Tips for making the best impression with your emails is my latest column for iMedia Connection. As with the last one, it’s practical advice for email marketers, based this time on my observations and experiences with airlines’ communiques. Check it out.
I wrote an article for iMedia Connection that was published today.
5 ways to avoid common email blunders is–well, the title sums it up nicely (thanks guys!). It’s a bit of practical advice for the many companies who may be running mailing lists without considering the big impact of little details.
I hope to publish regularly in iMedia Connection and elsewhere and will be sure to cross-link any posts from this blog.
Update, July 28: my article was picked up by shop.org the day it was published, and appeared this morning in their top-5 “most clicked” list. I’m pleased to see such widespread interest. Look for essays on similar topics on the Ai blog as well as elsewhere.
AT&T has officially detailed its 3G iPhone pricing, and it’s actually a bit worse than I noted last month.
The cost of data has gone up $10/month, as previously discussed. What I forgot to include was the loss of free text messaging–current owners get 200 SMS messages included in their $20 data plan. Now those 200 texts cost an extra five bucks.
Redoing the comparison, what I had outlined as
Old: 399 + (24 x 20) = $879
versus
New: 199 + (24 x 30) = $919
is, for users interested in the same level of access, actually
New: 199 + (24 x (30 + 5)) = $1039
Sure, the price increase includes the upgrade to 3G service, which can rightly be considered a premium. But the pricing strategy feels almost bait-and-switch-esque in its execution. They’re trumpeting a $200 savings in the price of the phone, yet users are paying $160 more for usage.
Ironically, what is classified as a win for the mobile phone industry–Apple’s moving to a subsidy model to make its prices more attractive–ultimately leaves AT&T with a horrible jack-up-the-prices publicity nightmare on its hands.
See you when the third-gen comes out in ’09.
Update: AT&T is not raising data rates on original iPhones with new activations, suggesting that the 3G network is the justification of the price bump. Well, that and the fact that they already made their money on the profit split of the initial iPhone sale.
I have been surprised in recent months by the number of ecommerce sites that have defaulted to opt-in upon completion of a purchase.
Opt-in is, of course, supposed to be a voluntary and user-defined action. But it hasn’t been that way for me as much as it used to.
As consumer spending slows, retailers, anxious to retain traffic and minimize customer acquisition costs, are taking steps to reach out to shoppers that fit their profiles. And what better way to do that than by hitting up previously converted users?
Interestingly, the sites that have opted me in recently are not uninformed small businesses; they’re major corporations with major legal departments, all of whom should presumably know better. Among the offenders:
Have you been spammed–I mean, opted in–recently? By whom?