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Sneaky Unsubscribe Page

December 10, 2009 in Business, Marketing, The Internet with 2 Comments

Somehow, somewhere, I got on the email list for US News and World Report. When I finally unsubscribed today, I thought their opt-out page was pretty sneaky.

US News and World Report Unsubscribe

I have always hated the “opt-out confirm” step, and think that unsubscribe links in emails should be a single click unsub. This one though used some subtle placement and language tricks that I’d expect to see more from shady grey-hat email marketers, than big old-media magazines.

As most users probably do, I read the page left to right, skip over or skim most of the text, and my first instinct is to click on the button marked “continue”. Since I just clicked “unsubscribe” on the previous page, my mind is expecting at first glance, that “continue” will continue the unsubscribe process I have already started. It actually keeps you ON the list if you hit that button.

Annoying.

Aaron Patzer Quote

November 16, 2009 in Business with 0 Comments

I’m not feeling so hot today, so I am at home, relaxing and catching up on some random blogs and RSS feeds that have been collecting dust for a while. And as is often the case, a particular quote from one of the articles I was reading, stuck out to me. Aaron Patzer of Mint.com is someone whose company and approach I really admire (and I love his product). When asked about pitching ideas to older decision makers, here is how he answered:

I pitch Mint to everyone from investors to engineers, young and old, and I do it pretty much the same way: Here’s the problem in the market place, here’s how we solve it, and here’s how we make money.

Almost daily someone will ask me (personally or professionally) what it is that our company does. I can usually explain it somewhat succinctly, but I vary the level of detail and the angle of the response quite a bit depending on the audience. As a result, I’m definitely not as clear as I can be 100% of the time, and I assume that though people nod along with my explanation, they may not always understand what it is I am telling them.

I dig Aaron’s approach here, which is basically to have a single, simple, clear pitch that nearly everyone will understand.

Online Advertising Needs To Change

August 11, 2009 in Business, Marketing, The Internet with 0 Comments

Amen Phil…

Particularly for agencies, there is a consensus that there’s got to be a better way. “I feel we could be facing an inflection point in our industry,” said Phil Cowdell, head of North America for WPP’s Mindshare. “The often contradictory forces of procurement-driven cost reductions and the marketing departments’ calls for more, smarter and better [approaches] will create an increasingly uncomfortable and potentially less effective operating zone for agencies. The only viable way forward is to shift from the procurement-oriented benchmarks of input measures such as CPMs [or cost per 1,000 viewers] to more output-oriented measures such as cost per hand-raiser and cost per lead. We need to move away from pure cost to a more-considered value equation.”

Via AdAge –> http://adage.com/article?article_id=138358

Markus Frind Quote

February 23, 2009 in Business, The Internet with 0 Comments

As someone that is involved in building community based sites, a quote from Markus Frind (Plenty of Fish) in a recent INC Magazine article really resonated with me.

Frind has resisted adding other commonly requested features, such as chatrooms and video profiles, on the same grounds. “I don’t listen to the users,” he says. “The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches.”

Though what Markus says isn’t totally true all of the time, it is mostly true most of the time. Noah’s post on Twitter about Tropicana’s un-redesign made me think of this.

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