Subject: Chief Marketer: Outsmart the E-mail Filters

From: Chief Marketer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 10:40:04 -0600

November 30, 2004 | A PRIMEDIA Property |

Table of Contents
Beating the E-mail Filter Odds
Websites Deliver More Customer Satisfaction than Stores
Should I SEM or SEO?
Avoiding PPC Fraud
Want to Boost Revenue? Make Your Employees Happy

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This Week's Stories
Beating the E-mail Filter Odds
DIRECT TIPS
Crafting an e-mail message that motivates readers is tough enough. Assembling one that can get through the array of spam filters used by the most significant ISPs is downright diabolical. (Hint: Lay off the red and green type.)

Brian Klais of NetConcepts offers some advice on making sure your e-mail makes it through the filters:

* Watch the ratio of text to HTML content. Filters tend to assume that anything with too much HTML is spam; even if it gets through, ISPs are becoming more aggressive about removing coded content, so chances are it won't be seen.

* Avoid using the "CC" or "BCC" line in the header -- that's a classic spammer tactic for firing out bulk e-mails.

* Don't insert the recipient's name in the subject line. Filters don't test for this, but in these untrusting times, many recipients have set their individual filters to round-file such messages.

For more tips on improving e-mail deliverability, visit DIRECT TIPS.

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Websites Deliver More Customer Satisfaction than Stores
CATALOG AGE
If you need more evidence that service is important to your business, here it is: A recent survey conducted by the Washington--based National Retail Federation's NRF Foundation and American Express Co. found that 99% of shoppers believe customer service is at least somewhat important when deciding to make a purchase.

Conducted in May, the nationwide survey revealed that stores in particular could stand to step up their service. Just 16% of traditional (retail) shoppers surveyed were extremely satisfied with their most recent customer service experience, while an additional 51% were very satisfied. In contrast, online shoppers were nearly three times as likely to be extremely satisfied with their customer service experience (44%) and an additional 45% were very satisfied.

To traditional shoppers, the most important elements of good customer service revolve around retail employees and the store environment, according to the survey. But the majority of online shoppers (88%) find a safe and secure Website an extremely important component of good customer service; they also want merchandise to be delivered on time (73%), and want the retailer to quickly handle questions and requests (74%).

To read more, visit CATALOG AGE.

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Should I SEM or SEO?
SEARCHLINE
How do paid search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), or organic search, interlock? When should marketers opt to pay for placement on a search page, and when should they spend their resources on making their existing Websites more readable to search engine "spiders"? What kind of results can each one produce?

Peter Hershberg, a managing partner at Reprise Media, says time and technology are determining factors in choosing between SEM and SEO. Since SEM is tied to performance, marketers who use it can set cost-per-acquisition metrics and then design a campaign to meet them. Costs are controlled by the marketer, who can spend as much or as little on paid search as the budget will allow. SEO results are very much at the mercy of the search engines and thus not as liable to give the same control over costs per new customer.

In the end, says Hershberg, SEM and SEO can dovetail nicely if done thoughtfully and with a focus on the most efficient use of marketing dollars. In fact, SEM can feed smoothly into a later SEO campaign. "Given the immediacy and the flexibility of paid search, we can take a look at which keywords turn out to be most profitable within an SEM campaign and then turn around and optimize a client's site around those keywords," he says. "So paid search can be a testing ground for work in SEO. You can make sure these clicks will acquire the right targeted customers before you go down the road of taking weeks and months to optimize a Website and see the results."

For Herschberg's rules of thumb regarding how best to balance SEO and SEM, visit SEARCHLINE, a new Website and complementary e-newsletter from CATALOG AGE and DIRECT.

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Avoiding PPC Fraud
With the advent of pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising has come PPC fraud. In a white paper from online ad services provider Clicklab entitled "How to Defend Your Website Against Click Fraud," authors Michael Bloch and Dmitri Eroshenko offer a few strategies for preventing fraud:

* Avoid PPC networks that allow "incentive sites." Incentive sites typically offer something to visitors in exchange for clicking on links. Such sites aren't fraudulent per se, but because "the focus of the click isn't based on interest in your product," say the authors, you aren't likely to convert these visitors to customers.

* Ask your PPC company about frequency caps on clicks. A frequency cap will prevent you from paying for multiple clicks originating from the same IP.

* Consider filtering out some countries. "What is your target market -- do you really need coverage, for example, in Romania?" asks the white paper. According to the authors, the majority of online fraud originates in Eastern Europe, Africa, and some parts of Asia.

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Want to Boost Revenue? Make Your Employees Happy
PROMO P&I
We all know that happy workers translate to happy customers. But a new study shows that there's a direct link a company's financial performance, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction--even among employees who do not have direct contact with customers.

Results of a study from the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement at Northwestern University suggest that influencing customer behavior goes beyond advertising, delivering on a brand's promise, customer service, and product research and development.

"The implications of this research are enormous in terms of how marketing, sales, and communications budgets are determined," Francis J. Mulhern, Ph.D., associate dean and chair of Northwestern University's graduate program in Integrated Marketing Communications, said in a statement. "The study supports the idea that internal marketing and communications, directly addressing all levels of employees and their job requirements, needs to be implemented as rigorously as external marketing and sales programs."

To read more of the study's findings, visit PROMO.

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