amy cham :: pixels + people

How Not to do Email: The user's view

Today I am doing something that is long overdue. I am engaging in the tedious task of going through my bulk email and unsubscribing from most of the senders.

Looking at all these emails all at once has brought all the most irritating email practices into sharp focus.  Message to senders: if you do these things, the odds of my actually engaging with your "offer" is essentially nil.

Also note, I am not speaking as a marketer. I am speaking as your audience.

Here's my Email Ick List:

• Sending me "offers" (and lots of them) that have nothing to do with why I might do business with you. I may have flown on your airline last year, that does not mean I need your help finding someplace to buy flowers.  Same goes for you, credit cards.
• Insisting that I log in to my account on your site to unsubscribe. I mean, really?
• Having an unsubscribe page that is "down for maintenance."
• Putting me on five different email lists because I bought something from you once.
• Taking 10 days to process my unsubscribe request.  Am I to believe you do not have access to an automated system?

Other bad ideas that aren't necessarily mortal sins:

• Using an image for your unsubscribe link.
• Using all images for your content and not applying useful alt tags.
• Putting your unsubscribe link in an odd place.

Aside from the obvious complaints of WAY too much email and promiscuous list sharing, what did I miss?

The Pricing Puzzle

Just what do I think I'm worth?

One of the things I learned quickly upon starting Paper Swan Photography was that figuring out what to charge--and what to provide--is one of the most difficult parts of the job.  When I first started, like so many others, I simply took whatever I could get--or worked for free--and was (truly) grateful for the opportunity.

Now I am in another place altogether.  I'm not a world-famous 'rock star' photographer, but I'm not a baby anymore either.  In this middle ground, where so many of us reside, there is, it turns out, absolutely no standardization in pricing.  None. Zero. Zilch.

Facebook Marketing for Moms, Friends, and Cheerleaders

Know somebody with their own business? Betcha do! And if you're like most people with entrepreneurial friends and relatives, you would love to see their venture be a success.

You may have emailed their web address to your friends, talked about the business, or passed along their business card if you have one. But did you know that if you are on Facebook there are a couple of powerful tools that are quick and super-easy to use, and could give the entrepreneur (or, for that matter, job hunter or house seller) in your life a big boost in reaching a new audience?

There are two specific tools that I have in mind...the Facebook "Share" link and "Suggest to friends" link.

Marketing Wha...? Note #2

Another marketing oddity...Apparently Coca-Cola's Brazil division is trying out Twitter marketing.  Last week I got a notice that Coca-Cola Zero was following me.  As a habitual drinker of sugar-free Coke products in the morning (I find coffee to be too much, too soon), I thought cool. Maybe they're posting codes for free sodas or contests or something.  Coke seems to do some neat things online from time to time...maybe I could learn something.

So I went to the profile to follow, and found that they are out of Brazil and all their tweets are in Portuguese.  *sigh*  There go my warm fuzzies.

I get that Twitter is free, but if you're going to spam-follow users in hopes that they will follow you, can you at least try to target people capable of understanding your messages?  Or, working the other way, retweet in the main languages of the people you want to follow you? 

Marketing Wha...? Note #1

Marketing weirdness over the weekend...my local movie theater was handing out free samples with the popcorn.  Not Twizzlers, not something chocolate...spaghetti sauce.  Full retail-sized packages of spaghetti sauce.

I dun geddit.

Every day is the Super Bowl! Check Adjack

I'm one of those wacky people who finds the actual Super Bowl game to be a distraction from the all-star commercial line-up that runs on that night.  The run-of-the-mill commercials that run the rest of the year can get tedious, but dang it, those Clydesdales can act!

If you're like me, you'll enjoy this site...Adjack.tv is the brainchild of David Boland, one of my friends from Cornell.  Recognizing the entertainment value of clever commercials, and the natural human attraction toward opportunities to win something for nothing, Dave created Adjack.  Adjack presents some of the most engaging commercials going, and gives you free chances to win big jackpots for watching them (where permitted by law).

Congrats to Dave on his beta release...  Check it out!!

Setting Goals for Content Sites

If you’ve been reading up on internet marketing, you’ve no doubt seen many articles talking about improving your site conversions. On a sales-oriented site, this is very intuitive…what portion of your visitors end up buying something? 

For a content site, though, it can be difficult to decide what a “conversion” might be, much less how to measure it and optimize for it. As this is something I have struggled with on some of my client sites, I thought it was worth a post and hopefully some discussion. 

This article is not intended to be a definitive, all-encompassing guide…rather, my hope is to get the wheels turning for how you might be able to more effectively use and measure your content-based site.

Marketing Books for Charity

This is cool...Rohit Bhargava highlighted this on his blog a couple days ago.  He has just launched an affiliate bookstore, The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore, with a unique idea.  The Amazon affiliate site collects recommended reading lists from marketing illuminaries, making it easy for shoppers to choose the best of the best in current marketing wisdom. Proceeds from the site's sales go to DonorsChoose.org, a non-profit that provides grants to teachers for projects they might otherwise not be able to get funding for.

A great example of leveraging the power of social marketing, Rohit and his team used LinkedIn to get recommendations for what charity to focus on, are using blogs to get the word out and get feedback, and will be releasing badges and other Web 2.0-ish tools to build awareness.

Check it out!

Web 2.0 Analytics presentation

I just got back from tonight's meetup, and the feedback has been pretty good so far.  I really enjoyed giving the presentation, and I hope that people found useful tidbits that they'll be able to use in their own analytics projects!  The presentation focused on using urchinTracker to flag user interaction points and understand how their non-pageview interactions are affecting your goal conversions.  I used Google Analytics as the example platform, but I'm guessing other javascript-based packages have some similar mechanism available.

If you're interested, I've PDF'd my presentation in notes view.

Updated: Dorian Benkoil of Teeming Media (a strategic digital media editorial and business consultancy, helping companies manage their digital media toward specific business objectives) was nice enough to record the presentation audio for us last night.  You can listen to the mp3 here. (You'll want to turn the volume up on your speakers.)

Were you there?  What did you think?  How will you use Google's urchinTracker in your next analytics project?  How have you used this technique in the past?

Irked at LinkedIn

'Kay then...in the past I have indicated my affinity for LinkedIn. In general, I really like it, even more so now that it appears they have hired actual customer service people to respond to emails.

Today, however, I am rather irritated with my friend.  I got the following in my messages inbox yesterday:

Now, as one who creates and builds web content, I fully appreciate the need to support free content and services with advertising revenue.  Even those of us who do this because we think it's fun still want to make some money, right? Go forth and prosper!!!

Here's the thing that's bugging me...I'm a paying customer.  If I am not paying for a service or content, I fully expect to be advertised to.  I have no objection to the ads sprinkled through my Facebook stream...it's my payment for a service that I enjoy.  But if I am paying $150 per year for a business account on LinkedIn, I do NOT expect to start wading through junkmail in my messages.  (Why Hilton seems to think I'm an event planner is beyond me.)

LinkedIn, don't waste your goodwill sending ads to paying customers (and brand advocates) like me, especially ones as poorly targeted as this one.  I can live with the on-page text ads, but things like this just gunk up an otherwise valuable and well-purposed communication channel and waste my time.

This is not what we are paying you for.