Email Campaigning Has Got to Go
A prominent book seller in the Utah area launched a haphazard email campaign that resulted in lost marketing dollars and a lot of disgruntled customers. They were sucked into the “email is easy advertising” trap. When people begin to regard your institution as a spam source, that’s asking for trouble.
Countless others have experienced the terribleness of spam. Everyone hates it. It’s on everyone’s badside. I don’t care if you make tons of cash from an email campaign, you risked too much; there was a better option out there that you didn’t take.
A friend of mine and I did some research on this one. We strategically split up email addresses, one for each signup. Many sites out there have compulsory registration, meaning you have to supply them with an email address and a password to be able to use the free services. So for each and every site, we had a different email address. (A great place to go to set this up for free is Fastmail.) Thus, when spam started to flow, we could target exactly where it was coming from.
Wanna know one of the worst spammers? The Wall Street Journal. Now, it wasn’t exactly their own ads that came up. But we could clearly see that they had sold the email address or something that produced oodles of spam. By the way, because of this discovery, we were able to leverage a cease fire to the spam on that account and also a free subscription.
So now the Wall Street Journal is paying, at least to us, out the nose. They lost business as a result of email campaigning.
My advice: it’s just not worth it. There are much better options available out there in cyberspace. (Hint: blogs!)
The 95 Percent Rule
The 95% rule states that 95% of all cognition occurs in the subconscious part of the brain. This fact is tough to grapple with when trying to target to consumers, especially over the net. Imagine taking all the aggregate surfing for just one moderate to high web user and sifting through all of it with this rule in mind. You know, I think it follows extremely well. When I’m honest with myself, I realize that much of what I do when I’m in the consumer role on the internet is go to the same sites, browse through the same stuff, and here and there something will alter that pattern, probably 5% of the time. Even though it is a pretty general rule of thumb, it seems to concur with a lot of current consumer research.
So what do all of us do that have to build our sites around this rule? Gerald Zaltman from Harvard stresses the value of one-on-one interviewing over focus groups. Researchers have found that a few conventional interviews yield the same data as large numbers of focus groups. “Often, the results of such interviews can be used to design more comprehensive surveys,” Zaltman says. “And properly designed surveys, when subjected to careful statistical analyses, can yield further insights into unconscious consumer thinking.”
Instead of investing tons in focus-group-based usability testing or large-scale market research consulting, grab a few co-workers or friends and have them give an honest look to the site. Be creative, but you’ll be able to piece together the 95% of their thinking patterns during the experience, and that will matter more than objective/conscious models of analysis.
Internet Explorer 7 Released, and What That Means
If you’ve come to this site using IE 6, you may have noticed my disclaimer that pops out on the home page. Now, more than ever, if you’re using IE 6, you have no more excuses to keep-on-keeping-on with it. Microsoft, about two hours ago, released Internet Explorer 7.
Softpedia has it available for download right now, if the auto update hasn’t caught up to it yet.
What this means for all the web developers out there is that no longer do we need to work with tables in layout for design. That should become a thing of the past in the next week. Every site should have CSS positioning over nested tables, now that the majority of internet users can get full support out of it.
Also, Javascript rollovers: thing of the past. CSS hover classes should replace that one indefinitely.
I vote for a recall on all color schemes based solely on the 128-bit system, or “web-safe” colors. The vast majority of users can grab high-res pallettes now, and with IE 7, there should be no more limitations on color rendering.
PNG support, in with IE 7. Therefore, GIF transparencies ought to be gone! Whenever there is a need for transparencies, use PNG. It handles it much better and can take less space when rendered correctly.
These are just some of the possibilities that come with a move from IE 6 to IE 7. My last request: will every web developer out there depracate all sites made for IE 6? Thanks.
