Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Alex Poole has a really interesting story about the power of the blogosphere.

On May 7th, Alex created a blog post complaining about the lack of an unsubscribe link in some emails sent out by Planet Ocean (the search engine optimization specialists, run by Stephen Mahaney who made my list of top-10 Internet marketers who influenced me the most).

According to Alex, the problem was with Planet Ocean’s “please come back” emails, which lacked unsubscribe links, and he blogged about how annoying it was to be asked to “come back” repeatedly without having an unsubscribe link.

Alex has now updated his post with an email he received from Planet Ocean saying…

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We’ve recently learned that you are unhappy with our unsubscribe policy. While we are complying with all CAN-SPAM regulations by providing an email link to our customer service department, we understand that some users prefer an actual “unsubscribe” link. With that in mind, future mailings from Planet Ocean will now include an unsubscribe link to make it easier for recipients to opt out of our offers.

We hope you are enjoying your current subscription to SearchEngineNews.com. Please feel free to contact us directly if you have any questions or concerns in the future.

Aloha & Best Regards,
Kristi Hagen - VP
—

So, within a week, Alex’s post has resulted in direct action by Planet Ocean. Congratulations to Alex for saving other people from the frustration and annoyance he was experiencing.

Also, congratulations to Planet Ocean for monitoring what their customers were saying on blogs, and rapidly reacting to the issue Alex raised.

My guess is that Planet Ocean have had that “please come back” autoresponder for many, many years, and when it was first set up one-click unsubscribe links were probably a thing of the future. It’s good to see that they’re updating the autoresponder to add that feature.

It’s also interesting to note how the power of the blogosphere can influence companies to take action.

What are bloggers saying about you and your company? Are you monitoring blogs? It looks like Planet Ocean are… and you should be.

One of the easiest ways to monitor the web is to set up Google alerts for your name, your company name and your product names. Google will send you a daily email containing any new references to your search terms… and it’s a free service.

Join the club.

It’s for sale? The price is going up? It’s not for sale? Scribd stopped allowing outbound links because of the volume of Internet marketers flooding their system? SMARTS was to blame for that flood? Now SMARTS is for sale again, but only for 24 hours? And they’re rolling back the price to the initial launch price, so you “save 600 bucks”?

OK, you got me. I’m confused.

BTW, I’m not posting an affiliate link because I haven’t reviewed the product. I hardly ever promote something “blind”. The few times I did, I got burned. So “never promoting blind” is a new rule of mine.

BTW, what happened with Scribd is a great example of why building your business using only other web properties is not a great idea. They can pull the rug from under you whenever they feel like it. For example, see the Google Slap when the Adwords program stopped sending traffic to people’s landing pages. Boom. There goes your business.

Thanks to Matt Garrett for giving away a nice juicy ebook listing tons of social networking, social bookmarking and video sharing websites. It won’t stay free for long, so go grab a copy.