More fun with visualization

The Yahoo visualization tool has been a lot of fun to watch. You can see how mail changes, see how subject line changes and even see when commercial mailers do major blasts.
One marketer described it to me as “Total marketing porn.”
I even took a screen shot of someone doing a drop of their “September Account Statement” to customers.

I even thought about trying to do some contest where I would give away some free consulting time to a sender that could make “Hi Laura” trend. But I decided that would be mean to do to recipients and to Yahoo.
But it’s amusing to think I could convince a big enough sender to trend a certain word.
Have a great weekend.

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Skywriting to market email?

I’m so busy today getting caught up from the whirlwind of cousins this week. Yesterday, we took them to SF to do some touristy stuff. While sitting outside having some food and a drink, we noticed a ton of people staring up into the sky.
Livingsocial had hired some (very talented pilots) to do dot matrix skywriting as advertising.
Skywriting for living social It was quite impressive, actually. Mostly because the pilots were so technically precise, but also because they were conveying useful information in short phrases.
Besides the “Livingsocial loves you” shown here, we also saw deals and even a URL at one point. There was enough breeze over the bay that messages didn’t hang around long (the blur going from top left to bottom right is writing from the pass about 5 minutes earlier). But it was eye catching and there were tons of people taking photos.
It would be interesting to hear how effective a campaign this is. Does Livingsocial see signups as a result of skywriting? Or is this just general brand awareness on their part?
As an aside, the cousins said they received emails from both Livingsocial and Groupon, but that Groupon just sent so much mail it was getting annoying.

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It's easy to be a sloppy marketer

Sometimes marketers are just sloppy.
Take, for example, an email I received today from a company.
I wasn’t expecting it (sloppy #1).
I never consciously signed up for it (sloppy #2). Apparently I’d bought a package they sold through Appsumo and they claim I asked for future offers. If I did, I didn’t mean to.
The email itself used a template from the sender’s ESP, but whomever wrote the copy didn’t actually proof read it (sloppy #3).

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A recipient's view on engagement

I found a blog post from a technical type talking about email engagement. This is a  non-marketing way to do things, and probably won’t work for many marketing programs. But I think good marketers should be listening to what their recipients say, even if it’s counter-intuitive.
Edit 9/15: the website seems to have expired so I changed the link to the google cache of the article.

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