MARKETING SMART
By: John GumasPresident, Gumas Advertising

Internet Usage Patterns Can Enhance Your Results

Over the past few years, on-line advertising has proven to be far less effective than most industry experts originally estimated. This does not mean that on-line advertising can’t be effective for your business. But, you need to know when and where to use on-line advertising to enhance your traditional marketing efforts.

A recent study has helped us to understand on-line usage patterns much better. For the first time, this study provides clear evidence that five distinctive dayparts do exist on the Internet. Each of these dayparts displays significant differences in usage levels, demographics and type of content accessed.

Savvy marketers can use this information to improve the efficiency of their on-line marketing activity and interactive media buys by weighting their efforts toward those dayparts in which their target audiences are available in the greatest numbers.

This study identifies five distinct Internet dayparts. A daypart is classified as a consecutive block of time on similar days (weekdays or weekends) during which the size of the audience is homogeneous as is the characterization of the group using the medium. They are:

1. Early morning (M-F, 6 am – 8 am)
2. Daytime (M-F, 8 am – 5 pm)
3. Evening (M-F, 5 pm – 11 pm)
4. Late night (M-F, 11 pm – 6 am)
5. Weekends (Sat-Sun, all day)

Some key findings of this study included:

- Daytime is the largest daypart (measured in both total audience and total usage minutes) followed by evenings and weekends.
- Affluent, working people between the ages of 25 – 54 make up the largest share of the daytime audience than any other daypart.
- Children under age 18 are three times more likely to be reached during the evening or weekend dayparts.
- Internet utilities, such as search engines, email and chat rooms show very little variation in usage by daypart. On-line content sites, in contrast, show distinct differences in usage by the time of day.
- Use of news and information sites is concentrated in the early morning and daytime dayparts.
- Entertainment and sports sites usage increases dramatically during the evening and weekend dayparts.
- On average, e-commerce activity is growing and now accounts for 5.3% of time spent on-line. A considerably larger share of e-commerce occurs on evenings and weekends than during the daytime.

As you can see, using the Internet to supplement your existing marketing is a wise use of your marketing dollars. The more you can direct those dollars to where and when your target audience is actually on-line, the greater your return on investment.

Gumas Advertising is an award-winning, full service marketing and advertising agency that helps their clients maximize the return on their advertising investment through the creation of smart marketing strategies, creative advertising and graphic design concepts and powerful on-line and interactive media programs.

Until next month…

If you would like to subscribe to Marketing Smart, click here to visit Gumas' Marketing Smart Page

If you would like to offer a free subscription of Marketing Smart to someone else or have a subject you'd like to see covered, please reply to: editor@gumas.com

JG -

"Encode Your Email Address And Kill Spam"

  by Azam Corry

How can you stop the unsolicited, bulk commercial email we call spam?

Well, lets be honest - you can't. Not entirely. But it's easy to avoid as much as 90% the of spam you get. Let me explain...

Fixing The Leaks Is Better Than Bailing Out

Although there are many spam filtering applications available, they take time to set up, have to be constantly adjusted, and more often than not cause as many problems as they solve.

The simple fact is that to filter out ALL spam, you're also going to inadvertently filter out some of the legitimate email you WANT to read.

It's unavoidable. No spam filter will ever be infallible.

Relying on a spam filter is a bit like bailing water out of a leaky boat instead of plugging the holes.

Until you fix the leaks, you're fighting a constant battle to stay afloat. And if you don't bail fast enough, you'll sink!

In the context of spam, fixing the leaks means preventing your addresses from getting into the spammer's grubby little hands in the first place.

Spam Bots Are Your Number One Enemy!

Spam Bots trawl the net much like search engine spiders. The big difference is that they only record the email addresses found on a Web page.

They create huge lists of addresses which are used to send spam.

But it doesn't end there ...

These lists are often sold to many other spammers, as well as the naive and misled who believe they're buying opt-in lists.

Spam Bots are the #1 reason why webmasters are drowning in spam!

It's Easy To Fight Back When You Know How!

All you need to do is encode all your email addresses into HTML so that spam bots can't read them.

If they can't read your address, they can't add it to their list.

As it's HTML, encoded addresses will display and behave exactly the same on a Web page as those written in regular Roman text.

Here's a quick way you can do it:

Every word has vowels, so instead of encoding all the letters, we can simplify things by only translating the vowels, the "@" and the "com" in your email address, plus the "mailto:" portion of the link.

Your address will still be totally unreadable to a spam bot.

Special Code To Instantly Hide Your Email Addresses

I've encoded all the essential elements for you so you can refer to them whenever needed.

The format of the code is:

   [Ampersand][Hash][ASCII Number][Semicolon]
a =        &          #               97                 ;

Unfortunately, since some email clients automatically translate the code, I've had to put a PERIOD (.) in the middle of each code character BEFORE the ASCII number, to prevent translation.

Delete the periods before using the any of the code below:

mailto: = &#.109;&#.97;&#.105;&#.108;&#.116;&#.111;:

@ = &#.64;

com = &#.99;&#.111;&#.109;

a = &#.97;

e = &#.101;

i = &#.105;

o = &#.111;

u = &#.117;

For example, "@nowsell.com" (my domain) would become:

@nowsell.com

Let's break that down so you can see it more easily:

[@][n][o][w][s][e][l][l][.][c][o][m]

   @       n       o       w   s      e       l   l    .      c       o     m

Note: Some people simply replace the "@" in their address with the code version. I don't think that's sufficient. Spammers only have to teach the software to recognize that one coded letter and your sunk. Also, some spam bots search for the "mailto" link because whatever follows must be an email address, so I recommend you encode that too.

<--- Power Tip --- >
If you use several different addresses in the form of "something@yourdomain.com," leave the "something" portion of the email address unencoded. You can then use the "search and replace" function of a text or HTML editor to update all the addresses on your site at once. Search for "@yourdomain.com" and then "mailto:" replacing each with the encoded versions.
<--- Power Tip --- >

Get Smart And Protect Your Web Site

Kill spam at the root. Protect your Web site from the scourge of the spam bots and you'll dramatically reduce the amount of spam you get. If you find the code difficult, use software like mine to do it all for you. But whatever you do, you MUST encode all of your email addresses ... Now!

© 2002 Azam Corry "Do it Better. Do it Faster. Do it Right!"

Online since 1998, Azam Corry can help you succeed. No-Bull
Marketing Help, Tools & Resources: http://NowSell.com/?encode2
Reprint Rights eBooks & Packages: http://eBookSaver.com/?encode2