EmailSherpa: Email Metrics for Marketers 101

This good resource to keep for reference covers the following:

1. Open Rate -- Never a Certainty
2. Click Through Rate (CTR) - Beware of Confusing Math
3. Conversions -- Are You Counting Everything?
4. Unsubscribes/Opt-Outs -- Unimportant!
5. Delivery Metrics -- Tech Hell

[MarketingFix]

Over the past year, Loosely Coupled has been tracking the research output of the various analyst groups that follow web ... [Loosely Coupled weblog]

Roundtable: Emerging Internet Marketing Opportunities.

avant marketer: Emerging Opportunities in Internet Marketing: Analyst Roundtable, Part

avant marketer held the first in a series of roubdtable discussions with three Internet marketing and advertising experts: Forrester Research's Jim Nail, eMarketer's David Hallerman, and Jupiter Research's Rudy Grahn.

The series' objective is to offer strategic viewpoints on emerging Internet marketing opportunities. This first part captures the expert's opinions on untapped Internet marketing channels. Some items discussed:

• Using the Internet to mine consumers brand recognition and purchase consideration process
  
• The underutilization of search engine marketing. Paid Listing. Paid Inclusion.
  
• Using Email for consumer dialog versus marketing.
  

[MarketingFix]

Forget BlogChalking. Go by the globe. A (slightly) simpler cousin of the GeoTags search engine (which I could never get useful information from anyway), the GeoURL ICBM Address Server (by Joshua Schachter of Memepool) pegs sites to specific points on the planet via good old-fashioned coordinates and META tags. While the web supposedly has no borders, many sites - like blogs - have a place at their heart, a virtual (if not physical) home. Now you can see if your site has neighbors. [Via Blogdex - More Inside] [MetaFilter]

Aaron Bailey and Jeff Jarvis have come up with a sweet GoogleHack: using the pricing for Google's text advertising to "price out" how valuable you are in the infosphere:

Yesterday (below) I asked Google to let us query its database of queries to find out what the people want to find out, to do our own zeitgeist, about anything, anywhere, anyzeit. Aaron Bailey at 601am did the ingenious thing and used Google's adwords calculator to do almost that.

He found:
: Glenn Reynolds: 0.2 clicks/day
: Jeff Jarvis: 0.2 clicks/day (wow, I'm tied!)
: Sex: 16,000 clicks/day (oh, well)

: I think this leads to a new Google game: Zeitgeist yourself. How many people look for you or your hot topics per day?

(You have to go through the pain of creating your own ad and then putting in keywords but it doesn't take long. Tips: calculate on all languages, all countries and up the cost-per-click or else anything having to do with sex will go off the charts.)

"Cory Doctorow" is worth $0.05 a click, while "Boing Boing" is $0.07. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!) [Boing Boing Blog]

ng my blog when someone who has been dead for 300 years is beating me to blog entries. Anyway...

Newbay Software have announced software to enable mobile phone network operators to facilitate blogging via mobile phones - here's an example of a weblog blogged from a Nokia 7650. I played around with the 7650 when I was in Europe last - unfortunately these are not available for US GSM networks yet - though of course Newbay's software isn't limited to high-end phones.

I think it was Justin Hall who kicked the moblog meme off - in his "From Weblog to Moblog" article back in November - extrapolating from Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs to smart mobiles. I remember after reading the Weblog to Moblog article and seeing the Nokia 7650 in action, I thought about a few of my dream features for moblogs - so let's blog them:

• An impressive feature of the 7650 is the ability to add photos alongside contacts in the address book. Useful if, like me, you have problems with faces and names. However, a neat extra feature would be an ability to add a blog link to a Contacts entry. e.g. "Here's Joe, here's his phone number, here's his photo, and here's a link to his home page".
• Group text (e.g. Vodafone All @ Once which I use) is a useful feature - but is temporal in nature. e.g. the coach of a soccer team texts the team on Friday night to say "training at 9am in the morning" - but the message is not archived anywhere. The ability to archive group texts on a moblog would add narrative and context to the messages - all it would take would be an option ("Post to web") when the group text message is about to be sent.
• The 7650 lacks basic image editing features - e.g. cropping or rotating. Some rudimentary image editing is required when most photos will be spontaneous point-and-click actions.
• An opt-in recommendation/best-of aggregration site. Although posting photos to a moblog can be exciting, sometimes the results end up being as stimulating as Phil Neville choosing what to have for tea.
• Integration with Sony Imagestation - that puts only two degrees of seperation between a mobile phone and "proper" paper photos.

Dan Gillmor has some good ideas here too, based on Joi Ito's New Year's Moblog.

[Mark O'Neill's Radio Weblog]

Clickz: Online Advertising in 2003: Predictions

Here are some more forward looking statements about what's to come in this next year in the Interactive space from Clickz' Jeff Graham. Among the predictions:

• Specialized content for broadband users...for a fee.
  
• iTV provided via cable company's high tech set top boxes.
  
• Decrease quantity and increase quality of online ads.
  
• Web will become critical component of cross-media plans

Nothing earth shattering but there you have it. File it away and refer to it December 31, 2003.

[MarketingFix]

So what better way to end the year than to point you towards a Web-based game where you earn points for destroying spam and cartoon spammers? Yes it's Spamwars, playing in a galaxy not so far away (the game is set in London) right now.  [_Go_]  [The FuzzyBlog!]

iMedia Connection: The State of DR E-Mail

This article does a good job of outlining the issues surrounding email markeitng, discussing where it should fit into the overal marketing mix, and suggesting ways in which it should be used.

So maybe e-mail isn’t just a direct response medium. Perhaps it can provide the continuity and relationship development that so many marketers are looking for to keep their brands top of mind.

1. Basic – Announcement Driven (one-off, promotional content, offer-focused, reach based)

2. Content – Accentuation Driven (ongoing program, generic content, response-focused, reach based)

3. Customized – Value Driven (integrated with all marketing channels, specialized content, relationship focused, impact based)

4. Personalized – Relationship Driven (long-term investment, one-to-one content, relationship focused, impact focused).

[MarketingFix]