July 24th, 2008

How to use email list rentals and newsletter ads

• The list owner is the company with the right to mail third-party offers to people on that list. And those people have opted in to receive such offers.
• Opt-in data, IP address, date, and time logs should exist and be retrievable on demand. If a list owner pushes your offer and your company serves the graphics and hosts the landing site, your company will be affected by any complaints.
• When the list owner sends the e-mail, it uses/includes its name or brand in the message’s sender field.

So, you do need to exercise caution in renting lists. Gather information about any list you’re thinking of using. Use a spreadsheet or database to keep track of the details about each list.

2. Email Newsletter Ads

The right third-party newsletters – attractive, credible, well-written newsletters, that also provide the right audience – can be very cost-effective marketing tools. Quality e-mail newsletters have become ever more useful in a world of inboxes chocked full of spam.

They provide a way to break through that clutter to reach highly targeted customers and clients.

Numbers? Good e-newsletters are sometimes opened at as high a rate as 60 to 70 percent or more. A compelling offer can pull a moderately high 1% click rate (conversions are mostly up to your landing page), which is much higher than some other website ads. Those with sales offerings can produce results some 50 percent higher than standalone e-mail.

In a past survey of consumer attitudes toward media types, which I’d doubt has changed too much, e-mail newsletters ranked number 3 of 12 (behind print and TV) as most trustworthy and least annoying.

But, to get good results, you should review a recent sample issue of every newsletter you are considering and ask at least the first few of the following questions:

• In what form can you advertise – text, graphics, or a combination? (text is often the better choice depending upon the situation). What are the specifications – number of words/characters, graphic pixel dimensions, etc.?
• Where, within the newsletter, are ad(s) placed? Top, middle, bottom; left or right sides? (The higher and to the left or middle, the better).
• What’s the average issue open rate?
• What’s the average, or range, of click through rates? Conversions?
• Can I see the subscription form(s) that people used to subscribe?
• What offers worked best in this newsletter in the past? Which sponsors have run multiple campaigns, indicating it’s working for them?
• Is a high percent of this list from co-registration or sweeps (which might be lower performing)?
• What steps is the publisher taking to avoid filters?
• Can you also put an offer in the publisher’s new reader welcome letter? (A high-performing add-on worth pursuing.)

Lots more information available on email marketing through our report on the topic available at http://www.srbmarketing.com/pubs_smooth_emailing.html.

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July 18th, 2008

FTC Guidelines & Green DNA

I just made some rounds on leading green marketing and business blogs and came across two items I consider related. One was David Widger’s excellent post on the green marketing guidelines that the FTC is in the process of revamping after 10 years. The other was a Harvard Business – Leading Green post asking what is the DNA of a green corporation?

The relation was in the need, regardless of government or other oversight, for businesses with green in their DNA to continue to break new ground and educate the rest of us on solutions to the most pressing problems of our time. “Green” has been thrown around a lot without definition, but is often meant in a broader sense to encompass not only environmental responsibility, but social responsibility as well. This was implicit in the Harvard post when it stated that boardrooms are going to discover that the principles of management necessary to make companies green are “democratization, openness, transparency [and] love…”

Widger describes three challenges the FTC faces in promulgating new guidelines, including the fact that it can’t really enforce those guidelines. Another of those challenges was that it is increasingly difficult for consumers to discern from current guidelines what the less-direct environmental impacts are of products. He uses the example of biofuels as arguably reducing arable land used for food, and leading to possibly more deforestation. Pull at one part of the web of interconnectedness and another will be affected.

These issues are too big for the FTC alone, or the federal government as a whole for that matter. I do agree with Widger that it’s important for the FTC to engage in the effort and that it will help reduce greenwashing. I also feel that it’s even more critical for us to keep a free flow of communication on the Web. That way, consumer advocacy groups, independent press (including bloggers), and consumers themselves can sort through the green marketing deluge most effectively and punish greenwashers accordingly.

Truly green businesses and business leaders — those with green in their DNA, like Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, Seventh Generation, and Stonyfield Farms — have also been critical to educating us for decades, and I hope they are not stifled in that process. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I heard/read recently that Monsanto was lobbying to prevent food companies that specifically keep genetically modified ingredients out of their products from continuing to explain that on their packaging.

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