Posted by Bart on November 27, 2010
A SPAM is an unsolicited email that is usually trying to sell you a product or a service you don’t need. (see Wikipedia for more details about the word SPAM and where it comes from).
Nowadays more than 95% of received emails are SPAM and the more we use Internet and emails and the more we are facing the SPAM problem. With viruses, it’s one of the biggest problems on the Internet, and it is responsible for the bad perception of E-mail Marketing. Numerous Internet users consider that E-mail Marketing = SPAM.
However, if you are a client or a member of a website, if you participate in sweepstakes, if you have registered to a newsletter or subscribe to a service, receiving an email from this particular website should not be considered as receiving SPAM.
Too many people forget that they have given their consent one way or another and complain about legitimate emails, wrongly considering them as SPAM. It’s a small number of the total SPAM, but it’s important to distinguish this from the actual SPAM.
Then, how to define accurately SPAM ?
If you are using a personal email address (not a company), it’s easy: every email that you receive without having given your prior consent is a SPAM.
If you are using a professional email address (company and professionals) it’s a bit more complicated. Advertisers and merchants are allowed to send you promotional emails. However they have to fulfill two requirements:
- the email should clearly state who is the sender (where does the email come from?),
and
- the email should include an unsubscribe link to allow you to unsubscribe from the sender’s emailing list.
If one or both of these elements is/are missing, the email is considered as a SPAM and you can complain (but is there really someone to complain to?).
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!
Posted by Bart on November 26, 2010
Wikipedia says:
E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:
* sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
* sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
* adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers, and
* sending e-mails over the Internet, as e-mail did and does exist outside the Internet
E-mail Marketing opposes to Display Advertising (i.e.: putting banners on a website), but both use the same techniques:
- E-mail Marketing uses images and links, anchors and redirection.
- E-mail Marketing can be sold/purchased on CPM, CPC, CPA, CPL, etc. models.
- E-mail Marketing can be tracked, capped and targeted.
However, compared with Display Advertising, E-mail Marketing offers several advantages:
- An exact return on investment can be tracked (“track to basket”) and has proven to be high when done properly. E-mail marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
- Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them.
- Over half of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day.
- E-mail allows marketers to reach out to consumers with personalized, relevant, dynamic messages.
- Transactional e-mails allow businesses to respond automatically to important consumer events like purchases or shop-cart abandonment.
But E-mail Marketing doesn’t have only advantages. One of its biggest drawbacks is the deliverability of the message, as well as the SPAM issue, which is related: Messages may never reach their target, or be considered as SPAM by the email software.
In addition, an average Internet user receives a large amount of e-mails everyday and has always less time and less attention to spend on each of them.
Therefore, the effectiveness of E-mail Marketing is declining. But it’s still a strong tool for Online Advertising.
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!
Posted by Bart on November 6, 2010
Ok, I guess everyone knows what a click (or point-and-click) is. But let just refresh your memory and see why clicks are useful for Online Advertising.
A click is the action of a computer user moving a mouse’s cursor to a certain location on a screen and then pressing one of the mouse’s buttons (usually the left one). A click will cause an event such as opening a folder, loading a new web page, downloading a file, etc.
A double-click is when the mouse’s button is quickly pressed twice. It usually causes a different event from the single-click.
In Online Advertising, there is no double-click. It’s always a click, or single-click. One may click on a banner, a text link, a video, etc.
For Email Marketing, we count a click each time an Internet user clicks on one of the elements in the email that he just received.
Click is important for Online Advertising, because it allows tracking and it’s also a payment model: Cost Per Click (CPC)
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!
Posted by Bart on November 4, 2010
An Ad Impression is similar to a Page Impression.
In Online Advertising and Internet, a page impression is when someone loads a page. Each time an Internet user loads a page (visits a page) or refresh it, it counts as one impression. If he visits the page again, this is one impression more. For example, I visit the home page of a website, then another page, then the home page again: the home page has been visited twice. These are 2 impressions.
It’s the same for Ad Impressions but not for the whole page, only for the ad banner (because you can have several different banners on the same page, or the same banner on several different pages): each time the banner is loaded, this is 1 ad impression.
Loading one page may generate several ad impressions, while loading several pages may generate several impressions of the same ad.
And of course, it’s possible to count the number of impressions, for instance to calculate the Cost Per Impression (Payment model that we will define later on).
For email marketing (advertising emails sent to website members), an impression is counted when the email is open (and the ad banner loaded). Every opened email counts as one impression.
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!