Today I received an e-mail promotion from an electronics e-retailer that I’d purchased from before. The after-holidays sales promotion looked interesting, so I clicked the ad to go to the site. I spent very little time there, didn’t see any deals I couldn’t live without, and clicked away.

About an hour later, in comes another e-mail from this company, this one with a note, “Thanks for visiting our site!”, and an e-mail coupon for a free $100 dining-out card if I make a purchase of at least $200.

This isn’t a new technique among digital-savvy retailers, but it’s the first one like this that I recall receiving.

Have any news websites tried this approach? (I’ve yet to see it.) It’s a great idea.

For example, tie automated e-mail promotions to when a (known) visitor views a car-review page. Build in some intelligence: If the site visitor reads a review about pick-up trucks or high-mileage hybrids, send a discount offer from a (client) local dealer, or maybe eBay Motors, specific to trucks or hybrids, respectively. Did the user visit the sports section and read three or more articles? E-mail him a discount coupon from a client sporting goods store.

This is a simple, potentially effective technique. But of course you need to know who your visitor is. That’s simple enough if you require your users to register on your site, or you know who they are because they log into your site via Facebook Connect or some other third-party connection.

And you need their permission, which you can get during the registration process (if your site has one), or by asking for permission to send them discounts in the future if they click their assent in a pop-up box.

Yet another possibility is if your news site has a premium membership program (a la Times+). Make receiving these targeted, contextual discount offers a benefit for being a paying news-website member. Of course, members don’t have to receive them and can decide for themselves whether it’s a useful benefit or feels more like annoying spam.

Finally, think beyond e-mail, of course. At sign-up for this service, offer options: Receive the discount offers via mobile phone, Facebook mail, Twitter DM (direct message), e-mail, etc.

If any news organizations have tried this, and I’m just not aware of it, please let me know in the comments area below — and tell us how it’s worked out.

This afternoon at 3:14 p.m., a few minutes after my daughter’s school ended for the day, I received this e-mail alert from the school’s principal:

“Dear Parents:

“An incident occurred today that we wanted to make you aware of. At around 12:45 p.m. the school received notice from BVSD that a threat had been phoned in to the Police Department regarding the King Soopers at Broadway and Table Mesa. BVSD and the Boulder Police Department determined that this was not a serious threat. Nevertheless BVSD asked Summit, Fairview High School and Southern Hills Middle School to go on a heightened alert status as a precaution and we (at Summit) did so for the last couple of hours of the school day. This involved students passing only in the hallway, locking all outside doors and having administrative staff and faculty outside during passing periods and after school to increase our level of supervision. The day ended without incident.

“Please call the school if you have any questions.”

I’m happy to get these kind of alerts from the school, and this one was somewhat timely, though I would have preferred to learn of it earlier since the initial threat was received by the school at 12:45 p.m. (Previous similar instances at my kids’ various schools have seen the e-mail parent alerts come much — often, annoyingly — later.)

The principal’s note made me think that our local newspaper could better serve the community by tapping into information like this and quickly sharing it with the community at large and, in a more in-your-face way, with anyone connected to the schools affected.

When I checked the Boulder Daily Camera website about half an hour after receiving the e-mail, there was nothing about the incident at the King Soopers grocery store or the school lockdowns. I don’t mean to fault the Camera; it sounds like it ended up being not much of a story, and/or they may not have gotten word as quickly as I, as a parent, got it.

But here’s my point: Local newspapers should be plugged in to alternative news and information sources such as alerts coming out of schools. This is how I’d imagine it:

• News editors ask to be put on parent-communication e-mail lists, so reporters will learn about incidents like the above right away.
• When an alert like this comes in, post it as “breaking news” on the newspaper website. Today’s school incident might warrant nothing more than a tiny blurb on the homepage, but a more serious incident like a school shooting in progress will get prominent website play plus e-mail and mobile news alerts to subscribers.
• Ultimately, this sort of information is of most use to those connected to the schools involved: parents and relatives of kids who attend, teachers’ spouses, etc. So here we get into the notion of the “personalized news service,” where registered users of a newspaper website have filled out a profile with information including where their kids go to school. (Explain, of course, that the information is used only to provide personalized news and information.)

This afternoon’s little incident may have been so inconsequential that a news editor wouldn’t deem it worthy of publishing a write-up in the print edition or the website. Even so, it’s significant news to those people in the community associated with the three schools that were locked down. This would be an opportunity to alert just those who care about a small story. (I’d include this in what I call “micro-personal news.”)

Yes, in this case the schools themselves got the word out in a timely enough manner, given the low significance of the threat. A more serious incident — say, a gunman being hunted in the neighborhood near the school — would demand more immediate news alerts, especially to parents. In that case, the newspaper staff most likely will spread the news faster than the school principal will get around to e-mailing parents.

A personalized-news feature that will send me special digital/mobile alerts when they involve an institution that I have an interest is an element I hope we’ll see offered by local newspapers soon.

We are, after all, in the age of instant news.

As the father of two American girls, now ages 11 and 16, I get to watch the younger generation’s (digital) media habits up close, which is useful in my line of work as a media trend watcher.

Something I noticed some time ago with my teen daughter is that e-mail is used in limited ways. She and her friends mostly communicate via social networks (MySpace and Facebook, in her case) and phone text messaging and instant messaging on the computer. If I send her an e-mail and want her to read it, I need to alert her to check her in-box.

However, with the 11-year-old, e-mail is big. The “big” social networks haven’t caught on with her and her friends — though they do get into some social networking activity via sites like Neopets, Club Penguin, Webkinz, etc. Of course, technically you’re supposed to be 13 to get a MySpace account. And Facebook accounts you can’t get unless you’re at least in high school, so that’s a big part of it.

So this is just a little tip for anyone targeting kids with content or services. When you hear that today’s kids don’t use e-mail so much and that it’s a communications preference more for the older generations, remember that that generalization doesn’t apply as much to the pre-teen crowd.

For more info about kids’ and teens’ online habits, check out this new research funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

Jay Small, writing on his Small Initiatives blog, comments on my latest Editor & Publisher Online column about how to smartly redesign print editions of newspapers.

One of the key points in my column is that newspapers need to provide MANY more refers and pointers to online and mobile content, in an effort to guide older print readers to a better future of reading print and consuming digital news content together.

Jay, who overall gave my advice a thumbs up, added a key tip that I overlooked:

“I would add one thing: If loyal print readers trend older, promote the online features older people would be most likely to use. E-mail, for example, remains in heavy use among older Internet populations. So rather than steering people to a Web site for breaking news updates, consider pushing them toward sign-ups for e-mail alerts.”

Absolutely. That’s smart.

I’m going to partake of a little nostalgia here. Stop reading if you don’t care about the early days of interactive news. …

Back in 1994, I started an e-mail discussion list called Online-News. It turned out to be the primary hangout for lots of the pioneers in the field of online news, and continued to be a thriving industry discussion venue for many years.

It was so long ago that in those days we were talking about the merits of dial-up bulletin board services; which proprietary online service (AOL, Prodigy, Delphi, Interchange, and some I’ve forgotten) news organizations should hook up with; and this fledgling thing called the World Wide Web, and whether or not we should take it seriously.

I served as list “owner” for quite a while, and when I went to work for the Poynter Institute in 2001, the lists went with me to be hosted there. I left my Poynter job in 2006, but Online-News continued on, residing on Poynter’s servers.

Alas, Online-News is no more. When Poynter Online introduced its new design in the last week, the old Online-News mailing list went away, replaced by a web discussion area: Journalism Conversations: Online & Multimedia.

I’m hoping that the new “Groups” functionality of Poynter Online will support a continuation of the great conversation that we Online-News members have had over these many years.

I am a bit worried that the rebranding and the ridding of the name Online-News will confuse people about what happened to it. So this is my attempt at leaving a record of the transition, and hoping that old Online-News members will make the transition. There’s still plenty to talk about!

Can anyone advise me on a Twitter feed challenge? See the comic avatar of me in the upper right of this blog page? There’s a talk balloon, and I’d like to get my latest post from Twitter to show inside that balloon. (That is, the balloon is updated with new text whenever I post a new tweet.)

Anyone got any suggestions for pulling that off? Thanks!!

In yesterday’s tip I talked about e-mail sub-lists as a marketing tool. Here’s another bit of e-mail advice: Personalize your e-mails to improve open rates.

It’s been demonstrated that inserting personalization variables into outgoing e-mails’ subject lines significantly increases the number of people who open an e-mail. We all get so many messages — many of them spam that slip through our spam filters — so it’s important to have strong and relevant subject lines that entice recipients to open your messages. You may have a brilliantly thought-out e-mail communications program for your audience or member base, but if they don’t open your messages, that’s a lot of wasted effort.

Aweber.com, an e-mail service provider that I use for some of my web projects, offers a long list of personalization variables that you can insert into the messages you send out to your lists: full name, first name, last name, date, geographic information, and custom fields. You just insert a code snippet into your e-mail’s subject line or body. Very easy.

Here’s what Aweber reports as results of using personalization:

“Subject line personalization using the date generated an average open rate of 51.4% compared to personalization using the subscriber’s first name generating 40.9% open rate. Newsletters sent without personalization of any type in the subject line generated average open rates of 28.9%.

“17% of newsletter subject lines sent in the last 30 days (by Aweber.com clients) contained date personalization while 19% used the subscriber’s first name. 56.3% of subject lines did not contain any type of personalization. Interestingly, using the subscriber’s full name or last name generated lower average open rates.”

Keep in mind that spammers also understand this and use personalization. So subject lines should not only include personal information, but also the wording must be relevant to your audience and not sound like spam.

For e-mail to be relevant, your e-mail lists need to be well targeted. Which again takes us back to the importance of sub-lists, the subject of yesterday’s tip.

Sending e-mail is easy. Getting recipients to open it is not.

(If you’d like to learn more about e-mail open rates and e-mail optimization, there’s a wealth of information available online. Here’s a start from Email Marketing Reports: Email Open Rates Guide.)

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got some domains sitting around gathering dust (and costing annual renewal fees). In my case, projects that didn’t work out, or projects that were envisioned but never got off the ground, are the reason.

I’ve got a couple domains that I think are pretty good names:

• Clearmail.com
• AthleteMoms.com

Clearmail.com is from a long time ago, when spam wasn’t yet a huge problem and there weren’t many solutions to it available yet. I hooked up with a couple other folks, including a software developer who had a good idea (we thought at the time). It didn’t get off the ground. And I also wonder why I got involved, since it was a bit outside my expertise and interests.

There aren’t many domains left with “mail” in the name. Could anyone use this one? Make an offer (please!).

AthleteMoms.com I think is a great domain for someone wanting to target that demographic niche. Any takers?

On a small e-mail discussion list that I’m on, one of the participants inadvertently sent everyone a PDF of a couple prescriptions for a family member. Obviously, her e-mail was intended to go elsewhere — probably her pharmacist. It was one of those “oh, s***!” mistakes that the speed of digital communications makes too easy.

Who among us hasn’t done something like this? If you can say that you’ve never sent an e-mail or instant message to the wrong person and it ended up being embarrassing, then you must be an abnormally careful person.

This incident reminded me of my worst instance of this kind of boo-boo. It was an instant-message exchange, using a corporate system (since this was well before IM entered the world), between me and a co-worker at a newspaper. I was working as a copy editor, and I was exchanging messages with a reporter, who was in another room not 50 feet from me. We were discussing the section editor, who was in his office nearby.

In addition to messaging the reporter, I was also messaging the editor; two instant online conversations were going on simultaneously. You can guess what happened. … The one message I sent to the reporter that was disparaging of the editor, well, that was the one I accidentally sent to the editor. Oh, s***!

What’s your most embarrassing digital working-too-fast moment?

So, spam now accounts for 90-95% of all e-mail. That’s up from 5% in 2001, and 70% in 2004 when the federal CAN-SPAM Act went into effect. That’s depressing.

Personally, I’m not bothered too much by receiving spam, since Gmail does a pretty good job filtering it. But where it has an impact is that I’m pretty certain that the occasional “false-positive” — an e-mail meant for me that’s not spam but is caught by the filter — is going into my spam folder.

I used to check the spam folder periodically, scanning through looking for personal mail put there by mistake. But that’s untenable these days with the volume of spam that Gmail catches on my behalf. I don’t even bother looking there any more.

But I often wonder what I’ve missed.