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Ariel Poler, CEO/Co-Founder, Topica, Inc.
"Interactive Week" article: Infomercials Coming to E-Mail
An Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based start-up later this month plans to launch an offering that combines brief audio and video clips promoting a product with on-screen links that users can click to buy merchandise or retrieve more product information.
"This is classic Direct Marketing 101," says Tom Blakeley, president and chief executive of the 22-employee start-up, called eCommercial.com. "This is utilizing Net technologies to streamline the way prospects are turned into paying customers."
MCA Records plans to use the eCommercial.com service to promote the launch later this month of a new Jimi Hendrix album that features previously unreleased material from the artist.
But Blakely envisions broader uses for the eCommercial.com service. He compares the data-intensive video e-mails, which can be as large as 400,000 bits, with traditional full-color brochures that companies send to prospective clients responding to a broadly targeted direct marketing campaign.
Manufacturers, for instance, could send integrated video and text packages related to their new product launches to their established reseller network, Blakely says.
The e-mails can be programmed to ping a central server every time a user plays a video clip or clicks on an information link, allowing marketers to track the effectiveness of their online promotions. The data also can be used to prioritize follow-up sales calls: Prospects who interact more with the integrated e-mail marketing package are more likely to be interested in buying the product, Blakely says.
The company (www.ecommercial.com) sells the promotion e-mails on a service-bureau basis and charges clients between 10 cents and 25 cents for each e-mail it sends, depending on the level of preproduction work and post-delivery tracking requested by the marketer, according to Blakely.
"This is not a spam tool," Blakely says. "This is a way to communicate with customers that alread have expressed an interest in your product."
x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0, March 15, 1997Cada vez que recibo un correo, veo estos datos. No importa que la fecha del mensaje no es March 15, 1997, veo esto.
the emergence of embedded advertising in email, and I'd like to lobby to thwart the use of URLs and markup language in this header info. Its best to stop this stuff at the protocol level, don't you think?
Otherwise we'll be saddled with messages that pop up on us even when senders didn't intend to be sending it.