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Gold Boxes, Share the Love viral marketing, and now triva questions with micro-payments for getting the answer right F’ing brilliant in so many ways it hurts me to think about it. It costs them like nothing to do this, but do you think it’s going to get people interested in learning more about what they have to offer? You bet it is.

ClickZ’s article about using outsourced telemarketing for permission based e-mail list growth is very interesting for a number of reasons. Interesting to me anyway. Hmmm.. I need a dark corner in which to think for a while…

We aren’t currently doing much in the way of creating case histories as a marketing tool. Still, I suspect that I’ll eventually want to find and refer to this marketingprofs.com story again at some point (if only for the Work section of my own site which has promised that case studies and portfolio samples would be “coming soon” for about 2 years now…)

ClickZ is running an interesting article on optimizing e-mail list growth. The focus is on minimizing the abandon rate. We aren’t currently tracking this number, but I know it’s a lot higher on Direct Source than I’d like it to be.

Part of this is that we’re strongly inferring that registration is required prior to proving our value. I’m tempted to back out of that — I never really liked that approach. But, as soon as we started doing that the # of registrations shot way up. Only 15% of the ones who said, yeah it’s OK to send me stuff seem to be garbage addresses. I’d like that to be lower, but I would have expected it to be higher. I guess the real question is how many qualified leads are we turning away with this approach. That’s pretty hard to test — if anybody’s ever figured out how to test that, I’m all ears.

Is it possible to address multiple buyers/personality types with a single copy message? The ClickZ article, The Way Customers Want to Buy, seems to be saying yes. I came of age steeped in the tradition of one audience, one message. If you have two audiences, then you need two messages. It makes sense, if you try to hit everything, you’re likely to hit nothing. I’ve gotten to be good at projecting myself into the mind of a hypothetical buyer - even a buyer who thinks and interacts radically different than I do. I’m less comfortable trying to speak to several buyers with the same message. Would my message be diluted or strengthened by trying to work through that? I’m not sure. I need to think about this more.

Marketing Sherpa put out a call for lessons learned in 2002 and got back replies from over 600 marketers. Collected here as a free PDF download. 136 pages that I haven’t even glanced at yet, but it looks like a solid resource.

I’ll think about this later.

According to ClickZ, AOL version 8 is going to default to a white list for Spam filtering. That’s probably a good move for them. It does present some interesting challenges for people doing legitimate e-mail newsletters and marketing though. Excuse me while I put on my thinking cap for a bit.

No time or focus to read This today. I do want to spend some time thinking about it later though, so…

G.M. O’Connel has been engaged in interactive marketing since 1987. Joseph Jaffe Interviews him for imediaconnection and O’Connel has some interesting things to say:

What I’m saying is that the creative hasn’t worked for the most part. What we tend to do from an industry perspective is that we want to make it bigger, louder and more intrusive. Those are the wrong answers. The right answer is how we can make things more complementary to what someone is trying to get done. And once we figure that out, we’ll be in business. That’s the problem with Advertising on the Internet. [link]