A few weeks ago we started getting what I called “subscription spam” through our e-mail newsletter sign-up forms. It seems that comment spam attacks are mistaking e-mail sign-up forms for comment fields. Apparently e-mail lists are now collateral damage in the comment spam wars.
Because we use a double-opt-in process we saw bounces from the fake e-mail addresses the spammers were using. That’s how we knew this was happening. And it was getting pretty irritating because these automated tools were becoming more aggressive and we were seeing several bounces per hour from these silly things.
Worse still, the bounces were coming back from big portal sites and from their perspective it looked like _we were spamming them_!
I sent off a note to “Campaign Monitor”:http://www.campaignmonitor.com to see if they had been seeing this with other clients, but it seemed we were the first ones with the problem.
The way Campaign Monitor turned this complaint to their advantage is a great lesson for all marketers…
One Degree Posts
In “a recent survey”:http://www.mindbranch.com/products/R203-221.html sponsored by the CMO Council, BtoB Magazine, and USA Today, the vast majority of B2B marketers said digital marketing was most valuable as a lead-generation tool. Other goals defined in the survey were traffic generation, customer education, content distribution and partner/channel education.
While these goals are important, they are not the primary goals of these marketing objectives. The ultimate objective for all marketing is to increase revenue – to sell. To be successful in business-to-business marketing, we all must remember a simple thought: B2B marketing is not the same as marketing to consumers.
So, why do we continue to see these same marketing practices aimed at large business customers?
Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for today, The Power of Defaults, reveals users’ annoying habit of clicking the first item of a list, in research conducted by Cornell University. This something we all suspected (a la “AAA Auto Repair” yellow page listings) and this research proves: user default is to click the top item.
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