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Well, there’s a nice tip:

Scrub your lists. Suppress suspicious "spamflag" addresses such as "abuse@" or "marketerspam@."

Link

A very sharp article over on MarketingProfs.com.

Problems tend to perk up the ears of your target audience. Once you’ve achieved that you then give them the solution (sometimes one crafted specially to their needs), and they understand the concept and respond to it.

Of course we’re planning to do all of These Things. We’ve been planning this for a while. I need a way to get past the planning and onto the doing. Hmm… Maybe I’ll draw up a plan for that later today.

Marketingprofs.com has a fascinating read about the problems with Database Segmentation for marketing and customer analysis. We’re finally starting to get access do a trickle of data (which truly makes me tingle with joy at the possibilities). It’s a little discouraging to see that as more data rolls in, your ability to grok it all diminishes on pretty much the same curve. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll want to refer to this article again at some point.

ClickZ has an extremely interesting article suggesting that major ISPs like AOL are (or are about to start) charging direct marketers for the right to mail into their networks.

I walk both sides of this fence on stuff like this. I am a marketer and I need to be able to get messages to people who want to receive them. I am a user of e-mail, and I jealously guard most of my e-mail addresses to reduce the amount of Spam I get. Even as a marketer, I hate, HATE, HATE Spammers because their bad behavior casts a negative light legitimate marketing efforts. If we can reverse the cost structures, then maybe we can make it uneconomically feasible for Spammers to Spam. Still, I am scared to hell and beyond about the idea that ISPs are going to start becoming gatekeepers to e-mail. That just reeks of negative consequences.

I want to read Click Z story later when I’m not also trying to watch The Royal Tenenbaums. Although I can easilly surf and even write while watching a movie, I really can’t sort through dense statistical topics like this.

Click Z is running a story about the interactive advertising industries new campaign to rehab their image and convince people to stop looking at click through rates and start paying attention to other factors as a metric of success. Color me unimpressed.

It’s probably not good that as a marketing professional, I have such little faith in the ability of most marketing activities to generate any kind of results. I want to be convinced. I really do. I mean I bought a Bowflex based almost exclusively on the success of their ad campaign (and the fact that in my reasoned opinion it looked like a pretty good product that would do what I wanted it to do). I know it can work, but most of the time it doesn’t.

I know it’s a poor workman who blames his tools, but there you go. And, this isn’t likely overcome those feelings one little bit. Maybe what we need are better tools to gather information. I’ll be the first to complain that our systems can’t give me the data I need to measure effectiveness, but what they do show me suggests that our fledgling on-line promotional activities don’t do much.

Haven’t really looked at this site yet, but the title on their home page certainly speaks to my pain point. So I’m bookmarking Discover Which Marketing Programs Really Work for later consideration.

Excellent suggestions to ensure copy hits the benefits of an offer. This is specifically geared towards a particular e-mail, but the suggestions here can easily be generalized to any copy needs.

Email Copy for the Next Economy

I don’t know. The suggestions in Direct Response Email 101 seem designed as a step by step checklist to make sure your messages look like Spam. Since the prevailing wisdom is that nobody opens Spam anymore, I’m not sure why you’d what to do that.

This is the problem. There are so many “experts” out there, and none of them seem to agree on what works. Of course this is why you have to test, but I want a roadmap to ensure success - at least a hint as to the right way to go. I’m afraid that my marketing brothers and sisters have already poisoned the well on this stuff.