WVU here I come

Over the last 2 years I have been working on my Bachelors in Information Technology/Multimedia and Visual Communications. I will be finishing in December of this year. For the last year I have just assumed that I would continue with UOP (University of Phoenix) when it came time to start my graduate program.

However, about a month ago Marketing Profs sent me an email that sparked my interest with another school, WVU (West Virginia University). The email was highlighting an online degree program (Integrated Marketing Communications) and online certificate program (Digital Marketing Communications). I am considering both.

The coursework for the IMC degree is very exciting. It promises everything from:

• Marketing & Analysis,
• Audience Insight,
• Brand Equity Management,
• Creative Strategy & Execution,
• Direct Marketing,
• PR Concepts & Strategy,
• Emerging Media & the Market
• with the Capstone Course being Campaigns.

There is a multitude of electives that I get to choose from;

• Media Analysis,
• Consumer Sales Promotion,
• Measurement & Analysis,
• Current Topics in IMC,
• Advanced Creative Concepts,
• B2B Direct Marketing,
• Applied Public Relations,
• Cause Marketing,
• Multicultural Marketing,
• Social Marketing,
• Direct/Interactive Creative Strategy,
• Digital Storytelling,
• Visual Information Design,
• Mobile Marketing,
• and Healthcare Communications & Marketing.

I find that choosing only 4 being a difficult task. Which ones would you choose?

The coursework for the DMC sounds like it’s perfectly aligned as well.

• Social Media & Marketing
• Web Metrics & SEO
• Digital Production for Interactive Media
• DMC Campaigns

With my background in email marketing I feel that this graduated degree will be an excellent choice/highlight to my career path. I’m very excited about this program and am anxious to get started. At times I find myself thinking more about that program than having the desire to focus on my current. I remind myself that I need to focus on this program and finish well so that I can get accepted into WVU. My goal is to start in their spring 2011 semester. Perhaps one day you will find me a WVU Alum.

How to make “Spam”

I received an interesting comment from a long time friend the other day. She mentioned something that still rings true with a lot of consumers. The finer ingredients of ‘Spam” are still unknown to the general public. No, not the spam you eat but the spam you receive in your  inbox.

Unfortunately, most people still view spam as any email that comes into their inbox that they weren’t expecting, knew that they were suppose to receive it, or just receive an abundance in amount from the company.

As a consumer I even have concerns about receiving emails that are unsolicited. So I would like to take this moment to clarify to my long time friend as well as everyone else exactly what the definition of spam is and how to tell if the messages in your inbox are really spam or commercial marketing email campaigns.

Spamhaus’s definition of spam is:

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

• Unsolicited Email is normal email
  (examples: first contact inquiries, job inquiries, sales inquiries)
• Bulk Email is normal email
  (examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

Keep in mind that not all emails in the Bulk folder are spam. Only those that are unsolicited. Spam is about consent to receive the message not the content of the message.

So when viewing the emails in your inbox or even bulk folder for that matter, ask yourself did I ask this company to receive this message? Regardless of the message that they are sending you if you asked them to send it to you then it’s not classified as spam (even as much as you want it to be). There are ways to combat the increasing amount of email in your inbox. First, before you complete any sign up form on a website view the company’s privacy policy. It should contain in clear language exactly what the frequency is on the emails that they will be sending to you (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc). Also, per the Can Spam Act there is to be a clear way to unsubscribe within every email campaign that you receive as well as a physical address or phone number of the company. These are all means in which the consumer can use to unsubscribe from the company.

If the company is legit and abides by the laws then they will promptly remove you from any list that you belong on so that you wont’ receive any more emails from them. However, iIf unsubscribing is not working and you are still receiving emails from that company you may want to consider contacting Spam Haus.

Amazing feature addition by Litmus

Is an Open rate really an open when the person immediately deletes the email? Would you want to know the delete rate for your email campaigns? Is your email campaign worth printing? Would you want to know who printed your email campaign?

Those are all things that I was thinking during the May 14 webinar given by Litmus. I had the pleasure of attending this webinar. They were showing a new feature; Email Analytics. They posted the recorded version of the webinar on their blog that afternoon.

Their Email Analytics is designed to show more than just the open and click rates that we are so use to seeing with ESPs. It goes beyond bounces and unsubscribes as well. It’s designed to show you deleted, print and read rates. Yes, read rates. Their feature is coded in a way that it will allow for you to see those people that actually fully read the email campaign, just skimmed the email or just deleted it. It can also track those people that thought highly enough of the email campaign to print it.

It can analyze the email clients that people are using to view the message as well as what browser they are using. It gives very detailed information on those email client statistics; showing opens, reads and deletes for each one. It is also aware of mobile devices that are opening the email campaigns.

In order to get these advanced Email Analytics, Litmus will provide a small snipit of code that will need to be placed into the HTML code before the closing body tag of the email campaign. It will, however, need to be a unique link for each email that is sent. The report for these statistics is real time. Coming into the tracking page every 30 seconds to 5 minutes. As with the email client testing that Litmus has you can publish these results and send the published link to anyone who needs to see those results for the email campaign.

The release of this new feature by Litmus will change how those that do email campaigns view their recipients. It will open our eyes regarding our recipients.