Firetop

In 2002 email marketing was seeing the march of lovely, ‘exciting’, colourful, image-filled HTML beauties. These new emails were enabling us to A/B test all manner of factors due to their pixel tracking capability – informing us of open rates, click through rates and pass-alongs. However, after seeing years of continually falling open rates, default image blocking as high as 50%, preview windows and consequential problems with graphic ad serving I am going back to the old skool with .txt as a default preference for all future campaigns and e-newsletter templates. (more…)

Discounts as purchase incentives are as old as the Earth, if properly tracked they tell marketers a great deal about the best sources of customer - enabling the optimisation of marketing budgets accordingly. Then along comes the Internet and a website which lists hundreds and thousands of current promotional codes from across the marketing landscape - from print magazines and ‘junk mail’ to online. Now consumers only have to visit ‘Hot UK Deals’ to choose from a number of current retailer offers if they are about to make a purchase; yesterday Suzie_Q saved £20 on a John Lewis web purchase courtesy of an offer from a magazine she never even bought or read. (more…)

I should have remembered how disappointing I found Internet World to be last year at Earls Court, but with free mini seminars on offer covering SEM, PPC and Web 2.0 it again seemed to be worth a visit. Unfortunately within minutes of arriving I was reminded of why the free seminars are NOT a good reason to attend the Internet World show; over subscribed presentations causing a massive shortage of seats and some very basic topics being presented. Quite why a packed crowd was sitting listening to one guy go over slides on SEO which I could well have written seven years ago I don’t know. (more…)

Email campaign open rates seem to be continually dropping, this is in part due to the unrelenting volume of messages being received from both illegal and legitimate sources, but also because of increasingly complex spam filtering techniques. Email marketers often ask why their email copy failed to achieve high open and click through rates, usually it’s because of a reliance on blocked graphics or poor audience targeting criteria. However, there are things that can be done to lower the odds of an email falling into a spam filter because of its content. (more…)

On Thursday evening I was privileged to attend the first AdMonsters event of 2007, this time a cocktail & dinner evening at Axis / One Aldwych. One Aldwych is a hotel not too far from Temple tube station, ‘Axis’ is one of their restaurants (a rather nice one). This online advertising operations event was, as usual, pretty popular - a few familiar faces from agencies and publishers were present to discuss the daily grind facing us all in delivering online advertising efficiently and effectively. (more…)

Tonight I received an email from my domain registration vendor Fasthosts, it offered me five free credits on the Fotolia image bank website. Fotolia allows both individuals and professionals to buy and sell their photographs or illustrations legally - at reasonable rates too (£0.57!). Having gone there to check it out I found it pretty good. I purchased four useful high quality images using my free credits, and loaded one or two of my own photographs to see if they might be saleable. This website looks like a great alternative to the likes of Getty who greatly irritated me earlier this year by sending a £1000+ fine in my direction. (more…)

On Thursday I attended the second AdMonsters Operations Leadership Forum at Café Royal on Regent Street. Admonsters brings together the publishers and agencies involved in online advertising production & operations.  Discussion and debate focuses on the issues affecting the global industry and ad trafficking processes. Attendees included members from the IAB and ABC Electronic, publishers like FT.com, CondeNast, Sky TV, MySpace and Yahoo!, agencies like Mindshare and Zed Media plus vendors / sponsors Doubleclick and Mediaplex. The biggest issues discussed at this event included streaming video standards and website auditing and demographic analysis. (more…)

It’s not often I receive a piece of spam that stops me in my tracks these days, when you own over 100 domain names the receiving of email from spammers offering Cialis, Viagra and bodily enlargement services is to be expected. This one however did make me laugh, it had the usual .gif attachment (blocked by my email reader) and from the content had one clear purpose. (more…)

For some time it’s been a concern that text-only emails see a higher click rate than HTML emails. Why should this be when back in 2000 all the evidence pointed the other way? Well it seems that default image blocking by email clients like Outlook (to limit spam detection of valid addresses) has grown so much that many people don’t bother to download images at all now (45% - Email Labs).

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