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...
Give Recipients Options
A few years ago I subscribed to a financial website that emails out articles about investing as well as a recap of your investments. For the first few months I enjoyed reading these emails but as time went on, I found them less valuable and receiving them every other day they turned into a burden to clean up and deal with. My options were to either unsubscribe or I could create a rule in Outlook...
Mini Cooper and their email oops
I haven’t been able to track down any information about what happened, but it seems MINI USA had a major oops in their email marketing recently. So much so that they’re sending out apologies by snail mail. Pictures of the apology package appeared on Reddit earlier this week, and include a chocolate rose, some duct tape and a SPAM can stress reliever. It’s a great example of a...
Frequency and Relevance: Insight from Actual Recipients
Last night, the email practices of Facebook, Verizon and LinkedIn sparked something of a discussion on IRC. Rather than trying to summarize into a business language friendly post I thought I’d share the whole thing. Warning: Includes strong language and graphic descriptions of human on salesman violence. Huey: I may have just arrived at a Laura guest blog post. Huey: About...
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...
Thinking of increasing email frequency for the holidays?
Then you have to read this post by Dayne Shuda on EmailCritic. How to handle Email Frequency During the Busy Holiday Season.
Emails that make you smile
This summer’s non-work project for me has been training for a 5K run with Fleet Feet in Menlo Park. As part of the training programs we get weekly emails from the store on Monday. As I was reading through today’s email, I found myself smiling and happy. Lisa, who is one of the store owners and writes the emails, is just so happy and bouncy and thrilled to share her love of running and...
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...
Mailing old addresses: 5 questions to ask first
James asked the question on twitter: If you haven’t mailed an address in 5-10 yrs, would you include it in a re-engagement mail? A number of people responded that addresses that old should not be mailed. I think the answer is more complex than can be handled in 140 characters. Five to ten years is a very long time. Think about what you were doing 10 years ago. It’s easy right now, 10...
Quote of the day
Still working on the Gmail document. I got a little stuck today writing it, and have put it aside to try and work through the stuck place. There was a very long discussion on Only Influencers today about frequency and un-engaged recipients. Lots of interesting opinions and a lot of people strongly welded to their points of view. One of the best comments came from John Caldwell, though. Pummeling...