Welcome to 2008

The seasonal break having passed off quietly here in Leeds (well, apart from our Travelodge team launching a post-Christmas offer that has proved incredibly popular - good job them), we're all back in the office and re–learning how to type after being offline for two weeks.

Yeah right.

A straw poll of the office found that almost 50% of Sense's team had been online on Christmas day. Logfiles for our clients show a quite astonishing amount of activity on the day, so it isn't just us internet–types (reassuringly, things are a little quieter on New Year's Eve, which suggests that there is a real world and people still do stuff there).

Nobody admitted to having watched the Queen's Christmas Message on her youtube.com channel, but you never know who you'll bump into online these days.

Until next month,

New Years Resolutions from Da Boyz

I will stop sending people an email and then phoning them to say "I've sent you an email"

Caveat Emailor

In this morning's Metro newspaper (yes, I am that high-brow), I read about a ghastly loan company approving short-term loans at 2.6 million percent APR, leaving one poor borrower paying £4,809.60 for a £320 loan. While the borrower agreed to the terms of this loan, it's an obvious scam and downright unfair.

In a similar vein, it seems that the big free email providers (Hotmail, Yahoo et al) are currently behaving badly in its attempts to handle the ongoing spam email issue. While there are some solid solutions available for verifying the authenticity of an email (SPF and Sender ID being the front-runners), it seems that Hotmail in particular is breaking all the playground rules by binning emails it considers to be spam.

While it's bad news when a big email provider sends your targeted opt–in email to the junk mail folder, Hotmail has taken to deleting emails altogether – no bounce-backs, no junk–foldering. Hotmail's terms and conditions read "We may use technology or other means to protect the service… These means may hinder or break your use of the service." That's certainly what we're seeing right now.

Sense Internet invests a lot of time and effort into its targeted email campaigns and email-enabled websites. We use email in-line with all recommendations, opt-in rules and data protection laws, yet we and others are getting penalised by the big free email providers and the strangle-hold they have on the people we are trying to speak to. My prescription for these winter-woes? Quite simply, gmail.com for the moment…

ASDA

An online version of the famous party game "Pass the Parcel", designed by Sense Internet for ASDA, helped the supermarket chain grow it's customer email database and promote its wider range of high end consumer goods through the internet.

"With 30% of the players opting in to receive future information from ASDA via email, and a referral rate of 20% (twice the Christmas average of 10%), both ASDA and Sense were pleased with how the game panned out", says Aidan Cook, Sense's Managing Director.

Prizes were hidden among the many layers of the game. Players have to unravel these layers while encouraging their friends to take part – the more people who enter, the higher their chances of winning.

"For every friend that players brought to the game, they were offered another layer to unwrap – that's unique and very incentivising", says Cook.
"We designed Pass The Parcel to provide a lot of fun and give a realistic chance of being a winner, while enabling ASDA to grow its email database of customers and prospective customers. "

"Online competition between retailers has grown immensely over the past two years with more and more retailers looking at other online marketing avenues outside the usual email, affiliate and PPC campaigns".

Says James Padmore of ASDA: "Pass the Parcel is an innovation from Sense which helped to raise awareness of the huge range of products within ASDA.com, with the added benefit of enhancing our email database by some considerable way".

Programmer Ed speaks Japanese don't you know?! A handy phrase if you find yourself in a / ryouriten (or 'restaurant' to you and me…)

Translation:

(panic over)