Brick and mortar stores have tried to use feedback as a means of driving customer engagement for a while. Anyone who’s shopped at a big chain here in the US knows what I mean. You buy a pack of gum and end up with a 2 foot long receipt. At the bottom of the receipt there is a URL and bar code. The cashier circles the bar code and cheerfully tells you to go online and tell corporate about...
The perfect email
More and more I’m moving away from consulting on technical setup issues as the solution to delivery problems. Delivery is not about the technical perfection of a message. Spammers get the technical right all the time. No, instead, delivery is about sending messages the user wants. While looking for something on the blog I found an old post from 2011 that’s still relevant today. In...
Email Marketing as News?
This afternoon I got mail. It’s clearly meant to be a tie-in to something. But, the thing is, I don’t know what.
That’s the problem with contextual marketing, you never really know if your target will understand the context.
Content is the new volume!
I’m having a great time here at #EEC16. Today is my visit and go to sessions day, since tomorrow I’m speaking at 2 different sessions. I was lucky enough to get into the Customer Experience session presented by Carey Kegel of SmartPak and Loren McDonald of IBM Marketing Cloud. It was an interesting session. If you don’t know, SmartPak is a brand focused on selling horse tack and...
Email marketing not dead yet
If Forrester research is to be believe, email marketing is feeling better. In fact, it seems email marketing is more effective than ever. Researchers at Forrester have found that attitudes to emails from brands are actually becoming more positive, despite the fact that most people tend to write them off as annoying “spam.” Business Insider attributes much of this change to the...
Is Spamhaus still relevant?
Today’s Wednesday question comes from a recent discussion on the Only Influencers mailing list. One of the participants asked “Is Spamhaus relevant and necessary? Are they willing to work with marketers?” I think this is an interesting question for a lot of reasons. One is because there’s such a broad range of opinions about Spamhaus and almost none of them are ambivalent...
Mail.app outs lazy marketers
The default mail client on OS X is Mail.app. In recent versions it does it’s best to bundle threads of email together to make it easier for you to keep track of conversations via email – they appear in the list of messages as a single entry with a badge showing the number of messages in that thread. There are standard ways to track mail threads, but they sometimes get broken by...
Relevant and timely marketing
What better time to advertise pizza specials than at 2:30 pm on a Friday afternoon? Either my local pizza joint is doing sophisticated tracking (hrmmm… these people often order pizza on the weekend, email on Friday) or I’m just smack dab in the middle of their average demographic. In either case, advertising pizza on a Friday afternoon strikes me as the epitome of timely, relevant...
Court rules blogger is not a journalist
Last week a federal judge ruled a blogger, Crystal Cox, was not a journalist and not subject to first amendment protections. I haven’t been following the case very closely, but was a little concerned about the precedent and the liability for people like me who blog. Reading some of the articles on the case, though, I’m less worried. This isn’t a blogger making some statements...
About that Junk Folder
I use a pretty standard mail filtering setup – a fairly vanilla SpamAssassin setup on the front end, combined with naive bayesian content filters in my mail client. So I don’t reject any mail, it just ends up in one of my inboxes or a junk folder. And I have a mix of normal consumer mail – facebook, twitter, lots of commercial newsletters, mail from friends and colleagues and...