Just stumbled across another (reasonable) e-mail CRM vendor called MailChimp.
They also had a pretty interesting December 1st, 2008 report of e-mail open rate statistics.
They seem a bit costly, but I don't know what you get and what their forte is. They've got this cool functionality which lets you see your e-mail in "the major e-mail client's" inboxes called the "Inbox Inspector".
Might be worth checking out.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Returning to Roots...
I believe frame of reference is critical to all people. It gives them a simile by which to make sense of the world. It helps them cram an infinite amount of data and combinations into a comprehensible set of information.
As such, I seem to always return my my roots - IT and Marketing.
This has proved to be problematic for one of my partner agencies who pulls me in on work, regularly (O'Keeffe Communications)... He asks, "Ray, what can you do that's Web 2.0'ish to advance the PR efforts on this business?"
And Ray returns a bunch of (really good but really inappropriate) MARKETING ideas.
Today, over breakfast, he clarified it for me. He said PR was:
"The generation of awareness through 3rd-party resources."
Wow. That's clear and clarifying... He continued by saying,
"Some of the true magic comes from what I'm sure your mom used to tell you. It's way better when others toot your horn than when you toot your own... Leveraging the 'resources' (i.e., media, bandwidth, opinion, expert-status) of others lends way more credibility to your efforts than anything you can do yourself."
That makes sense. That's something I can dig my teeth into.
Now it's time for me to wander off to my happy place and think about how my efforts can be used to affect change with this endpoint in mind.
- Ray
Monday, September 29, 2008
aWeber: Quick note...
Just found this out...
Love aWeber.com's deliverability...
But they got that at the expense of their ease of use.
For example, try to send to a list. It's a pain in the arse. Not only that, if that list happens to be some one like, teachers, and you do figure out how to send to them, they better not all be at the same IP address (like teachers in a close geographical area) because aWeber.com will only allow 10 form registrations from the same IP/day.
What a P.I.T.A.
There will be more to come on this.
Love aWeber.com's deliverability...
But they got that at the expense of their ease of use.
For example, try to send to a list. It's a pain in the arse. Not only that, if that list happens to be some one like, teachers, and you do figure out how to send to them, they better not all be at the same IP address (like teachers in a close geographical area) because aWeber.com will only allow 10 form registrations from the same IP/day.
What a P.I.T.A.
There will be more to come on this.
Friday, August 29, 2008
A 64-bit FYI...
If, like me, you got duped into buying a 64-bit Vista box, know that it can be used as a reasonable development box.
One thing I stumbled on was setting up Apache as a service. I had to use a precompiled version. Hopefully this will allow for module updates. Nonetheless, here's how you make it a service under Vista:
cd \
cd Apache2
cd bin
httpd -k install
If you suffer the same plight as me, let me know your experiences. As an FYI, ApacheLounge.com was an indispensable resource in getting this box set up.
- Ray
One thing I stumbled on was setting up Apache as a service. I had to use a precompiled version. Hopefully this will allow for module updates. Nonetheless, here's how you make it a service under Vista:
cd \
cd Apache2
cd bin
httpd -k install
If you suffer the same plight as me, let me know your experiences. As an FYI, ApacheLounge.com was an indispensable resource in getting this box set up.
- Ray
Monday, August 25, 2008
What people will do to try and scam...
I find this both sad and amazing...
So one of my clients was giving away something free. It was for a coupon for an item which was only good for like a week and it was for a $2.99 food item.
The anti-fraud mechanisms were okay (within the client's tolerance levels and, believe you me, this was discussed at great lengths...) and we were doing just fine.
Then, as I previously mentioned, we got picked up by SlickDeals.net and a bunch of other freebie sites. Overnight, our list just from just above 1,000 subscribers to right under 10,000 subscribers.
Wow...
Well, today, I was putting together an exclusion list from the database to use for a localized AWeber.com e-mail (kinda a pain due to shortcomings of their platform) and I noticed a ton of beautiful "ASCII art" in the e-mail address extract.
As it turns out, 54 people tried exploiting the fact that GMail does not reconize periods to get a free $2.99 item...
2500 times.
It doesn't matter... I think AWeber was smart enough to catch this and, based upon the necessary redemption mechanisms and the relatively low value of the item, no harm was done. It just sorta disturbed me that some one went to such great efforts to break my toy...
If anyone would like to dump these addresses (and any other permutations thereof) in your block list, feel free. I've put them in a (long since past on order to get it off my front page) blog post here.
And, as you're putting together that freebie offer, remember to parse the periods out of the GMail addresses before you do your uniqueness lookup...
- Ray
So one of my clients was giving away something free. It was for a coupon for an item which was only good for like a week and it was for a $2.99 food item.
The anti-fraud mechanisms were okay (within the client's tolerance levels and, believe you me, this was discussed at great lengths...) and we were doing just fine.
Then, as I previously mentioned, we got picked up by SlickDeals.net and a bunch of other freebie sites. Overnight, our list just from just above 1,000 subscribers to right under 10,000 subscribers.
Wow...
Well, today, I was putting together an exclusion list from the database to use for a localized AWeber.com e-mail (kinda a pain due to shortcomings of their platform) and I noticed a ton of beautiful "ASCII art" in the e-mail address extract.
As it turns out, 54 people tried exploiting the fact that GMail does not reconize periods to get a free $2.99 item...
2500 times.
It doesn't matter... I think AWeber was smart enough to catch this and, based upon the necessary redemption mechanisms and the relatively low value of the item, no harm was done. It just sorta disturbed me that some one went to such great efforts to break my toy...
If anyone would like to dump these addresses (and any other permutations thereof) in your block list, feel free. I've put them in a (long since past on order to get it off my front page) blog post here.
And, as you're putting together that freebie offer, remember to parse the periods out of the GMail addresses before you do your uniqueness lookup...
- Ray
Monday, August 11, 2008
An interesting tool...
Just a quick miscellaneous post...
I found this "tool" in my iStockPhoto contact sheet newsletter. It's called "Moodstream". It's an interesting interface and seems to be a good way to burn a bit of bandwidth, but I don't know that it will prove to be useful.
Worth blowing a few moments on. Let me know if you find it useful.
http://moodstream.gettyimages.com/
- Ray
I found this "tool" in my iStockPhoto contact sheet newsletter. It's called "Moodstream". It's an interesting interface and seems to be a good way to burn a bit of bandwidth, but I don't know that it will prove to be useful.
Worth blowing a few moments on. Let me know if you find it useful.
http://moodstream.gettyimages.com/
- Ray
Friday, August 1, 2008
Watch what you say on the Internet...
Because the world really is watching.
This became evident today.
One of my clients, CincyDomino's, has a coupon for a free 10" pizza for signing up for their weekly deals alerts... We have had the coupon up for a while and the list has been growing modestly.
This week, I had a friend of mine put a cute little Flash ad on his site, GarageSaleCow. It went up about Monday. Well, it turns out that he has the most traffic on Thursdays and Fridays (as people start searching for garage sales). It turns out that some one from Kenwood found it... And then the crazy ride began.
The person from Kenwood posted it on FatWallet.com. From there it was picked up on the following sites:
SlickDeals.net
DealsOfAmerica.com
DealsPl.us
DealsList.com
Orkut.com (I don't know where the hits from this came from)
From there, we added about 7x the number of subscribers we started out with and got a ton of e-mails.
So, you might ask, "where's the problem in this"? Well, it's simple. CincyDomino's is a coalition of the 49 local Domino's Pizza restaurants. The coupon is regional. There is no value to them elsewhere in the US.
But over half of our current registrants are outside of the Greater Cincinnati Area. Opps. We definitely put up a ton of disclaimers since then and the e-mails have slowed down.
The moral of the story is, watch what you ask for and know that the whole world is watching when you put something out on the web. Today was a painful, but exciting, example of that.
As an FYI, only SlickDeals and FatWallet allow sweepstakes/contests to be posted.
Do you know of any great deals sites which can help to cause a tipping point? Post a comment and let us know!
- Ray
This became evident today.
One of my clients, CincyDomino's, has a coupon for a free 10" pizza for signing up for their weekly deals alerts... We have had the coupon up for a while and the list has been growing modestly.
This week, I had a friend of mine put a cute little Flash ad on his site, GarageSaleCow. It went up about Monday. Well, it turns out that he has the most traffic on Thursdays and Fridays (as people start searching for garage sales). It turns out that some one from Kenwood found it... And then the crazy ride began.
The person from Kenwood posted it on FatWallet.com. From there it was picked up on the following sites:
SlickDeals.net
DealsOfAmerica.com
DealsPl.us
DealsList.com
Orkut.com (I don't know where the hits from this came from)
From there, we added about 7x the number of subscribers we started out with and got a ton of e-mails.
So, you might ask, "where's the problem in this"? Well, it's simple. CincyDomino's is a coalition of the 49 local Domino's Pizza restaurants. The coupon is regional. There is no value to them elsewhere in the US.
But over half of our current registrants are outside of the Greater Cincinnati Area. Opps. We definitely put up a ton of disclaimers since then and the e-mails have slowed down.
The moral of the story is, watch what you ask for and know that the whole world is watching when you put something out on the web. Today was a painful, but exciting, example of that.
As an FYI, only SlickDeals and FatWallet allow sweepstakes/contests to be posted.
Do you know of any great deals sites which can help to cause a tipping point? Post a comment and let us know!
- Ray
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