Magilla Marketing Archive
Ken Magill's Columns are now Email Essentials, and run by editor Sherry Chiger - Don't miss a minute of the Email Essentials Newsletter! Subscribe to Email Essentials here.
Announcement: This is My Last Magilla
It is with mixed emotions that I announce today that this is my final issue of Magilla Marketing. Why am I leaving? It’s simply time to do so. I have decided I want to pursue other challenges. This newsletter’s still popular and I want to leave on a high note, or a low note, as some would no doubt contend. ...
Can the DMA Survive the 21st Century?
In a case of sad or comical symbolism—depending on how you look at it—when the Direct Marketing Association sent an e-mail last week announcing president and CEO John Greco was resigning, I didn’t see the message for two days. Why? Because it went to my spam folder. ...
Stupid Media Watch: Another Case of CSDS
There’s a pathology prevalent among the Internet’s digerati. It’s called Can Spam Derangement Syndrome, or CSDS. Its sufferers blame everything wrong with e-mail on the fact that the U.S. Can Spam Act is opt-out based, or doesn’t require marketers to get permission before e-mailing people. Lose something in your spam folder? Blame Can Spam. Girlfriend break up with you via e-mail? Blame Can Spam. Did your wife—or better yet, your mother—tell you to get off the computer and get a life? Blame Can Spam. ...
North American Bounces, Complaints High, Opens Low: Study
E-mail bounce and complaint rates are relatively high in North America compared to the rest of the world and the continent’s open rates are relatively low, according to a study by Implix. The average open rate—an “open” is recorded when the receiving machine calls for graphics from the sender—of HTML messages sent by Implix’s clients in North America was 25.44%, according to the e-commerce software provider. Europe, South America and Africa all came in at higher than 33%, according to the study. ...
Stupid Idea Watch: The Sarcasm Punctuation Mark
Great, just what we need: a punctuation mark denoting sarcasm. Everyone reading this by now knows that e-mail’s stark presentation can lead to confusion about the writer’s intent. Some sentences get misinterpreted as overly cold or critical when they’re not. That’s why we have those silly emoticons:) They’re childish and stupid—and yes, sometimes I use them—but they at least help the recipient interpret correctly the intended tone of the message. One company has decided sarcasm needs a punctuation mark, the SarcMark. ...
Strange Idea Watch: What the ... ?
Arguably the strangest idea in the short history of e-mail marketing comes in the form of the Web site BottleOnBeach.com. Touted as an innovative answer to the spam problem, BottleOnBeach allows marketers to craft a text message and upload a list of e-mail addresses for which the message is intended. ...
Stupid Top-10 Watch: Dumbest … List … Ever
For the stupidest top-10 list of 2010—yes, it's only January, but it's difficult to imagine this one being topped—look no further than the top-10 list of e-mail service providers published last week by an outfit called TopSEOs. Besides claiming to evaluate things it can’t evaluate, actually being an existing e-mail service provider apparently wasn’t a requirement for inclusion. ...
Obama, Jolie Top 2009 Spam Names: McAfee
President Obama’s name graced more spam subject lines than any other celebrity in 2009, according to a recently released report from Internet security vendor McAfee. Also, Obama was the only male to beat Angelina Jolie in terms of spam-subject-line popularity, according to McAfee. ...
Stupid? Brilliant? Getting Pitched on String
At first, I thought it was the stupidest PR pitch I had ever received. The rep wanted me to write about string. Yes, string. ...
Sad Magilla Watch: Where’s the Hate?
OK guys, fess up. Is it you? Or is it me? Where is all the wonderful hate that was once directed my way? It wasn’t all that long ago that a vanity search using “Ken Magill” on Google groups and blogs would return a slew of wonderfully hateful comments. My personal favorite is one that still leads the results page on Google groups: “Ken Magill vomits out another editorial,” which was posted on anti-spam discussion group Nanae in 2001. Clicking on that link reveals a comment posted by “Morely Dotes” calling me “a used-car salesman in a nice suit. Trust him at your own risk.” And even better than “used-car salesman” was the time anti-spammer Mark Ferguson called me a “fat toad.” Ribbit. ...
Stupid Media Watch: A Cringe-Inducing Defense
I have contended for years that sales-and-marketing executives are arguably the most under-appreciated professionals there are. Want to insult someone? Call him a used-car salesman. But sales reps and marketers are what make capitalism work. Countries that do away with sales and marketing tend to start work camps and gulags. So I defend the sales and marketing professions loudly and often. But invariably, a sales rep or marketer will come along and embarrass me by exhibiting the worst traits of their profession. Such is the case this week in a guest column on KansasCity.com written by one Todd Natenberg, president of TBN Sales Solutions in Leawood, KS. ...
Top 10 E-mail Trends of 2009: Return Path
E-mail deliverability and reputation-management firm Return Path has released what it has deemed to be the top 10 e-mail trends of 2009. The Top 10 Emails Trends in 2009, according to Return Path, were: ...
The End of Tonnage E-mail Marketing
I generally don’t make predictions because I consider doing so to be a prime opportunity to make an ass of oneself. However, as we move into the second decade of the twenty first century, one prediction for marketing seems glaringly obvious: The era of tonnage marketing is drawing to a close, and direct marketers who think primarily in terms of file size are going to begin to see their e-mail programs fail—that is if they’re not already seeing them fail. ...
The One Worst Question: A Lesson Taught in Song
“Where can I buy a list of e-mail names?” It’s the single worst professional question an e-mail marketer can ask a vendor. There are worse non-professional questions—“Would you please shave my back hair?” comes to mind—but we won’t go into those. As stated in this newsletter before, legitimate e-mail lists that mailers can buy, take possession of the names, and e-mail with no restrictions simply do not exist. In the spirit of the season, I’ve written a couple list-themed carols....
Stupid Magilla Watch: Correcting Two Years of Egregious Inaccuracy
It is truly a sad day in Magillaville. It came to my attention last week that I have been repeatedly misreporting a fact for the last two years and it’s time to set the record straight. ...
Analyst Daniels Resigns from Forrester
David Daniels, one of the most influential voices in e-mail marketing, has resigned his position as an analyst with Forrester Research, Magilla Marketing has learned. Word on the street is he hasn’t left the company yet, will probably work through at least the end of the year and then plans to start his own research and consulting business after he leaves the company. ...
Stupid Subject Line Watch: Promoting a Non-Event
Commercial e-mail subject lines using the term “Cyber Monday” skyrocketed 184% this year over the 2008 Christmas-shopping season, according to Email Data Source, a firm that monitors the e-mail and twitter activity, and corresponding Web site traffic of thousands of brands. Not surprisingly, the Cyber Monday subject lines resulted in no discernable spike in Web site activity for any of the brands monitored with two exceptions—Dell and Hewlett Packard, according to Email Data Source. Why would Cyber Monday flop as a subject-line? Taking a wild guess here, but maybe it’s because the term means little to nothing to consumers and is increasingly meaningless, period....
E-mail Marketers Measure the Wrong Things: Expert
While marketers tend to measure their e-mail programs using such basic metrics as clicks, opens, and sometimes even conversions, one expert says most of them have got it all wrong. “There are metrics that people should be looking at that they’re completely ignoring,” said Andrew Robinson, director of international services for marketing services provider Lyris. “The real screamer is short visits to a Web site from an e-mail campaign. This is one we look at all the time that people in the industry aren’t looking at. Once people click through, if they spend less than two seconds on the site and then move away, then that’s a short visit.” ...
Stupid Political Watch: Your Kind Assistance
It’s bad enough that the various political movements in this country are apparently passing around e-mail names like Viagra at a porn-star retirement home, now the Democratic Governors Association has apparently hired 419 scammers to write its subject lines. Either that, or its copywriters have graduated from an e-mail marketing school based in Nigeria. ...
Goodmail Launches Domain-Based Whitelist
E-mail certification firm Goodmail Systems announced today it has launched a domain-based whitelist that inbox providers can reference to help them determine whether or not incoming messages are spam. The move comes as inbox providers such as Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are reportedly moving toward domain-based reputation monitoring. ...
Medicare DM Volume to Rise: Mintel Comperemedia
Medicare direct-mail volume for the fourth quarter of this year will top last year’s volume by 20%, forecasts Mintel Comperemedia. Mintel reported earlier this week it expects insurers to send approximately 350 million direct mail pieces to non-customers from October to December 2009. Typically, insurance companies send the most Medicare mailings of the year from October to December, when they’re allowed to market Medicare Part D plan information to consumers, according to Mintel. ...
Q3 E-mail Click, Open Rates Rise: Epsilon
E-mail marketers’ average click and open rates in the third quarter of this year edged up over the same period in 2008, according to a recent study by marketing services provider Epsilon. Average open rates—an “open” is recorded when the receiving computer calls for graphics from the sending machine—in the study of more than 6 billion e-mails sent by about 200 clients during the third quarter of 2009 were 21.9% compared to 19.8% during the same period in 2008, according to Epsilon. ...
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