One of the most important and valuable marketing opportunities for any company is management of proper email campaigns. We’ve covered bulk email management and discussed how and when to capture email addresses from current and prospective customers. Following last month’s article on the importance of setting your email client to read messages using plain text, today we’re going to examine why you should market using plain text email.
User preference
Users are realizing the dangers of reading email as HTML. More and more users are switching off that functionality, and we couldn’t agree more. When an HTML email is sent to a client that reads email in plain text, it has the potential to look garbled. The user then has to decide if he or she wants to switch on the HTML view to see the message formatted in a readable way. The smart assumption is that this decision isn’t going to be made often, especially for solicitation email. Because most solicitation email is sent as HTML, users are more likely to spend more time reading emails that are sent as plain text.
Avoid high graphics and html emails as they send up a flare to the spam filter to look closer… By staying on top of why spam filters isolate certain emails and not others, you are thinking ahead and outsmarting the spam software so your customers and you can use the powerful tool of email to do business.
Email sent as plain text is much more likely to actually make it to the inbox of the recipient.
Mobile devices
Mobile devices have become quite popular. As the number of smart phones begins to dwarf all others, the more active population will be reading more and more email away from their computers. Most mobile devices don’t even try to render HTML email, and those that do try to do so render it poorly. Sending HTML email
Accessibility
One of the cornerstones of a competent web presence is consistency of message. The reason we use web standards to build fixed-width websites is so that our sites look the same on every browser. For this same reason, we should want our email to look the same to ever customer. Jan Meyer, on fixmypages.com, writes the following.
HTML email may look wonderful on your computer, but on the recipient’s computer it could look very bad and be unreadable. Most HTML email writers add in font types and sizes to the message. Differences between your system and the recipient’s system can change the layout, font type and size of the message the recipient sees. This means your carefully constructed HTML email masterpiece looks nothing like you think it does on the recipient’s system.
Also for accessibility reasons, we should avoid sending email as both HTML and plain text. A multi-part email message has both an HTML and a plain text version in the same container. This method is going against message consistency, as it assumes that some users will get one message and some won’t, and it also needlessly increases the size of the message.
Branding
Using HTML email tracking systems is very bad from a branding perspective. A proper marketing campaign should drive traffic directly to your website by promoting your website address. Email tracking systems use redirects to first count clicks before sending traffic to your website. Users reading your email as plain text will see these tracking links rather than a link to your website. Because most email clients highlight and activate links in plain text messages, these long tracking links will stand out to the user, highlighting that you’re trying to track his actions. The user may have clicked on the link that looks like http://www.abcauction.com won’t click on a link that looks like http://abcauction.mailtrack.com/?id=01928369872364U49854. Using HTML email doesn’t promote your brand, it confuses it.
Summary
When deciding how to conduct an email marketing campaign, you’re much better off opting to send that email as text. Your users will appreciate that you understand that HTML is for the web and text is for email. More users will be able to read it, both because fewer messages will be blocked by spam filters as well as because mobile devices will display the message properly. Everyone will see the same message, and your website and brand will be properly promoted.
There is a disturbing trend in the auction industry. The availability and ease of installation of inexpensive or open source scripts that turn any website into an auction site [read: eBay clone] have convinced some trade publications and newspapers to try to be auctioneers. Newspapers and trade journals who try to be auctioneers by adding auction scripts to their websites do a disservice to their subscribers, the auction industry and – most egregiously – their sellers.
Subscribers Sandhills Publishing has recently added an “Online Auction Listings” section to its websites at www.machinerytrader.com, www.tractorhouse.com, www.truckpaper.com and www.controller.com. It has disallowed auctioneers who list items at Internet only auction from advertising in their publications and on these websites. This choice to become its own exclusive auctioneer for equipment at Internet only auction means its publications are less valuable to its subscribers who can no longer see the wide range of equipment available from many auction companies. Instead, the subscribers only see equipment listed for live auction and equipment listed directly by sellers on these websites for Internet only auction. This creation of a monoculture means that prospective buyers will increasingly turn to other venues for more comprehensive lists of available assets, reducing the value of advertising sale listings and traditional auctions in these publications.
Auction industry
What makes matters worse is that in addition to the reduction in value to the subscribers, Sandhills is playing the eBay game of calling itself an auctioneer and claiming that it doesn’t get involved in the transactions. The obvious question is, “who does it hurt?” – indeed, eBay has been around for a long time and has offered the ability for sellers to directly post items for sale. The problem is that the “Online Auction Listings” system does a disservice to auctioneers and the auction industry.
TractorHouse completely misses the definition of no reserve
Notice the image to the right, taken from tractorhouse.com. The system completely botches the concept of a no reserve auction by listing an opening bid price. This is an intellectually dishonest practice, since an auction with a significant required opening bid is by definition an auction with reserve. This misunderstanding of auction concepts causes confusion for sellers trying to decide how to liquidate assets and it makes it harder for auctioneers to educate the public that an auction can have either an opening bid or no reserve but never both. Will McLemore from McLemore Auction Company doubts that such systems are sustainable.
“Ultimately it will come down to who is able to conduct auctions with attractive and consistent terms on a regular basis. I highly doubt that any publication will be willing or able to book unreserved auction business online. It does concern me because their ineptitude will inevitably muddy the waters for those of us who understand what we are doing.”
Sellers
This kind of system is an easy sell. A seller who subscribes to the publication has the perception that the it’s local and has the bidders – solely in the other subscribers – who may be interested in the asset. The logic failure goes something like “I subscribe to this publication so everyone else interested in my assets must do the same.” This seller is perhaps one who may have sold the item with a real auctioneer and had access to a professional marketing campaign that included more than one publication and one website. Instead, he is led to believe he’s using the auction method of marketing when he’s doing nothing more than listing his item with a price in the classifieds.
Any auctioneer knows that he is an agent of the seller and has the specific duty to work in the seller’s best interests before, during and after the auction. The position taken by Sandhills is the same as eBay’s. They claim to not be involved in the transaction but merely to allow sellers and buyers to find each other. This hands-off approach can be a dangerous situation for a seller who, especially when dealing with assets of high value, should have professional services of an auctioneer at his disposal.
Diversity
It’s not just Sandhills Publishing. Other publications such as the Nashville Tennessean and Kansas City Star have at least kicked around the idea of building auction sections on their websites, and it’s inevitable that in a time of rapidly declining subscriptions, companies originally rooted in traditional publications will look to diversify into other arenas and undoubtedly step on some toes in the process. Carl Carter, president of Auction Communications and blogger at www.overcoffeemedia.com is closely following the plight of traditional media.
The crisis facing media — including newspapers, consumer magazines and trade media — is so enormous and so pervasive that some will inevitably be tempted to venture into new lines of business, including auctions. But these companies need to realize that their organizations are built around a totally different business model. The pitfalls are wide and deep, ranging from ill-fitted cost structures to potential conflict of interest.
An increase in diversification is a reduction in focus. We think companies should be auction companies or they should be something else. An attempt to diversify into the auction business by media companies does a disservice to their subscribers, the auction industry and their sellers.
Do you know of other publications who have tried to enter the auction arena? Let us know in the comments.
We realized recently that we’ve made a huge mistake by not adopting and advocating Dropbox long ago. Here’s how the service works.
Install the client. You’ll find a “My Dropbox” directory in your documents folder, wherever that may be. Anything you put in this folder is automatically and immediately synchronized on the Dropbox server. If you have Dropbox installed on any other computer, it’s immediately updated there as well.
Not content with simple and secure synchronization, Dropbox provides the ability to share. A very convenient web interface lets you login from a web browser and have immediate access to all the files in your Dropbox. You have the ability to provide links to allow others to view the content you specify, and Dropbox has a very nice picture gallery system for any photos. You also have the ability to see previous versions of your files as well as restore deleted files.
The service is cross-platform. We’re currently using it on 2 Vista machines, 4 Linux machines, Windows XP and a Windows 7 installation. Each of these 8 computers has the same files, and a change to any of these files is nearly instantly replicated on each of the others.
The service offers 2 GB for free. 50 GB costs $100 per year and 100 GB costs $200 per year. As a backup tool, it’s not quite as cost effective as Carbonite or, our new favorite set-it-and-forget-it backup tool Mozy, but neither of those services offers painless synchronization across computers nor the ability to share and have web access to your files.
We’re going to reiterate the power of this service. If you’re working on a file on the desktop at your office and have to go home, you don’t have to worry about copying the file to your laptop or netbook. Simply save the document in the Dropbox directory and it’s automatically on your portable device and the computer at your house. If you’re going to a meeting and need the file on the computer that’s running the projector, simply login to getdropbox.com and access it over the Internet.
If you have more than one computer, or if you would like the ability to access certain files from anywhere very quickly via a browser, Dropbox is a no-brainer.
Brandon Harker from Auction Flex was a guest on Auction Podcast Episode 9. Auction Flex has just launched a new blog and Brandon has written a great article about the importance of clerking auctions. He gives some great tips for using bidder numbers that have the same number of digits. Here’s a sample from the much longer article.
Auction Flex launches new blog
This helps because the clerk knows that every bidder number should be three digits. If the clerk mis-hears bidder number 23 they automatically know there is no bidder number 23 and they can ask the auctioneer to repeat the number.
We’ve known this for a while. Legacy permanent numbers are intended to make customers feel welcome and instead add to confusion that ends up costing their time and our time, not to mention making other customers feel unwelcome.
We look forward to keeping an eye on the Auction Flex Blog, which you can visit at http://blog.auctionflex.com/.
Chris Longly from the National Auctioneers Association talks about his role as Deputy Executive Directory and promotes the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and show. We’ll have a transcript posted here soon.
By far the most important part of advertising an auction is the item-level listing on the Internet. With that listing, a prospective bidder can find the items he’s interested in, not just a prospective auction that he may or may not have the time to investigate. One of the two crucial parts of listing an item for auction is the picture.
This article is the first in a series about how to handle auction pictures, from storing them to processing them to posting them on the web.
We’ve seen many cases where an auctioneer’s pictures for auctions were stored separately from the spreadsheets used to list the items. We’ve seen cases where one auction’s data was on one computer and another auction lived on a different computer. We’ve seen cases where it took an auctioneer 10 minutes to find the pictures of an item.
All data relevant to a specific auction should be stored in one place, be it a server in the office or a specific computer on a home network. This recommendation doesn’t mean that multiple people can’t work on data simultaneously, it simply means that when everyone is done they should store the files in a logical manner.
We recommend having a primary directory – a directory is the same as a folder – that contains all data relevant to all auctions. Inside this directory, create a folder for each year. Inside the appropriate year’s folder, create a folder for each day you have an auction. Most importantly, name this auction directory using the International date format. Before you wind up your propeller hat, here’s an example image that illustrates this hierarchy.
Naming and storing auction data
As you can see, this model is completely scalable regardless of the number of auctions you do. The benefit of using the international date format to name your auction directories is that they will always sort themselves chronologically. In order to find a file related to a specific auction, you’ll only have to know the date. This method is much better than some of the others we’ve seen, such as having a folder for each seller or naming the auction directory after the auction title, both of which require a better memory and better folder sorting skills. Do you have two auctions on the same day? Create a subdirectory within each day folder with the auction name.
We’re really big on organization, and so you’ll see in the image above a few folders inside the day directory. Each picture you post should be edited with picture editing software, and in future articles we’ll look at different programs and processes to perform on the images.
Originals
An important rule regarding picture storage is to always keep a copy of the original pictures you take for each auction. You never know when you’ll want to use a specific picture for print advertising or when you want to re-process a picture to highlight a feature that you cropped out in your first pass. Once a picture has been properly processed and saved for the web, it’s no longer of high enough quality to use for much else.
Uploaded
We like to always keep a copy of the pictures we’ve uploaded to the web. That way, if something happens to our web server or if we overwrite the wrong folder or accidentally delete a directory, we’ll have an easy way to reupload the missing pictures from our local storage location.
Spreadsheets
The spreadsheet is still the clear leader in the way that item listings are generated. Sure, text documents are still widely used by auctioneers who don’t list at item-level (a big paragraph of items is NOT item level), but spreadsheets are the way to list items. We like to save many and save often.
You can have many other folders of file type such as marketing or video – or you can dump everything into the same folder. Find what works best for you. The important components to a data storing strategy is to find a logical system, store everything in one place, and do it the same way every time.
Do you have a better system? Let us know in the comments.
We try to cover basic security best-practices as much as possible. We talked about the value of NoScript, a Firefox plugin that prevents JavaScript from loading on web pages unless specifically allowed by the user. Today, we’re going to examine why reading email as HTML is a bad practice from a privacy, security and usability standpoint. We’ll also look at how to fix your email client to read all messages as plain text.
HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language and is the foundation of the modern Internet. It is the way web designers can specify that certain text should be linked to other web pages and how images can be displayed on websites.
Email was never intended to be anything other than a messaging system. At some point, email clients began using a browser or browser-like rendering system to display any HTML in emails graphically. As if this wasn’t bad enough from a usability and privacy perspective, it soon followed that they began to interpret scripting as well, thus bringing all of the security dangers of malicious websites to our email boxes.
HTML-rendered email can be virtually wiretapped through the use of invisible images, specially formed links, and other techniques that allow email to be tracked. For example, unique serial numbers are often assigned to invisible images stored on a remote server. Each time the email is read, those images are accessed, providing a record of whether the email was opened.
Imagine if each time you checked your post office mail box someone recorded which letters you opened and sent a report back to each sender. It’s amazing that the objections regarding government wiretapping and the privacy of medical records are made by the same people who haven’t secured their inboxes from such observation.
In addition to tracking image loads, many times the links themselves are coded so that the sender can know exactly which link you click. The link connected to the words website.com at the top of the email may be a different link than the word website.com at the bottom of the email.
The same tracking systems in HTML used by over-zealous marketers are also used by spammers to tell if inboxes are valid. An email address that consistently loads the HTML-included image means that spam sent to it is being read – or at least opened – and is a much higher-value target than an email address that never loads the image.
Security
Reading HTML email is bad from a security perspective. Phishing is a common practice wherein a user is tricked into providing login credentials, like a username and password, or other sensitive data such as credit card information to a malicious website. One of the many possible baited-hooks used in these attacks is sending an email that looks like an urgent and official email from your bank. The pretty picture says click here to login and takes you to a web page that looks just like your bank’s login page. What you don’t notice is that the URL is slightly different. When you submit the form with your username and password, the malicious page sends your information to the hacker who then can use it to login to your bank’s real website.
Scripting refers to the ability of a program to interpret commands given to it by the content of the document it’s rendering. It’s very common on web pages, but has begun to creep into other types of documents where it doesn’t belong. PDFs, spreadsheets and email are just a few of the types of content that now interpret scripting and now have the associated security issues.
Scripting allows documents to essentially run programs on your computer. Benign scripts may simply ensure that the data you enter into a PDF form is valid, triggering a pop-up if you try to enter a letter into the phone number field. Malicious scripts, however, can be much more pernicious.
standard JavaScript with no bugs, no exploits, no buffer overruns, no mistakes at all, can be used to port scan your internal network, identify devices, take them over, reprogram them…
Unfortunately, many email clients that render email as HTML allow JavaScript to execute when the document is loaded, so even the simple act of selecting an email with an open preview pane may be enough to cause serious damage.
Even without scripting, email can make use of advanced HTML and CSS techniques to overlay links on parts of the document that don’t look like links so that an accidental click anywhere might send you to a web site in your browser that has the malicious scripts there.
Usability and speed
HTML email is bad from a usability perspective. If you accept that the purpose of email is simply to receive messages, then what faster way to read those messages than in simple text? The different images, font sizes and color choices can take seconds to adapt to, and content in different areas or columns can be difficult to prioritize. This extra time and confusion adds up substantially for those of us with a lot of email to parse and very little time in which to do it.
Benefits of plain text email Reading email as plain text solves all of the problems listed above.
Plain text email doesn’t support images, so you can’t be tracked by the email senders
Plain text email lets you see the links you’re clicking so you can tell if you’re clicking on a link that goes to capitalone.com or one that sends you to capitalone.evilsender.com.ru
Plain text email doesn’t support scripting so your email doesn’t try to perform actions on your computer
Plain text email is easier and faster to read
Fix your email reader
In defense of email readers, recent progress has certainly improved the security of clients like Outlook and Thunderbird. While they’re improved, they’re by no means completely secure, as each regularly releases security patches and updates to prevent the latest vulnerabilities.
Even if the browser is completely secure and rendering HTML perfectly, a link on an image or anchor text could still send you to a phishing website. Even if you turn off images and scripting and have the latest and greatest anti-phishing software running on your computer, you’re still left with the annoyance of varying typography and colors that simply aren’t an issue with plain text email.
On the Tools menu, click Trust Center, and then click E-mail Security.
Under Read as Plain Text, click to select the Read all standard mail in plain text check box.
To include messages that are signed with a digital signature, click to select the Read all digitally signed mail in plain text check box.
Thunderbird Thunderbird is even easier to secure.
Start Thunderbird
On the View menu, click Message Body As and select Plain Text.
Remember that neither modification is permanent. Outlook will tell you that a message has been converted to plain text and if you’ve decided that it’s from a trusted source and for some reason you wish to view it as HTML, you can click the header of the message to do so. All Thunderbird requires is that you simply select view > message body as > original HTML.
HTML is for the web, text is for email. Reading email as simple text is safer, faster and protects your privacy. Soon, we’ll look at this issue from a marketing perspective and learn why sending email as plain text is better for your brand and better for your subscribers and customers.
We recently had reason to search for an alternative to the overpriced [read: not free] web conferencing solutions such as WebEx and GoToMeeting. A quick Google search revealed a relatively new service that claims to be “the world’s easiest web conference” and 10 minutes into our tests, we believe it.
Firmly grounded on an open-source platform, complete with GPL source code, Dimdim offers an enormously robust service at no cost. While other companies offer a time-limited free demo, Dimdim offers the their service for free for up to 20 simultaneous users.
The biggest problem with WebEx was the download. We’ve been on meetings where participants using Macs were left out in the cold, and we never even hoped – much less tried – to get it to work on Linux. Dimdim offers its service based solely on Flash and claims to support Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. We usually have bad things to say about Flash, but this application is a perfect use of the technology.
Not content with simple presentation sharing, Dimdim offers desktop sharing, chat, whiteboard and document sharing. That’s not all. Also included in the free plan is VoIP and a free teleconference phone number. To top it off, the free version allows the presenter to share his or her webcam to provide video to up to 20 meeting participants.
It’s tough for us to remember the last time we needed meeting software to support more than 20 participants, but if that’s necessary, Dimdim can certainly scale up to large enterprise needs at a fraction of the cost of the competition.
Fourth Wave, LLC, a vendor of auction clerking and cashiering software, has apparently closed its doors.
On May 13, we received an email from an auctioneer claiming that he had purchased the software and needed to contact Fourth Wave but was unable to do so. We noticed that the website, fourthwave.net, was indeed down and we sent an email inquiry.
Later that day, we got another email from the same auctioneer who reported he had just received a letter from Fourth Wave. The letter allegedly contained a refund and stated that the company may be going out of business.
Now over a week later, we have additional reports of other Fourth Wave users receiving similar letters. We still haven’t received a response to our initial inquiry and fourthwave.net remains down.
We were approached in February by Fourth Wave with a request from them to be featured on the Auction Podcast. We agreed but couldn’t nail down a time. This chain of events seems fairly quick, and the strange twist is that their website recently went back up at a different URL with no announcement other noticeable change of content.
Do you have any more information regarding Fourth Wave? Let us know in the comments.
Here’s a recent press release from the Purple Wave blog. Though it doesn’t mention it in the article, the other new trustee with term expiring in 2013 is Michael Fine, CAI, AARE, executive vice president at Sheldon Good.
Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES
MANHATTAN, Kan. (May 19, 2009) – Aaron Traffas has been named a trustee of the National Auctioneers Association (NAA) Educational Institute (EI). The NAA Educational Institute offers opportunities for auction professionals to improve their skills and adapt to the rapidly changing industry. Traffas is currently the vice president of technology and auctioneer for Purple Wave Auction in Manhattan, Kan.
“We’re all very proud of and impressed by Aaron’s achievement. The expertise and dedication he’s brought to Purple Wave is sure to be an invaluable tool for the educational institute,” said Aaron McKee, president of Purple Wave.
Traffas is one of two trustees to be selected in 2009, and will provide guidance and oversight to all NAA educational offerings. According to Harlan Rimmerman, director of the NAA Educational Institute (EI), to become a Trustee individuals must be NAA members for not fewer than five years and hold a recognized designation. Trustees serve a four-year term as a member of the nationally recognized board of trustees.
“Aaron was chosen because he had excellent credentials and has been a very active and productive member of the NAA,” said Rimmerman, “He is the youngest Trustee since I’ve been involved with EI and possibly the youngest ever.”
Michael Fine, CAI, AARE, CCIM
Though young, Traffas already earned several of the industry’s most coveted professional designations. By completing the three-year Certified Auctioneers Institute (CAI) at Indiana University and also earning the Certified Estate Specialist (CES) designation, Traffas is part of an elite percentage within the auction profession. In 2007, Traffas served on the Auction Technology Specialist (ATS) curriculum development team. Currently, his is also one of two auctioneers involved in teaching the class to throughout the country.
“My experience with system development at Purple Wave lead directly to my involvement with the creation of the NAA’s Auction Technology Specialist designation course,” said Traffas, “The NAA has been very important to my growth as an auctioneer and to Purple Wave’s growth as a company.”
(obvious) disclosure: Aaron Traffas is the author of AuctioneerTech.
Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES is an auctioneer from Sharon, Kansas. He is currently VP technology for Purple Wave in Manhattan, Kansas.
Aaron is an active singer and songwriter, and when not at work or evangelizing the use of standards-compliant websites to the auction industry, can be found playing original alternative country music at shows across the Midwest, both solo and with the Aaron Traffas Band.
