceforth, e-mail is the teat of marketing.

If the email manager can do neither, then they’re just the people person who uses buzzwords, gets boners over new products like ICQ, Friendster, Twitter, or Google Wave replacing email so they can catch up, and outsources everything. They are no cow teat. In fact, push them enough and they are Toms: