From Marketing Profs.com

Excerpt:

"Savvy marketing professionals understand that sales and marketing must work together to move prospects through the sales pipeline. This is especially important in the complex sale, with long decision making cycles and multiple buyers that need to be influenced. The good news is that Web content drives people through and shortens the sales cycle for any product or service—especially complex ones that have many steps and take months or even years to complete."

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From Marketing Vox today:

"Volkswagen has produced 120 online short films for its new Passat campaign - the largest number in a single branded entertainment undertaking, which is also the final effort for VW by Havas's Arnold Worldwide of Boston, having lost the account to Crispin Porter & Bogusky of Miami - reports AdAge. The blitz is VW's biggest online launch.

Each short, just 15 seconds long, is being shown on the VW site (www.vw.com/passat) and demonstrates a single feature of the redesigned 2006 Passat, with the feature itself being revealed only in the final seconds.

To highlight the side curtain airbags, for example, the film is of a man wearing a large Afro wig who isn't bothered by a baseball's breaking through his window and hitting his head.

The first 25 shorts went live earlier this month; the second 25 will launch next week. VW will add a viral option to allow visitors to forward the films to friends.

VW has an online ad buy through late November on portals and lifestyle and third-party auto sites to drive consumers to the films on vw.com. The URL is also listed in all offline Passat ads."

This article was written today, again from ClickZ. It focuses on email campaigns - the first and last email you send someone. (When someone subscribes and when someone may want to unsubscribe.) The exit strategies are what I found most interesting.

Of course I do wonder how many people track and monitor their email lists and implement these strategies.

Excerpt:

"Last week, my amazing co-columnist Jeanne Jennings wrote about retention e-mail marketing tactics gone bad. In her column, she questions whether continuing to send e-mail that gets absolutely no response is an example of persistence or of arrogance. She points out this type of effort has serious implications; it could be the future cause of spam complaints.

For me, Jeanne's column was perfectly timed. When it published, I was at a high-tech business-to-business (B2B) workshop speaking about e-mail marketing best practices. On my list of the top five strategic elements to drive successful e-mail, my number one item is all about designing entrance and exit strategies.

Many people forget e-mail isn't brand new to recipients. This sounds like a strange statement to make, but think about it. How many times do you receive e-mail messages from a company for a few months, and each starts out as if they were the first e-mail the company ever sent to you?

And how many times have you not opened, read, or clicked on an e-mail for months, yet the messages keep coming to your inbox?"

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