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No E-Brochures, Please

No E-Brochures, Please... I don't know what took me so long to figure this out. But here's my new rule of thumb: Never send an unsolicited e-brochure larger than 75 KB. And never send out multiple e-brochures. Yep, the 75 KB is an arbitrary number. Maybe it should be 100 KB, but it should never be 500 KB, much less 1 or 2 MB. While many office networks feature huge bandwidth, which enables fast downloads, more and more professionals are logging in on the road with dialup modems. And they ain't happy.

Just listen to Chris Crocker at Capital Commercial Real Estate/NAI in Los Angeles. "Just last week I was sitting in a meeting and waiting for an inbound fax via eFax (on 56k modem). A broker, not to be mentioned, blasted his brochure list just before the fax came... Took over a half an hour to get to the point where I could download the inbound fax! PLEASE ... Links or text only. Busy brokers are away from their DSL lines very frequently and downloads KILL e-mail for the road warrior. A simple text announcement asking them to reply if they want the brochure or more info is perfect!"

Mattias Bergman at Sun Microsystems (yep, he's wired!) agrees that text with a link is a better solution: "Even with a massive link to the Internet from work, I prefer a combination. The flyer could easily be an ASCII paragraph (no more) with the key points, with the URL attached so that I can find out more. Usually, I ignore 95 percent of these attachments, but that just pre-screens those that I do want to look at. It's a win-win. This system conserves my time, as well as the promoter's pipes into and out of their web site."

How do you create a "small" e-brochure? Here's an interesting PowerPoint alternative. Shari de Marsais at Colliers Appelt Womack has figured out a way to create an animated PowerPoint slide show with color, images and sound. (You must have PowerPoint installed on your computer.) I checked out a flashy presentation on a 100,000 square foot sublease in Houston that weighed in at 79 KB. Cool.

Comments? ... I've got more to report on e-marketing in a future Dispatch. But please keep your ideas flowing to me . Thanks!

--Peter