A while ago I wrote some thoughts about the conflicting requirements of delivery and marketing. I posted something similar over on the Only Influencers list, too. My thoughts generated a very interesting discussion, one that helped me clarify some of my somewhat random thoughts from earlier. Marketing is about finding mindshare. One way you get mindshare is repetition. But people tune out...
OMI responded to my post about data cleansing yesterday. She asked an interesting question: Why do so many in this industry feel that the email channel should be somehow held to a higher standard than other direct marketing channels? There are a lot of reasons why the email channel is held to a higher standard. The big one is actually that the consumers have a big enough stick (in the form of...
In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited...
YMMV. One of those abbreviations us old folks used ages ago before email had pictures and the closest we had to social networking was USENET and social gaming was in the form of MUDs. I rarely see it used any more. In a lot of ways that’s a sad thing. It was a very useful abbreviation. Using it at the end of a post full of advice was a sign that the author was providing information but knew...
I’ve been thinking a lot about motivating people recently. What really motivates people to do things? Why do we make the choices we make? How do you convince people to do things when they’re unsure they want to do those things? Let me give you an example. Friends of mine are fostering dogs for local rescues. A neighbor of theirs is trying to start a rescue herself. The neighbor is...
The Wall Street Journal reports that some large retailers are scaling back their email marketing. Benefits of sending less mail include higher open rates, lower unsubscribe rates and an increase in sales. Since cutting back its volume, Nicole Miller has seen the rate at which customers “unsubscribe”—or request to stop receiving emails—drop, and the percentage of recipients who open...
I had the privilege to talk with a bunch of experts on the Only Influencers Blog Talk Radio show this morning. The discussion centered around the perceived conflict between Marketing and Delivery. The conversation was a good one, with a lot of different perspectives aired. I strongly recommend people who are interested in hearing multiple industry experts talking about email marketing and...
Those of us in the email space often have opinions about volume and frequency and opt-in and everything involved in email marketing. What we don’t always have is the luxury of receiving unsolicited feedback from recipients. Every once in a while I find a post online that is that unsolicited feedback from someone. Today a poster on reddit describes his experience with signing petitions and...
There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap. Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person...
In addition to posting some of my thoughts about how delivery and marketing have different and possible contradictory constraints, I asked folks on the Only Influencers list what they thought. They had some different perspectives, primarily being marketers. One person even welcomed me to the dark side. The general response from the marketing side of things appeared to be that ISPs need to stop...
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