Posts from ‘Essential Tips’

Mar
24

If you are an email marketer or any company wanting to market your products and services through email, read this. Follow every step if you want to annoy users, lose brand equity and sales.

1. Send Permission-less Email Newsletters

All you need to do is obtain email addresses illegally from every website you can find and send your newsletters to them. Let these emails pop up on victim’s mailboxes and send them wondering what they have done to deserve these spams. Put <ADV>  in your subject line and trick them into thinking you’re doing a legal email campaign because users are stupid. They will be happy to read what you have to say and are very likely to buy your product.

2. Don’t Include An Unsubscribe Link

This is a no brainer, if you want users to stay on your mailing list, don’t include an unsubscribe link! Your newsletter’s content is gold, users would love to receive more of them. Why would they click “Report Spam”, bounce or delete your email? Unless they’re not interested in your spam of course! But most users LIKE anonymous newsletters in their busy inboxes so they’re unlikely to mark it as spam.

3. Okay, Include An Unsubscribe Link

But let them surf through 100 pages before they can hit the life saving unsubscribe button. Let them play hide and seek. Let them log in first, even though these users have never signed up before or cannot remember their log in credentials.

Let’s assume they managed to log in to set their newsletters preferences. Disable the “unsubscribe from newsletter” checkboxes so that users cannot uncheck them and unsubscribe! Genius! This is what we learnt from Mocca.com.


4. Don’t Unsubscribe Them Immediately

Fine, after all the thick walls you have put before them, they still manage to unsubscribe. This is the last tactic you can use to continue spamming them dry.

When they hit unsubscribe, tell them that it will take 30 days to take them off the list. The more number of days the better, this is so that you can continue spamming them during these 30 days or more.

See the pattern here? You have time to continue spamming them but have no time to take them off the list. But don’t worry your users aren’t smart enough to notice that this is absurd.

5. Include Everyone’s Email Addresses In The “To: or CC:” Field


Use your desktop email client like Outlook to send newsletters, and put everyone’s email addresses in the “To: or CC:” field so that everyone else who receive the newsletters can see. Perhaps they can save everyone else’s email addresses so that they can spam each other later, the world needs more spam email newsletters, right?

Conclusion

This is what rogue email marketers do all the time. They are usually engaged by companies wanting to sell their products or services and who are clueless about how to reach out to more people.

As a result, these companies resort to buying email databases sold by companies who collect email addresses all over the internet whether or not they have permission to use them legally for any email campaigns.

With these email addresses, they engage email marketers to do email marketing on them even though none of these poor victims subscribed to these newsletters.

As a result, the rate of users marking these unknown newsletters as spam, unsubscribing, and worse still, hating your brand, is sky high because these email campaigns aren’t targeted at all. They did not sign up for these.

These marketers who think “eventually somebody is going to say yes” are oblivious to the consequences of such email campaigns. Overtime, when more people who aren’t interested gets annoyed about these newsletters and your brand, your company’s reputation naturally goes southwards. Instead of buying from you, they get pissed off and you wonder why they don’t buy from you.

Mar
16

Less than 8% of the people interviewed at Times Square New York know what a browser is.

There’s no surprise that more people around the world, not just Times Square alone, doesn’t know what a browser is, don’t use the internet as much as we would like to think, are less savvy and would get lost if the site is designed to be more complicated than they would have liked.

It’s a good place to start thinking about these users who are going to use the next website you design. Watch the following video and be surprised:

Found at: UX Magazine

Feb
15


Like many others, I don’t really get what Twitter is at first, if you’ve just started using Twitter, you might think that it’s just a scaled down version of Facebook’s “Status” component, updating what you’re doing occasionally and showing it to your network.

I thought so too but if you really use Twitter like you would using Facebook, you’ll never make the most out of Twitter’s potential.

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Feb
03


Recently I have been thinking alot about where Flash is heading in the near and long term and how we as developers have to re-think the way we use Flash to build websites.

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Nov
20

As web usage has been increasing throughout the years, even if you don’t own a personal website, you most probably own a blog. Having a website without being able to track the number of visits and where they’re coming from is almost like putting your site to waste.

Here’s a quick one explaining the basic terms of web statistics so you can better appreciate the use of it. Keep in mind that the terms used by various web statistic services might differ a little from each other. Some might refer to “Unique visitors” as “New visitors” or “Referrers” as “Traffic sources” etc. But they share similar meanings.

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Sep
19

For every entrepreneur out there, contemplating to start a business or even in the midst of it, this is a must watch video! I promise Gary will inspire you:

Sep
12

Real Simple Syndication, or RSS for short, is a part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

RSS has been around for quite some time and my bet is you see them 90% of the time when reading blogs especially. I am very surprised at how a handful of people are still not acquainted with it. As time spent online has been increasing at an alarming rate, we keep track of a number of blogs or websites almost daily to keep ourselves up to date with stuff that we like. These number of sites increase throughout the years and chances are you’ll find that visiting these websites to look for updates turns into a chore and a pain. This is where RSS comes in to rescue all you information hungry people.

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Sep
07

As a sucker for productivity tools, I am always looking around, reading reviews and trying out new native and web applications to manage my day to day life – personal or work wise. You might already be using some that you love or deem useful, but I would like to share 4 tools I use everyday for my personal life and Hex.

I have joined Melly and hopped onto the Mac bandwagon, please pardon me if some of these applications doesn’t work on PC. Here goes:

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Apr
20

Tired of pressing “Shift” or “Ctrl/Cmd” while clicking on the search results just so the site will launch in a new window or tab?

Here’s a useful tip where most of us missed out, you can actually set your searching preference via this small link on the right of the search box:

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Apr
16

It took me 7 years as a flash designer to realise that optimising a flash web banner is an art. Yes web banners are just web banners, they sound easy to develop but trust me, it’s not when your flash banner is byte critical and have to appear on Yahoo or other advertising channels and the file size restriction is 30kb even if your brief basically says “we need to include everything! Not sure how it can be done but it must be done”.

Here’s one that I developed for the movie 30 Days of Night (click on banner to replay) for Qais Consulting (I know, banner looks pixellated but this is what I call – compromise – for file size restriction), I would like to share with you my experience while developing this innocent looking banner which only weighs 29.7kb.

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