Month: July 2006

Live, from Baltimore! It’s EduWeb 2006!

Several readers of Karine Joly’s Collegewebeditor.com blog are posting updates from EduWeb 2006, a conference being held in Baltimore today and tomorrow. EduWeb is billed as “the only conference that offers attendees a combination of Web development and Web marketing topics presented by some of the top speakers in the country.” (Apparently, according to Joly’s blog, one of those top speakers, keynoter Jeff Kallay, cancelled at the last minute.)

Today’s entry summarizes a presentation by Stacy Roberts Beam of Northwestern University on the subject of project management. Thanks to Rachel Reuben of the State University of New York at New Paltz for the summary.
Joly put out a call for bloggers attending EduWeb to post on her site. She got seven takers. So we should be seeing more activity later tonight and tomorrow.

P.S. – Sorry about the cheesy Saturday Night Live ripoff in the headline. I just couldn’t resist.

Enticing email for AutoPreview surfers

…some pretty big mailers (Target, The Company Store, the DMA and ourselves among them) have blah, please-don’t-open-me AutoPreview copy.

You know the routine. If you’re like 69 percent of Outlook users, you scan through the morning’s email using AutoPreview, deleting all the html-email marketing pitches that show up as a hairline box outline where some image is supposed to be and the text, “”Click here to download images.”

Instead, you click to delete.

Again. And again.

So, what if your prospective students, alumni, potential donors and other potential readers are doing the same thing with your oh-so-important email messages?

The crack research staff at Marketing Sherpa has combed the web looking for good examples of email that just might make it past the Outlook AutoPreview gatekeeper. According to Marketing Sherpa, “some pretty big mailers (Target, The Company Store, the DMA and ourselves among them) have blah, please-don’t-open-me AutoPreview copy.”

But there’s hope. In this article, Marketing Sherpa offers some great tips for more readable email.

Among the tips:
Start with compelling copy. “Instead of beginning the text-version with administrative crud, emailers including JetBlue, Mystery Reader and the Motley Fool launch directly into their content — the letter or article summary that the email is hoping recipients will react to.”

Use CAPS to catch the eye. “The average Outlook in-box screen has five-six emails when viewed in AutoPreview. So, your message is competing with four-five other messages to get the open. Putting all caps in your subject line is a no-no due to spam filter restrictions these days.”

Use text symbols to catch the eye. Adding a row of symbols is another way to catch the eye in a busy in-box.

Bonus: some examples of what and what not to do.