E-Mail to the Editor

An Online Index

Last month when I reviewed Cory Rudl's Insider Secrets course I mentioned that it needed an index. It turns out there IS an index after all. You can find the course index online at http://www.marketingtips.com/courseindex2.html Take a look. This will also give you a good idea what the course includes.

MailKing Fixes

Kim Brower of Revnet wrote about my criticisms of MailKing 2.0: "Download the 2.0.116 version -- the memory problem and the message limit issues were fixed last November :-)."

EDITOR: I downloaded the 2.0.116 version, and while the message limit issue seems fixed, I am still getting "out of memory" errors that crash the program occasionally. Good program, though.

MS Office 2000 and E-Mail Merge

Neil Gillespie of Infinity Strategic Consulting (http://www.infinitygrp.com) says, "I have one issue to pick. Word 2000 can e-mailmerge with just about any file format, filter with MS query (sophisticated), or the standard Word filter. You compose the e-mail, insert the merge fields and then click the merge button to e-mail (it lets you specify the subject line and the field to be used for e-mail address). Outlook 2000 will then send the e-mails.... I'm not sure how this would work for thousand of messages, but it worked just fine for a few hundred. Good enough for small B2B."

EDITOR: I tried the Word 2000/Outlook 2000 e-mail merge combination again today. There's an old children's poem that goes, "When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was awful." When I used my Outlook 2000 Address Book as the data source to send personalized e-mails to all contacts with "Ad Agency" in a certain field, it sent only 25 e-mails and then inexplicably stopped short.

Then I exported my contacts to an Excel spreadsheet which I used as the data source. I was now able to use the "categories" field, and sent out all 57 e-mails with ease. The ability to use the "categories" field in e-mail merge is new with the Outlook 2000 version, and is a significant improvement. Why didn't it work when I used the Outlook 2000 Address Book as the data source?

Measuring E-Mail Marketing Effectiveness

Kathleen Contrino inquired, "If I get an e-mailed broadcast newsletter from someone, how are they measuring that it was an effective piece of communication?"

EDITOR: Effectiveness is tracked with some precision using coded URLs within the e-mail. For example, if in an e-mail message I give you a URL of http://www.wilsonweb.com/ it goes exactly the same place as http://www.wilsonweb.com/?code=1234 but now I can track in my logfiles how many people clicked on the URL in the e-mail.

If I program my computer to place a cookie on all web browsers that responded to the code=1234 mailing, I can track how many purchases were made from the code=1234 mailing by checking for the presence of a cookie on the shopper's web browser at the time of purchase.

With HTML e-mail, which is beginning to take off more this year, e-mailers can track the number messages opened from the number of images accessed from their servers, called as recipients open and view their e-mail messages.

With these kinds of e-mail tracking you can determine response rates and conversion rates (percentage of shoppers who actually make a purchase), and continue to tweak your message until you maximize the conversion rate.

Whether or Not to WWW

Paul Van Ness asked, "Do you had any findings on the effectiveness of using the 'www' in your URL? e.g. www.xxx.com vs. xxx.com (assuming both URLs work). Is one more memorable than another?

EDITOR. I think we'll come to a time when www.xxx.com will equal xxx.com in the mind of the beholder. I still use the www to remind the novices that this is the Web. Strangely, some URLs DON'T work interchangeably because the ISPs for some reason decide not to configure them that way. My old ISP didn't. I've found that perhaps 10% to 15% of sites don't have this interchangeability. I've never heard a good explanation why not.