neva,Arial,Sans-Serif size=2> [MarketingSherpa Case Study]

Dan Fogarty, Director Propaganda & Manipulation (yes that is his real title), for McDonald's hip burrito chain Chipotle, received far more customer email from the chain's Web site than anyone ever expected.

Fogarty explains, “Customers were begging to get on an email list, they wanted to be notified of store openings and special events. It was like they were saying, please spam me.”

“We knew there had to be a positive way to tap into and strengthen the relationship with customers emailing in again and again.”

Google's Gift to Email Marketers by John Lawlor

The mantra of direct and e-mail marketing has long been “test, test, test.” But testing takes planning, time and money. While testing may not be as costly as running a campaign using an opt-in rental list that draws a low response, it is still costly. As e-mail response rates decline, the importance of testing increases.

Even though fewer Americans trust the Internet now than they did at the end of last year, they are spending more money and engaging in more financial transactions. [internetnews.com: Internet Advertising Report]

 

ions and surround sessions during popular morning dayparts on the NYTimes.com and Boston.com sites. [internetnews.com: Internet Advertising Report]

Many executives claim to be using the technology but definitions differ. [CyberAtlas]

een Group white paper to learn how leading marketers should be striving to optimize the medium by using email as a structured, strategic means to manage the customer lifecycle. (PDF, 65kb)

arch funded by Quris, a Denver, Colo.-based e-mail marketing provider, Greenfield Online surveyed about 1,250 frequent e-mail users and found that 56 percent felt the quality of permission-based e-mail communications influences their opinion of the sender.

More research from Executive Summary Consulting and Quris on email marketing, this time about the effectiveness of email for building brand equity with customers.

 

class=a2>Spammers have co-opted an administration feature in Microsoft's Windows operating systems and are using it to bring up intrusive advertisements on Internet-connected computers.

The feature, known as the messenger service, typically lets a network administrator send warnings to users when, for example, a server is scheduled to go down for maintenance. Now some advertisers are using it to send bulk messages to anyone connected to the Internet with an accessible address.

"Spammers are blindly sending their advertisements by randomly picking a series of Internet addresses," said Charmaine Gravning, product manager for Windows at Microsoft. "On computers without a firewall, a little messenger window pops up."