So how could this happen? A couple of insights:

Technology is making it so cheap to interrupt someone that even the holy can be tempted by the lure of immediate results such that even an organization that should be absolutely opposed to this kind of technology not only embraced it, but were boasting of their efforts on Twitter. That is until the entire marketing community overwhelmed them with a major spanking in public. Now the “convo” that they wanted to keep rolling has taken a life of it’s own and is undoubtedly something WOMMA would do anything to stop. Right now they are reaching for their “disaster recover” binders and Googling “Tylenol.”

This leads to another insight – playing with fire can get you burned. By participating in social media there is an inherent contract that you are no longer in control of your message. It’s a very powerful tool with very sharp edges that cuts both ways. A quick search of @WOMMA on twitter shows an overwhelmingly negative response to their tactics. This should be a warning to anyone that they need to be squeaky clean in this era of instant news cycles where everyone is a publisher. And when Seth Godin takes the time to call you and tell “You’re doing it wrong” you shut the F up and listen.

Another problem is that regulators are asleep at the switch. I don’t expect government to be everywhere in our lives, but this is a prime example of the FCC being woefully out of date with technology. If you don’t need a brain to use ROBO calling, perhaps you should at least have to get a license or answer some questions like “Have you been drinking today?” We made fun of the lack of prosecution of spammers (it’s pathetic) last summer during a stunt that we videotaped.

You might be thinking this point that perhaps it was a highly considered ploy to drive PR – but I guarantee you that is not the case no matter how they will try to spin it. At best they were moronic, at worst they were desperate. You may create some PR for yourselves, but when it diametrically opposes your message – your going to be a punch line on the Tonight Show. Your name recognition will certainly go up – but be careful what you wish for. Ask Steve Bartman if that is a good thing after he ruined the Cubs 2003 world series run. In a mindless grab of selfishness, because it was easy, he derailed his favorite team’s hopes for victory. He and the organization may never be the same, and I’m afraid this may be the case here.

Related posts:

1. Government Turning a Blind Eye to the High Cost of SPAM?

So when we came across this video, posted on email-marketing-reports.com’s blog, we laughed our asses off and couldn’t resist re-posting it here.

Email-marketing-reports.com explains the premise:

“Newsletter expert Michael Katz is fond of describing B2B email newsletters as the electronic equivalent of having a coffee with a customer.

Which got me thinking…what if emails could walk and talk? Here’s one vision of the message typically communicated by a corporate email newsletter. Enjoy.”

We love this video because not only is it hilarious, but it also hits on so many points of generic email newsletters. Most newsletters you get in your inbox are all — and ONLY — about the company sending it, even if that information is dull and irrelevant to you. They do no work to scout out what might be going on in your world that you’d want to hear about.

Second is something we always stress to our clients — consistency. Stay in touch with your subscribers on a regular basis and form a good, communicative relationship with your clients.

Whether our clients are writing their content, or we’re helping them put it together, we emphasize including things like local events in their area and always getting out a message once a month.

People aren’t always going to want to buy a car or a house or even a bottle of shampoo. But in the meantime, you can say hi and recommend an upcoming local festival or some favorite Valentine’s restaurants. They’ll be excited about the relevant information, and will remember that it came from you.

Related posts:

1. How To Build Your Email List – the Right Way

So, here’s what you can learn from Salesforce.com:

1. The first mistake is that they send email from a “No-Reply” address. This is a fundamental mistake and email marketing 101. The whole idea of email marketing is to engage your customer. If you cant accept replies to your outbound messages then you shouldn’t be sending them. Some companies make this mistake because they get a raft of replies that have nothing to do with the email sent – and the company therefore considers it a waste of their time. But what’s really happening is that customers are reaching out hoping to find a human being to help solve their problem. I’m not sure anything is more important to a company’s future than helping their customers solve problems, yet it is deemed an annoyance and that customers “should go through the right channels.” In these cases little regard is given that the customers may have already tried that approach and failed. Bottom line is that if you can’t respond to your customer’s replies – you shouldn’t be using email regardless of how big you are.

2. They do not have an opt-out link on their “customer” emails. This is in violation of the CAN-SPAM act, and subjects them to an $11,000 fine per email that they send out. Apparently someone at Salesforce.com has made the decision that since these are “Customers” (or apparently FORMER customers in my case) that they should have no choice than to receive these emails. This is another mistake at creating a one-way communication channel with customers. Ultimately, your customers should have the choice whether or not they want to hear from you. That includes you Microsoft!

3. Since they can’t even take someone off their lists when asked – multiple times, it’s highly doubtful that Salesfore.com is segmenting their audience for targeted emails. The message I received today was to alert me to the upcoming changes that are taking place on their platform and how that will affect me. Well, if they did any kind of segmentation at all they would see that I have had ZERO activity with their platform in the last 9 months, so making me aware of their changes is a waste of both of our times. What they could have done (had I not already asked to unsubscribe!) is send me some kind of message that says “Hey Ken, we’ve noticed that you have not logged into the platform in over 9 months. We want you to know about some helpful videos that we created in helping customer like yourself get started.” That kind of message is targeted and might be relevant assuming I HADN’T ALREADY CANCELED MY ACCOUNT.

4. Another common problem with companies like Salesfore.com that integrate their CRM with an email platform is that any silo of your business (marketing, sales, customer support, etc) can easily broadcast an email to contacts in the database. This can lead to anything from mildly annoying your contacts with too many emails, to complete disaster like sending directly conflicting information or overlapping offers. Large companies need to have an email marketing individual leading a thoughtful campaign with highly relevant email messages instead of the free for all that can exist when everyone has access. I suspect that this is the case with me and Salesforce.com – they can’t figure out where else my information exists to keep people from emailing me and don’t have central control. Or they apparently can’t figure out how to completely delete my record permanently in their own heralded platform.

5. By the way, if you are curious on why we abandoned Salesforce.com it was because of the complexity of the application and it’s steep learning curve. After signing up, and watching my 4th video tutorial and completing my 4th skills test, it was still difficult to figure out the basics of entering a lead and setting a reminder task. And as a former corporate sales champion I have had my share of experience with CRMs. If you are considering Salesforce but don’t need a lot of the advanced tools check out Highrise at 37Signals.com For us it’s the right amount of information, takes about 15 minutes to master, and has all the tools that we need.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
2. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key

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Watch this video and then ask yourself how we can make the mundane parts of your business more fun? How can we use FUN to modify people’s behavior and deliver the unexpected? How can we use fun to be remarkable?

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Please comment below on what your business is and some ideas that you came up with – even if they are crazy.

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Here’s one of ours: We ask for a birth date in our demo and we’ve just come up with a daring and hilarious email to send people on their birthday. You’ll probably agree that it’s very unexpected if you get it.

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No related posts.

It’s incredibly unfortunate that there are no enforced standards for email clients like Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and Outlook as far as formatting. Email is already kind of “stuck in the stone age” coding-wise. Since email doesn’t recognize css (cascading style sheets — the “rules” for how a website looks), businesses using email marketing have to use basic HTML to construct their message.

And even within this HTML, some email clients will pick up or ignore elements differently than others. Take Gmail for example. Gmail doesn’t recognize background colors, and 9 times out of 10 text will come through a smaller size than you intended it.

And don’t even get me started on Outlook 2007. Although a lot of people use this to look at email, it is by far the worst as far as standardized email formatting. Something about Outlook 2007 using Microsoft Word to run the HTML through causes many email templates to look like they went through a meat grinder.

The only way to make sure your email is going out to every one of your subscribers exactly the way you intend it to is to test, test, test. By far, this is one of the most important tips we can give you. In fact, if you only follow one of our ten email marketing tips, it should be this one.

Your system to be set up to test messages through multiple clients, so that you know what your message looks like in all of them. How does your newsletter look for those using AOL, Mac.com or Mozilla Thunderbird? Don’t know? Maybe it’s time to switch over to a system that can provide you that information, as well as info for Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Outlook. You wouldn’t believe how different each of these can look with exactly the same HTML coding.

Testing also gives you the chance to read over your email newsletters multiple times to check for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. Send it to yourself a few times, as well as at least one other person in the office. A fresh pair of eyes can recognize a lot.

Save yourself the embarrassment of a mangled message or poor grammar — test, test, test! And give yourself the time to do so. It’s not worth trading time for quality, is it?

Want to know our secret strategy? We have checklists for everything that we fill out as we test. Everything has to be marked off before we send our messages. We think it’s the best strategy for getting it right, all of the time.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital
2. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission
3. Preview “Pains” – First Impressions DO Matter

A recent study by The New York Times reported that up to 94% of all email traffic is SPAM. That’s hundreds of millions of emails clogging one of our most important communication channels and it’s getting worse. Though each of us may only spend a few minutes a day dealing with it, the collective drag on productivity is astounding. The National Technology Readiness Survey says it costs us 21.58 Billion per year. That’s $131 per year for every Internet user in the US.

As ISP’s have become more capable at filtering SPAM, and an entire hardware industry has been created to fight the problem, it seems that our government has taken a back seat in its enforcement.

Robert Solovay, aka the “Spam King” was finally convicted last year by the state and sent to prison for a mere 4 years. Microsoft successfully sued Solovay as far back as 2003 and his exploits were widely known according to SpamHaus. Why has it taken the state 6 years to track down such an obvious offender even with him mocking the legal system? Before this conviction, the state’s last legal victory, according to the Attorney General’s website appears to be in 1998. So for 10 years our state has not been able to prosecute a spammer even though the problem has grown exponentially?

Similarly, the Federal Government’s record is not much better. While they did just receive a guilty plea from a 5-man SPAM operation lead by Alan Ralsky and his son the penalties seem to be quite light. While the spam induced pump-and-dump stock scam they ran reportedly raked in millions, the sentences sought are only “up to” 24 to 84 months, and the corresponding fines from only $30,000 up to 1 million dollars. Sentencing occurs Oct. 29, 2009.  The CAN-SPAM act says that offenses are supposed to be subject to $11,000 fine per email incident. At billions of emails sent by this ring, the math simply doesn’t add up. And that ignores the wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, and lying to the FBI charges that are included in the guilty plea.

While any conviction is laudable, is this the best we can do? For a major player in the 21 Billion dollar problem (not counting victims ripped off by scams) we get a couple of years behind bars, and a penalty less than the amount swindled? That might even be palatable if these convictions occurred regularly, but it is years between major convictions. It seems that the government (we the people) are not angry enough about the problem, or are not directing our ire in the proper direction.

It’s time that we aggressively punish those that punish us with their time-wasting email. Prosecution needs to be extended to those selling email list and companies that are paying spammers to advertise their wares. Below is our list of things you can do to help can spam:

1. NEVER respond to a spam e-mail, or even “download images.”

2. Click the “This is Spam” button, if you have one. This alerts your ISP and allows them to refine their proprietary spam filter.

3. Forward all spam to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov BUT:

4. If it’s an e-mail you signed up for, don’t use the spam button. Just click unsubscribe and you should be removed. Be fair!

5. Reply to legitimate “over-senders” and tell them to reduce their frequency. If they don’t, unsubscribe and warn your friends about them.

6. If you are not willing to take the time to read the sender’s privacy policy, don’t give your e-mail.  If it’s more than one paragraph, forget it.

7. Use two email addresses. If the content is good, use the “update profile” and give them your real email address.

8. Use your own e-mail filter. A free, personal version is available at cyberdefender.com, but there are others. Check frequently for false positives, especially when first installed. Your legitimate mail may be getting trapped.

9. Write to your Congressional representative, and insist that they introduce legislation intensifying pursuit and prosecution of spammers and their business partners.

10. Reward only email marketers who “Do Email Marketing Right” with your business.

Related posts:

1. Disasters Of Spam
2. Email Marketing Tips: #1 Get Permission

Spam. You get it, I get it, and we all hate it. Did you know that 94% of all email is spam (New York Times)? It’s insane how much of it is floating around in everyone’s inbox.

With so much spam around, here’s the most important thing you can do when setting up your email marketing campaign:

Get Permission

No one likes getting newsletters in their inbox that they don’t remember signing up for or agreeing to. These days, getting one of these unprecedented emails is enough to make readers immediately unsubscribe before reading what you have to say — or worse, flag you as spam.

Even if someone wrote down their email when buying a product or attending an event, if you didn’t mention that their email would be added to a newsletter list, then you don’t permission to add them to your email marketing list. You need to be explicit, not sneaky. Here are some of the things to avoid when developing an email marketing audience, and ways to grow your email marketing audience legitimately.

Bad Examples

• Buying your list off someone else
• Stealing or randomly generating a recipient list
• Adding everyone who has bought a product from you online or has given you their email for some purpose other than subscribing to your newsletter
• Automatically adding and check-marking the “subscribe” button on a sign-up form for something other than your newsletter

Good Examples

• Adding a newsletter subscription form to the front page of your website for visitors to use
• Adding an optional checkbox for newsletter subscription to info forms at events
• Using a double opt-in method, like a confirmation email with an opt-in link

Why We Recommend Getting Permission

Besides being annoying and very similar to spam mail, here is why some of the bad examples are particularly bad. They are against the CAN-SPAM Act requirements.

“The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.”

CAN-SPAM prohibits:

• “Harvesting” email addresses from Web sites or Web services that have published a notice prohibiting the transfer of email addresses for the purpose of sending email
• Generating email addresses using a “dictionary attack” – combining names, letters, or numbers into multiple permutations
• Using scripts or other automated ways to register for multiple email or user accounts to send commercial email
• Relaying emails through a computer or network without permission – for example, by taking advantage of open relays or open proxies without authorization. (Federal Trade Commission)

Here’s the bottom line:

You want your readers to WANT to read your emails. Getting permission will insure you don’t annoy your readers or get marked as spam.

Plus, wouldn’t you rather have a smaller group of dedicated readers than a massive list of readers who don’t care and/or feel spammed by your email? We thought so.

Related posts:

1. Email Marketing Tips: #4 Relevance is Key
2. Email Marketing Tips: #2 Personalize
3. Email Marketing Tips: #3 Content is Vital