Issue 37, October 1, 1997

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This article contains older information. Go here for newer information on miscellaneous Internet marketing strategies.

Welcome to Issue 37 of Web Marketing Today, sent out to 29,011 subscribers around the world.

In this issue:

• Using E-Mail with Your Company's Domain Name
• Electronic Commerce Is Exploding
• Sponsorship
• E-Mail to the Editor
• Book Review: Zeff & Aronson, Advertising on the Internet
• Nice Words and Awards

Using E-Mail with Your Company's Domain Name

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

Too often I see CEOs with company websites using their own personal e-mail addresses to conduct business. Usually this is a result of ignorance, both of the message it sends and the technology of e-mail. When you use your joeshmoe@aol.com address for company business it:

• Undermines the company image
• Defeats development of brand identity
• Communicates smallness
• Looks unprofessional

Marketing your company on the Web has to do with projecting your company's image by means of both your Web site and your e-mail messages. Often, though, new web users don't understand how to use their new company domain name for all their e-mail, and with good reason -- it's complicated. We'll try to simplify a rather complex, technical subject so it makes sense to ordinary business people. Larger companies on a network probably have their own e-mail server which receives mail and distributes it throughout the company -- and a computer tech to set it up. But what about smaller companies?

Types of Internet Providers

First, let's distinguish between two kinds of Internet providers:

• Web Hosting Service is the company which has your Web pages on its computer and displays them over the Internet.
• Dial-Up Internet Service Provider (ISP) provides a phone number which your modem can connect with, giving you access to the Internet.

Often these are two different companies. It's been my experience that the dial-up access companies are sometimes inattentive to Web hosting needs. And Web hosting services generally don't provide any dial-up access at all, since often they are in a different part of the country altogether.

So you're the sales manager at Osofine, Inc. in South Florida. How do you get e-mail delivered to your company's domain which is being hosted by your Web hosting service in Chicago?

Your POP E-Mail Box is the place where your e-mail messages are stored until you log in and download them. (POP stands for Post Office Protocol.) Your dial-up access ISP includes a POP E-Mail Box along with your dial-up account, and business accounts often include several POP boxes. To keep it clear in our minds, let's call your personal POP E-Mail address josephine@verylocal.net which is located physically on your local South Florida dial-up ISP's computer.

There are two ways for you to get messages from your company domain name -- osofine.com -- which is tied to your Web hosting service in Chicago. The first is forwarding.

Forwarding

Your Web hosting service in Chicago can program your account so all mail sent to the osofine.com domain will automatically be forwarded to josephine@verylocal.net in South Florida. The e-mail hits the server in Chicago, and is sent on to South Florida. Incidentally, most Web hosting services allow you to have multiple "aliases" which forward to different e-mail addresses. For example, sales@osofine.com would to go to josephine@verylocal.net while service@osofine.com to go to your customer service manager, jimbob11175@aol.com, his own personal e-mail address.

Using the forwarding approach, you'd log on to verylocal.net and then have your e-mail program download any messages waiting in your local POP E-mail box under the username josephine. And similarly, Jim Bob could get his e-mail through America Online.

Return Address

You don't want to give out your personal e-mail address, however, so you set the return address on your e-mail program for sales@osofine.com, even though you physically sent the mail from your personal account. This is a very commonly used approach: forward mail from your company's domain to your local e-mail address, and then set your return address so it reflects your official company e-mail address. This works pretty well, and no one will know unless they study all those confusing headers at the beginning of the message.

Pop E-Mail Box on the Web Hosting Computer

The second way to receive e-mail is to access the POP E-Mail Box on your Web hosting service computer. Getting confused? Think of it this way. You can have a personal POP e-mail box with your local dial-up ISP in South Florida and a business POP E-Mail Box with your Web hosting service in Chicago. Many (though not all) Web hosting services provide one to three POP e-mail boxes with the hosting account. You don't have to use them -- you can forward all your mail to your local POP E-Mail box -- but you could use the POP E-Mail box labeled sales@osofine.com in Chicago.

I don't want to make a long distance call from South Florida to Chicago, you protest. You don't have to. You set the modem dialer on your computer to dial up your local ISP in South Florida. Ring, ring, Bzzz, FlotttsssNik! It's connected. Now you set up the e-mail program on your computer (I use Eudora Pro, for example) so that your POP account is set to sales@osofine.com. (Note: this is different than your local dial-up username which is josephine.) Your e-mail program now requests all the e-mail which has accumulated in your sales@osofine.com POP e-mailbox in Chicago and downloads it to your desktop computer. (Some Web hosting services allow you to send mail, also, from an SMTP [Simple Mail Transfer Protocol] program on their computer.)

Traveling

Now that you know about POP e-mail boxes, you know that you don't have to phone up your dial-up ISP from Stuttgart, Germany, when you want to check your e-mail on trips abroad. If you can get access using a friend's local dial-up access account in Stuttgart, you can download the e-mail from your POP e-mail box in South Florida or Chicago. Some dial-up ISPs now offer a reciprocal "roaming service" with ISPs in other parts of the world to accommodate business travelers with laptops.

You should never again have to give out your personal e-mail account for business. Instead, give out an e-mail address with the company domain name such as sales@osofine.com. Personnel in your company come and go, but their "function's" e-mail address -- sales@osofine.com -- remains the same for the life of the company. Alternatively, each employee can have his or her own company e-mail address, such as jim_bob@osofine.com.

All you'll have to change is an alias or a password. Pretty slick way to project your company's image via e-mail.

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Electronic Commerce Is Exploding

I have been utterly amazed to see how much is happening in the last few months with regard to electronic commerce. In the last issue of Web Commerce Today we included links to 48 separate articles and resources garnered in one month. While this doesn't equal the record 80 links to marketing topics in the issue you are now reading, it is indeed significant.

ActivMedia reports that 25% of websites are trying to sell products. Many of these sites are now learning to become profitable. Electronic commerce is now in prime time, slated to grow to over $1 trillion dollars in sales in the year 2001!

I really want you to be able to keep up with electronic commerce. That's why we launched Web Commerce Today and our new Electronic Commerce Research Room. Together, these are designed to keep you on the cutting edge of electronic commerce the same way that Web Marketing Today and the Web Marketing Info Center with its hundreds of links keep you on the forefront of Web marketing. What's the difference?

• Web Marketing Today (free) covers promoting your company and website
• Web Commerce Today (fee) covers sales from your website

Together they make an unbeatable combination.

Why don't you subscribe today? The cost for an annual subscription (and full access to the Electronic Commerce Research Room) is only $49.95. A lot of money? Not if you pay yourself only minimum wage!

Let's say you need to find an article which explains how to design your site so people are induced to buy rather than just browse. You can easily spend five hours searching AltaVista without even finding what you were looking for. At minimum wage, you've just paid for more than half your subscription. With the Electronic Commerce Research Room, you'll find that article quickly under the topic of "Design" and your valuable time isn't wasted. What's more, the ideas you gain with Web Commerce Today each month are quite likely to bring you hundreds or thousands of dollars in increased sales. Finally, when you count the money wasted in ill-advised decisions Web Commerce Today will help prevent, you can see what a great investment it really is.

You may subscribe online at http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/
or subscribe offline at http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/mailform.htm

If you value your time, can you afford not to subscribe?

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E-Mail to the Editor

We received information about a couple more products which can extract information from e-mail forms responses and place it in a database:

• Symantec Web Prospector, $295.
• WinSales 4.0, $495+.
• OnTarget service

Kristy Nardini wrote: "I use Office 97 to do my personalized, mass emails for my newsletter, and to keep in touch with my contacts. I use a combo of Microsoft Word, Access and Outlook for a very easy to use solution.

"My email database is in Access. In Word, I set up my document as mail merge. Then I open Outlook, go back to Word and tell it to merge the document. It merges to individual, personalized emails right to Outlook, which I then send from Outlook. Each message takes Outlook about 2-3 seconds to send over a 33.6 modem connection for a 3 page document.

"Tip: if you aren't personalizing each message, such as for an e-newsletter, include a merge field for your email addresses at the very end of the document."

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Sponsorship

Trying to reach business people who are trying to market their business on the Web? You can sponsor an issue of Web Marketing Today or place a banner ad on our website. More information is available at http://www.wilsonweb.com/ads/

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Advertising on the Internet

by Robbin Zeff and Brad Aronson (John Wiley & Sons, 1997)

Zeff and Aronson's Advertising on the Internet is one of the first books focused on advertising on the Internet as opposed to setting up a website to advertise. While the book surveys a number of advertising models (e-mail, classified, buttons, push, and interstitials), its main focus is on banner ads. It begins with a demographic overview of Web users, and then discusses measurement of traffic on a website as a way of analyzing a banner’s visibility and effectiveness (page views and click-throughs).

Next, the authors discuss advances in the ability to target a banner to reach just the right Web visitor. Double-Click Network, for example, is developing a database which tracks a particular person’s likes and dislikes, ZIP, etc. When a visitor is identified with a cookie, the Double-Click database delivers a banner based on geography, preferences, and banners seen so far. The authors explain how to collect information about from website visitors by means of registration, surveys, and contests, so that potential advertisers have demographic profile from which to determine a match with potential customers.

The authors then describe various pricing models, primarily CPM (cost per thousand page views), click-throughs (cost per person who clicks on the banner and is transported to the advertiser’s site), flat fee, and pay per purchase. An appendix gives sample rate cards current when the book was written to show how this might be done.

After laying the groundwork, the authors integrate information from two different perspectives: the advertiser and the publisher. In "Running an Online Advertising Campaign" they outline the various steps: establishing campaign goals, buying ad space, locating ad space and rates, using an interactive agency, and measuring campaign effectiveness. The next chapter, "Selling Online Ads," covers preparing the site for paid advertising, analyzing and documenting the site’s audience, pricing ads, various ad-selling strategies, and closing an arrangement. The book contains a sample banner advertising contract, banner ad delivery checklist, insertion order, rate card, an extensive resource directory, and tips for designing effective banners.

I recommend this book to website owners who want to generate revenue from banner ads, as well as companies wishing to use banners to promote their site or product. As a survey in usable form of the current state of the industry, this book can’t be beat.

You may purchase a copy at a substantial discount through Amazon.com Books or for regular price at your local bookstore.

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Nice Words

A Satisfied Client

One of our clients wrote, "Having worked in information technology for over 25 years, I am not easily impressed. Too much promise, too little delivery, has been my experience. I am delighted to say my experience with Wilson Internet Services has not been to usual.

"For openers, you made no wild claims about what the Internet could or would do. Instead, you had me read some sobering articles on how business on the Internet really works. Next you made me really think about our business by having me answer a series of questions using some online forms. I know we needed to have a Web site, but I was clueless as to how to make it useful for us. The questions helped me clarify who we are and how we wanted to present ourselves to the world.

"Building the site was the easiest part. Your experience in designing other sites helped us determine the number and kinds of pages in a single session. Once I completed the text for each page in Word files, you did the rest. Turnaround was never longer than 24 hours - many times in a few hours. I got everything I asked for and more. The attention to details was excellent. People who have viewed our site can't believe how terrific it looks. And they really can't believe how reasonably priced it was.

"'Thanks' hardly seems adequate. You did a terrific job of getting us on the Web quickly with a polished site. I've looked at many other firms that offer Internet services for businesses. Very few can match the breadth and depth of what you offer. We're positively delighted with your work and look forward to a continuing relationship." -- Tom Jobling, Relocation Connections

Israel Export Institute Seminar

A seminar organizer wrote, "Like many others, I 'met' you via your Internet site. On the basis of that site and your previous experience, I chose to invite you to come to Israel and participate in an Internet seminar September 23, 1997 in Tel Aviv which the Israel Export Institute organized. Meeting you in person and, after hearing your presentation at that event, I am happy I made that decision.

"All of the seminar participants enjoyed your presentation and were extremely impressed with your knowledge, your experience, your ability to create a rapport with your audience and the clear, concise way in which you expressed yourself. If you lived here in Israel, you would undoubtedly be on our regular list of speakers at such seminars." -- Amos Cohen, Director, Information Division, Israel Export Institute

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