Web Development Email Marketing Portfolio

1. The benefit of the internet to your circulation/audience development efforts, and how important it is to your company
2. How to use email to renew or acquire new subscribers
3. E-mail tests - what’s working, what’s not working
4. Search engine marketing - what are you using and how is it working
5. Banner ads - are they working, what have you changed, where do you have them
6. How has can spam effected your subscription efforts? How has it effected your list rental activities? How has it effected your use of outside lists for subscription promotion?
7. Web agents - are they still working?
8. Blogs - are they a source of names? How can we get subscription information onto a blog?
9. Email files - do you have separate files for circulation, web casts, eNL, or a combined database for all? Advantages and disadvantages for each.

Gloria Adams, Pennwell - Moderator
Laura Wilson, NEJM - Panelist
Sean Fulton, GCN Publishing - Panelist
Brian Klais, Netconcepts - Panelist

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Most email marketers agree that ethically, email address harvesting and sending unsolicited opt-out messages are taboo and should be avoided. I of course agree. It’s always fun to talk ethics, but let’s bring the discussion to a practical level. I contend that harvesting and opt-out are both impractical for legitimate email marketers.

Let’s look at why…

Harvesting of email addresses from the Web will inevitably pick up “honeypot addresses” that will end up in your opt-out database. A honeypot is an email address hidden in the page somewhere where no one will click on it, but email harvesters will still capture it. Any emails received at the honeypot address will then get the IP address of the sending mail server “blackholed” for a period of time, so that emails to other addresses on the receiving email server will not get delivered.

Frequently the ethical question is posed as to whether the opt-out email is spam if the content is squeaky clean. The answer is an unequivocal YES. It’s still spam because you do not have a prior business relationship with the recipient, you were not granted permission by the recipient in advance, and your email is unsolicited. It doesn’t have to be “bulk” to be spam. Spam is spam to the recipient regardless of whether you sent 100 or a million; it’s immaterial to the recipient what is going on outside of their inbox. And spam does not need to be a sleazy message to be considered spam. A church could “spam” people with donation requests by email if they are unsolicited.

So back to the practicality and repercussions for a moment… Imagine this: you send out unsolicited emails requesting people to opt-in and you have no prior business relationship with them. Some of them inevitably will report you to SpamCop. Your ISP will be notified by SpamCop, and they will need to either give you the boot or justify in a response to SpamCop why you don’t deserve the boot. ISPs take SpamCop very seriously, as they don’t want their SMTP servers blacklisted. More than a couple SpamCop complaints and your ISP is going to be very grumpy with you.

So in all, this whole approach is quite an impractical one. Spammers must be very good at hiding their tracks (e.g. by sending spam out through “zombies” which are PCs compromised by viruses/trojans) or must ‘move house’ constantly. Unless you’re willing to live like that too, you’ll find that the email harvesting and opt-out approaches will burn you.

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It seems a small tick-box is causing a few ructions in the world of Google Desktop. Which tick box you may ask? The one where Google Desktop, by default, indexes secure web pages.

This ‘feature’ of Google Desktop results in GD indexing and caching secure files such as internet banking pages and web-based email pages that are viewed by the user. The index isn’t providing the passwords to access these, but the pages viewed by the user once the password prompt is passed.

These cached files have previously been somewhat buried in windows, but with them easily available to GD there are obvious security concerns. For example, try a search for ‘compose’ on Google Desktop if you have used web-based email recently and you may be surprised at what GD indexes and caches.

While the tech news sites argue over whether this is or isn’t a security threat, it’s clear Google overlooked an obvious user concern when they left that GD option on by default.

It makes one wonder what secrets may be buried deep in the Google web index, just waiting for some intrepid searcher to discover!

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Most companies don’t even realize their competitors are “eating their lunch” online - ranking higher in the search engines, getting more traffic, converting more visitors into buyers and enjoying better returns on their website investment. They simply don’t know how well their website is performing. And they are missing out on valuable e-business opportunities.

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