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. It was quite impressive, actually. Mostly because the pilots...
I so often talk about the failures of various email marketing programs that it’s only fair I mention when someone gets it right. We spent the past week with family on the east coast. Our flight back to the west coast was very, very early Sunday morning so I booked a night at the airport hotel. That way we could just stumble to the shuttle at some horrible hour and not worry about trying to...
A friend of mine sent me a copy of an email she received, asking if I’d ever heard of this particular sender. It seems a B2B lead generation company was sending her an email telling her AOL was blocking their mail and they had stopped delivery. All she needed to do was click a link to reactivate her subscription. The mail copy and the website spends an awful lot of time talking about how...
There has been a plethora of big brand companies doing stupid stuff with marketing recently. I can only figure it’s end of quarter and everyone is looking to pump up their numbers as fast as possible. I talked about Millenium hotels sending me with an utterly irrelevant ad earlier this week. @Yahoomail direct message spammed all their twitter followers with an ad for something related to...
I continually run into companies that don’t really have a goal or understanding of their email marketing program. They’ve never really asked questions about how they’re using email or even why email is the right answer. Lots of companies are also diving head first into email marketing or the social media craze without having thought about what their goals are and what they want...
An interesting look at what doesn’t work when marketing on Facebook.
Many online retailers assume that anyone making a purchase from them is a prime target for email marketing. THEY ARE OUR CUSTOMERS! Of course they want to get mail from us! Well. Maybe. But not always. Think about the person who shops online during the holidays. I visit a lot of places looking for gifts for other people. These aren’t places I’d normally shop for myself, and are not...
A few months ago I got email from Staff of Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont, to an addresses scraped off one of my websites. At the bottom it says: You are receiving this email because you have ordered from us, or emailed us in the past. We take your privacy seriously,and promise never to give your personal information to any other company. Most people probably wouldn’t know that for the...
Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time. In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes...
Having listened to the Facebook announcement this morning, I am even more convinced that emailpocalypse isn’t happening. Look, despite the fact that companies like Blue Sky Factory think that this means marketers are NEVER EVER going see the inside of an inbox again this isn’t the end of email marketing. Yes, Facebook email is a messaging platform that marketers are not going to have...
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