Books on flash drives?

At Paramount, we are learning the flexibility of using flash drives to back up and to transmit manuscripts from writer to editor to designer. Since we are preparing most of our book files to be available as downloads, we wondered whether there is a market among librarians or corporate marketers for books on a flash drive.

It occurred to us that these could be useful for:

1. searches on key words and concepts
   
2. corporate marketers who are traveling and want to take a book with them for further research
3. libraries that may have a tattered copy of an older book that they would still like to keep in their collections; the pdf on a flash drive would make the book available in a downloadable version making it unnecessary to keep the book on the shelf
4. libraries that need more than one copy of a book because it is being assigned as supplemental reading
5. corporate libraries that need more than one copy of a book

So, we thought we'd put the question to our readers: If you could pay $99 and put any of up to 7 of our titles that you need on a flash drive, would you do it?

If we gathered together titles on like segments (baby boomers, kids, multicultural) or on like research techniques (moderating, for example), would you be interested in having these books on a flash drive?

We await your comments and suggestions. email Tim@paramountbooks.com

Email List Segmentation

What is email segmentation?

A segment is a portion of a database that has similar characteristics. Those characteristics are used to market in a relevant manner. Segmenting is vital to ensure that you are getting appropriate information to the appropriate audience.

In traditional marketing segmentation can be difficult and expensive. Most marketers resort to mailing to "segments" defined as people who subscribe to a certain trade magazine or who have ordered from a particular catalog. Most traditional marketers don't even try to segment their "house" lists because it is inefficient to mail in small quantities. However, if someone is receiving mail from you that is inappropriate or not relevant to their connection with your business then you run the very real risk of fatigue and disinterest. You do not want this. Segmenting your list gives you the direct connection to that audience with the information most relevant to them and makes a lot more sense when the delivery vehicle is email.

For small businesses it may still be difficult because you need to spend time analyzing your database and your customers' behavior. This takes time and thus costs money. It is however, a vital piece of the email marketing puzzle.

It has been found that open rates in email campaigns are higher when the list is smaller. In a study done by Morgan Stewart, Director of Strategic Services from ExactTarget, list size was an incredible predictor of both open and click-through response rates. Open and click-through rates were approximately 2.5 times higher for emails sent to fewer than 100 subscribers than for emails sent to 10,000 subscribers or more. *

Consider the following before sending your next email to your list.

1. Which subscribers should receive this message? Identify at least one group that should not receive this message. If you can't, you probably are not protecting your subscribers from irrelevant messages.
2. What information can we leverage to increase the relevance of this message? If you have collected information on the subscriber interests, make sure it's leveraged to drive dynamic content. Use demographic data to determine the right products, message, and offers to deliver.

* Source: Email Marketing by the Numbers by Chris Baggott.

Baby Boomers and Vacations

As baby boomers turn the corner to their sixties and head into retirement, most travel companies are trying to figure out how to target them. In her new book, Turning Silver Into Gold, Mary Furlong says that most boomers are eager to travel and they are looking for out-of-the ordinary experiences including adventure travel, educational travel, and luxury travel.

It's not surprising that Boomers want to travel. Cheryl Russell writes in the latest edition of American Consumers, the newsletter from New Strategist, that Americans have the least vacation days of any developed country. She points out that on Americans get an average of only 13 vacation days a year and they have 3.5 million square miles in the U.S. (besides the whole rest of the world) to explore.

Says Russell, " The Europeans must feel sorry for us. The British get 28 vacation days a year on average, the Germans 35, and the French 37. And they have a lot less territory to cover. Maybe it is time for a new quality-of-life statistic, the How Much of Your Country Have You Seen Indicator, calculated by dividing vacation days by square miles times 1 million. Higher is better. The French have 37 days a year to explore their 211,000 square miles. We have 13 days a year to explore 3.5 million square miles. The French indicator is a lofty 175.2. Ours is a measly 3.7. You can bet the French are much more familiar with their geography than we are with ours."

Many Boomers have worked since they were teenagers and want to finally have some fun. This could be a problem, even when they have time on their hands. In their new book, Baby Boomers and Their Parents, George Moschis and Anil Mathur, point out that some boomers will barely have enough money to stay overnight in the motel down the road, let alone travel extensively and expensively. Still, those who do have money enough are ready to hit the road and looking for new, fun options with which to enjoy retirement.

'Latinization' of the U.S. Transforming Business, Culture and Life Itself

New book illustrates how marketers, employers and others are learning to embrace the changes and capitalize on Latinos' growing influence

CHICAGO, July 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Most marketers, civic leaders,
academics and others who track the changing face of the United States are
well aware that at 44 million-plus, the Hispanic population is the largest
ethnic group in the U.S. and the fastest growing. A new book,"Latinization: How Latino Culture is Transforming the U.S.," (Paramount Market Publishing; $24.95; ISBN 978-0-9786602-5-3; 125 pages, hardcover) provides valuable insights into this mounting phenomenon. Latino purchasing power is estimated to reach $1.2 trillion in 2011, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth.

Author Cristina Benitez (http://www.lazoslatinos.com/mediaroom/cristina_benitez_bio.pdf) defines Latinization as a movement, a force that represents a series of Latino values and trends that are shaping contemporary American culture. It's a combination of factors from the 22 Spanish-speaking countries that are homelands to the Hispanic population of the U.S. These influences are as wide-ranging as Argentinean tango, dulce de leche desserts and the fast-growing popularity of Mexican cuisine.

In 1998, Benitez founded Lazos Latinos (http://www.lazoslatinos.com/intro/main.html), a Chicago-based strategic branding and advertising company that focuses on the Hispanic market. In 2005, she developed the concept of Latinization to help Fortune 500 companies and to develop Latino leadership empowerment. Benitez advises top-tier corporations and organizations, including Exelon, Kraft General Foods, General Electric, PepsiCo and Deloitte Consulting.

"Latinization" focuses on the positive influences Latinos exert on their new country, covering topics from culture to the high value Latinos place on family relationships. Using real-world examples, Benitez provides essential lessons about how to craft successful marketing messages and advises corporations on how to develop Latino leaders and create stronger relationships with Latino employees. Most importantly, readers of "Latinization" will enhance their understanding of the fast-growing Hispanic population: Latinos accounted for 36 percent of the 100 million people added to the U.S. population over the past four decades. Benitez's book illuminates Latino-influenced factors that impact everything from this population's purchasing habits (http://hortmgt.aem.cornell.edu/pdf/smart_marketing/cuellar7-06.pdf) to new product development and Internet usage. For example, tortilla and taco chip sales are growing at a rate 2.5 times faster than potato chip sales, according to a report compiled by AC Nielsen for the Tortilla Industry Association. Supermarket sales of tortillas are rising while white bread sales decline.

With a foreword by Henry Cisneros, "Latinization" also features the knowledge of 20 Latino experts offering lessons in their respective fields. "Latinization" can be ordered at http://www.paramountbooks.com or from online booksellers Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders. Review copies are available from Paramount at (888) 787-8100.

Image handling in Emails: What it really means

In my last post, I referred to the handling of images by "client emails." Client emails are the applications you use to read your email including Gmail, AOL, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and many many more.

A lot of the discussion about how different applications you use to read your emails handle images and the effect that has on the effectiveness of your email is not written in a way to help those who are less technical understand the impact. This post is designed to help explain to "non-techies" what all of this means.

The application you use to read your email displays images used for many things including site or email navigation (links to sections of a web site), to display an ad in a certain way i.e. controlling the font usage or the space around the ad.

It is usually a designer who wants to make sure an ad looks a particular way - font size, font color, photo of the product or person, and so forth. To accomplish this designers create images exactly the way they want them to look and then embed that into an email. See the Macy's example here. (middle of the page)

What do you mean by navigation? On the top of a web site or some emails, there are links to sections of a web site. Those links sometimes change when you run your mouse over them. Most of the time those are images.

Are my images of my office building, or office personnel for example affected by this? Yes, anything that is an image is affected.

Now that the definition of images is clearer, we move on to ALT tags.

Alt tags have been around since the beginning of the html code. The ALT tag refers to "Alternate" — some text added to the code to be displayed if the image is not displayed. This is an important consideration. With the default of most email applications set to NOT display images, this text is what appears instead (to complicate things more, some emails do not display the Alt tag). This Alt text can be used to encourage the receiver to load the images (usually done by pressing a "load images" button in the email application). With this in mind, go back to this post and see the examples of emails with the images off.

Hopefully this has helped clear up this previous post for more of you. Go ahead and re-read it.

Images off : Image Handling Tips for e-mail campaigns

Anna Billstram posts two interesting articles about image handling in emails.
Images Off: Unfortunately, It’s the First Impression and Review: 10 Emails with Images-Off.

She offers some tips. (Read both articles for more information)

Tips: How to Design For Images-Off
- Use of non-image HTML techniques, such as colored background tables and colored text.
- Enticing, clever alt-tags that induce viewers to select “images on”
- Reducing the number of images above the fold
- Not relying on one large image for your email
- For tabbed headers and menu header, using tables and text instead of small images

Tips On How to Get Them to Turn On Images

* Ask your customer to whitelist you (you already probably do this!)
* Entice them with subject line or alt-text to view images. “Special offer in this image- select images-on” button at the top of their email. “Great offer here- just click ‘view images!’
* Do appropriate alt-text for your email. Use the usual copywriting rules and style guides.
* Make the email look good even with images off (see last post, “Review: 10 Emails With Images-Off” for good, and bad, examples)
* Move the design focus away from images for this first email. Use HTML in addition to images, but not solely images.
* Don’t use spacer images for layout. Use CSS to position text.

This post at Campaign Monitor, gives detailed information on how many different email clients handle alt text in e-mails.

This is interesting and valuable reading. There are screen shots from all the em-mail clients reviewed.

The Email Open Rate Metric

The open rate for emails is the most cited metric in email marketing. It is becoming, however, a hotly discussed metric. The discussion mainly falls on the definition of the open rate, as well as the ability to confirm the validity of the open rate however it is defined.

While definitions vary slightly, the definition most cited and accepted is the number of individuals who open an e-mail divided by the net number of emails delivered after all the bounces are subtracted.

This seems simple enough, except that we also need to define when an email is opened. An "open" is impossible to track in a text only email. An open is tracked in an html email when the receiving computer calls for a graphic that is within the e-mail. As Internet service providers, corporate IT departments, and email client applications increasingly block images by default, some mail is getting opened and is not being registered as an open.

Further, email client applications are changing rapidly. Many applications have a preview pane to view an email. This preview pane can collect the images, thus register that email as an open, even if the end user is simply scrolling through his list of emails. That is to say, the receiver may have looked at the email or he may have scrolled right over the email without a pause. Also, with more people carrying Blackberrys, iPhones, and other personal digital assistants, the accuracy of the open definition is even more in question.

The discussion then becomes, is this open rate metric a valid tool. I believe it is. While not 100 percent accurate, it does give valuable insight into the effect of the email campaign. In the text- only days it was extremely difficult to gauge email marketing effectiveness. Using this metric with other statistical analysis (web traffic statistics, landing page statistics, click through rates) will continue to give meaningful information to your email marketing team.

Email Marketing Subject Line; The Best and Worst.

Emailing is such a new field that there is little data to help purveyors of e-commerce determine the best practices. With all the "rules" about words that shouldn't be included in subject lines because they will trigger spam filters, it is hard to know what subject lines will pass the test and cause the reader to want to open the email. I found an analysis by MailChimp.com to be useful.

The common thread among the subject lines that have the best open rates, according to MailChimp is the use of a company name that actually identifies the source of the email.
Perhaps this gives recipients some level of comfort that the mail is from someone they know, or with whom they have a business relationship. These subject lines seem boring.

However, go to the link below to see the Worst subject lines and you will notice that they are more "spam like," and like some wording you might see in a print advertisement for a diet pill or a big car sale. "Big savings!" MailChimp notes that most people get so much spam in their mailboxes that they ignore any subject line that even looks like it could be spam.

The 4 Cs of Truth in Communications by Isabelle Albanese includes a chapter on email that is probably worth a look. One way to make sure your subject line attracts your customers is to make sure it meets the expectations of the potential customer. If the customer opted in for "special promotional deals," then telling her that a discount coupon is in the email may be a good option. If, on the other hand, the customer is expecting to get a "newsletter" with tips about how to use your product or service more efficiently, trumpeting a discounted offer in the subject line probably won't work.

Here are the subject lines that MailChimp.com found worked best.

According to MailChimp.com,

Best Open Rates (60%-87%)

1. [COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter
2. Eye on the [COMPANYNAME] Update (Oct 31 - Nov 4)
3. [COMPANYNAME] Staff Shirts & Photos
4. [COMPANYNAME] May 2005 News Bulletin!
5. [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter - February 2006
6. [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter - January 2006 [ *|FNAME|* *|LNAME|* ]
7. [COMPANYNAME] and [COMPANYNAME] Invites You!
8. Happy Holidays from [COMPANYNAME]
9. ATTENTION [COMPANYNAME] Staff!
10. ATTENTION [COMPANYNAME] West Staff!!
11. Invitation from [COMPANYNAME]
12. [COMPANYNAME] Jan/Feb 2006 Newsletter
13. Website news - Issue 3
14. Upcoming Events at [COMPANYNAME]
15. [COMPANYNAME] Councils: Letter of Interest
16. [COMPANYNAME] Coffee Exchange - Post-Katrina Update
17. We're Throwing a Party
18. October 2005 Newsletter
19. [COMPANYNAME]: 02.10.06
20. [COMPANYNAME] Racing Newsletter


Worst Open Rates (1%-14%) See their post for the worst Subject Lines.

* Study only included campaigns sent to at least 100 recipients.

What does 4i4l mean?

If you market to kids and moms these days (and who doesn't?), you should subscribe to the free e-newsletter published by WonderGroup. The newsletter chronicles new trends among youth and highlights new product and advertising campaigns and with a name change to SuperConsumer University, it will be refocused on the mom and kid dynamic. You can subscribe at the url above or click here.

Principals of WonderGroup are David Siegel, Tim Coffey, and Greg Livingston. They are also the authors of two of Paramount Market Publishing's bestselling books. The Great Tween Buying Machine and their most recent book, Marketing to the New SuperConsumer Mom+Kid.

Mom and kid (4i4l--4 eyes, 4 legs) are a new buying powerhouse with moms giving ever more consideration to products their kids favor. In Marketing to the New SuperConsumer, the authors note that moms even ask their kids (boys and girls) to help them choose their outfits and hair styles.

In its latest issue, WonderGroup reports on family mealtime and says that reports of its rebirth may be overrated. Here's a partial quote from the latest newsletter, written by WonderGroup president, Dave Siegel.

"WonderGroup used its proprietary mom-u-mentary video research to get a bird's-eye view of today’s family dinner to see for itself and its clients just what these dinners are really like.

"What we found was somewhat troubling…even if the family dinner may, in some respect, be alive…in many occaisions, it sure isn’t well! Here’s just some of what we observed:

"The family dinner hour has become the family dinner 15 minutes! And during this time the whole family is actually sitting down together for only about 8 minutes! Family members are often leaving the table to answer a phone, get something more out of the fridge, take bathroom breaks and more.

"There are constant interruptions. Cell phones ring, TVs blast, kids scream. Often, when the family does sit together, there is woefully little dialogue, bonding and/or socializing taking place.

"The TV is often on. In fact, many times the TV is actually serving as the source for conversation or the reason to eat together!

"There are many implications that can be drawn from these dinnertime observations: new products that might help mom ensure that all food is easily ready and accessible during those precious 15 minutes of family time; conversation starters or simple games to be played and talked over together during dinner; even new ways to incorporate the TV into conversations... perhaps even a family review of commercials! Think about it!"

For more from the latest newsletter, go to www.wondergroup.com.