I have not posted anything on this site for awhile as I have been in a period of transition in my life. After 7 1/2 great years at Quest Software, I decided to leave for bigger and better challenges. I decided to join Sears Holdings as the Manager of Email Marketing Transformation and therefore, I have decided to slowly phase out this blog and start a new one dedicated to email marketing.
I will of course keep this one open for as long as people want but will start to post most of my entries a The Scrappy Email Marketer. Please visit my new blog anytime and I look forward to another exciting journey with you.
Marc Kline has a great post on ways to optimize the landing pages. What I took from this post was the fact that you should not only check your links but check the landing page. I will take it one step further than that. You need to experience what the user experiences. Get the email, click the links and do a desired action. How easy was it for you to order the item? What was your experience like in going through the order and what sort of response or “love” did you get after it was placed. Bottom line is..the email can get folks there, but if you have no idea what they are going thru once they get there, the email wont make a difference.
I am still blocked from collecting any feeds from Technorati and STILL cannot access their site. I have contacted their support twice and no response. I had an individual contact me as a result of my blog postings about Technorati and still nothing. I was able to get to their site yesterday, but now its same old……403 forbidden error.
If you are a blogger or a person of influence in the blogosphere, I urge you to take note of all my postings about them and rally behind me to see if we can get Technorati to perhaps change their ways of blocking people and customer service.
I have been reading Douglas Karr’s blog for awhile now and he has a really good post on why go with an ASP. He provides a great explanation in his post and its something you should definitely read about if you are considering this move.
Recently, I signed up at an online retailer as an experiment into their email practices. After finding the spot on their site to subscribe, I was taken to a login screen, where I had to create and account, with my full name and postal address. I wasn’t asked my email preferences or any profiling information, but I had to create an account in order to get their emails. Ok. So beyond the frustration of setting up an account (it was a single opt in), I never received a “thank you” email for signing up to their site.
1 week went by. Nothing.
9 days went by. Nothing. So I logged back into their site to see if I indeed went thru their process right and low and behold, everything was fine.
Day 10. First email from them.
Here is what is wrong. I SIGNED UP TO GET EMAIL. THEY ARE A MAJOR ONLINE RETAILER….and I had to wait 10 days to get an email?! Heck at one of their competitors, I signed up and within 2 days I received their latest pitch. In addition, on their competitors site, I was able to set my preferences and chose from a variety of options to receive some other emails. At another competitor, I was just asked for my email address and was given the option to creating an account and was able to chose my preference of HTML or TEXT. I got a fairly decent “thank you” and am still waiting for my email. (I just did it today…just to see)
THE POINT IS: If you are a retailer trying to sell me stuff, make it easy, ask for my preferences (and not my postal), send me a decent “thank you email” and send me email (heck even if its last weeks mailing) to get my whet my appetite. Start our relationship showing that you care and not leave me hanging for 10 days, hell I almost forgot about you.
Wow…talk about viral. Tide has hit a home run here for sure. At mytalkingstain.com you get to create your own talking stain video and have a bunch of downloads. Guess it does not hurt that they ran their $2.7 million dollar spot at a good point in the game. As soon as I saw it, I said to myself…”this will stick” “what viral potential”.
So with out further adieu…I give you the one and the only……”The Scrappy Software Marketer” as THE talking stain. Look closely…
Unless you live in a cave, one of the hottest trends around these days is video. I have long talked about sending video in email but understand the limitations of rendering and blocking etc. However today, I am going to conduct a series of experiments unbeknown-st to some of my peeps in the organization about the delivery of video in emails. If my experiments work, I will start to do some testing with a group with my organization that seems keen to being the testing bed/guinea pigs of new and exciting things. In addition, if I am successful, it might change the way alot of us think about video in emails
I recently wrote a strategy brief for my current organization on recent email marketing trends and issues facing email marketers. In it, I discussed a few of the most prevalent issues and offered up solutions for those vexing problems. I was on a call yesterday with someone in my organization who said that he read my document and that it contradicted itself on whether or not to use images or mastheads within email.
I think what some people fail to realize is that email marketing is both an art and a science and there is no generally acceptable practice or method by which you should engage your users in email marketing. Each piece of email is unique to audience and depending upon your audience and message, will determine whether or not you use images within a particular piece.
However, one of the things that I do caution against is the use of image laden emails with calls to actions embedded in your image or the use of images as a primary driver for your email. I am strictly speaking about B2B email as this might not apply if you are selling toasters online in the B2C area. Often, I run across people who are more hung up on moving the masthead image over a 1/4 of an inch to fit in that last bit of text thinking its going to drive ROI. I also run across people who will wait weeks for a custom image to be made and embedded into the email, but give little thought as to their message content and whether or not its compelling enough to drive actions.
Bottom line: Be smart about the use of images in your email. Worry more about the content and the compelling drivers to action in the email and worry more about nurturing the user and establishing a healthy long term relationship with them as opposed to choosing red or green for that must have background image of the hotel your seminar is at.
I receive alot of email. I also receive alot of spam. Here are some of the worst subjects I have received in the recent days. Would love to know yours.
Milkshake Solid Chocolates Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:04:42 +1200 Toilet
Ashamed of your size!
Keep her on it all night..
i êîðïîðàòèâíàÿ èíòåãðèðîâàííàÿ ëîãèñòèêà (my personal favorite)
There was a post by Erick over at TechCrunch today talking about a company called Visible Measures. Visible Measures offers data-collection software to capture every play, pause, rewind, and e-mail-to-a-friend button that viewers click on while watching videos on a given site.
As you know video is a hot thing and for us marketers we are always interested in engagement of our stuff. Let me know your thoughts if you have tried this thing out.
I am attending a training session today and tomorrow for one of our sales group on some of our most important products. I think its great for a software marketer to not only understand the products that their company has, but to more importantly hear from the sales folks who are in the trenches selling the stuff. Alot of great ideas can be spawned from these folks about creative ways to market or even message the product for them.
While I don’t have a ton of opportunities to do this sort of thing, I find it refreshing and energizing to sit in the back of the room as the “token marketing guy” to glob ideas from these folks.
If you don’t talk with sales people in your marketing role and try understand their pain or issues in selling as well as the folks that they sell too, you are missing out and I encourage you to get to know “your other customer”
ExactTarget has a great white paper out on trends for email marketing in 2008. 2 of the trends that interest me the most are #3 - The birth of the Marketing Gadget (widgets for you Mac Heads) and Trend #8 Rendering (which mostly deals with mobile email marketing)
While my organization is very far from even thinking about Trend #3, Trend #8 is an interesting one and I am about to put things into place in order ensure we are doing the best we can with mobile devices. Since there is no clear cut standard on mobile email marketing as of yet, it will be interesting to see how this will evolve in the coming 18 months.
This white paper is one of the best white papers I have read in the last 6 months or so as it does provide some valuable insight into what professional email marketers can do to increase success in the marketplace. Since organizations rely heavily on email marketing these days, this is a cant miss opportunity for you to at least try to implement some best practices discussed in this paper.
I am blocked again (no feeds and I cannot get to their site), this is the third time in less than a year and the 2nd time in last 30 days. C’mon Technorati, get your act together. I am not a spammer or doing something illegal, I simply have alot of feeds and monitor a bunch of stuff.
As most of you know, I don’t do alot of promotion on my blog, but thought it might be prudent given the fact that this is a really neat event that we have coming up. As most of you know, I work for Quest Software and on February 6th, we are having a Notes to Exchange Migration Virtual Conference. Its completely online and geared to those folks who are interested in moving from Lotus Notes to Exchange and Sharepoint.
I think virtual conferences or trade shows are great since you can do it from the comfort of your desk and really have no “sales” interaction which on some level is a good thing. Anyway if you or someone you know is interested in attending, I would encourage you to register and attend this great event. As always, let me know if you have any questions.
Do you remember your first time at learning something new. Perhaps there was confusion or elation. For example, I will never forget my first time I learned what email was. My father explained it to me with something like this. “Yes. There is thing called electronic email. You type out your message and then send it off and people. It goes around the world and then people get it in their mailbox and read it” I was like whoa….that is cool. I remember asking something to this effect “What if I wanted to send something to everyone who had a mailbox? Man…that would be cool” (early email marketing opportunity)
What is my point you ask. My point is this….sometimes a new concept or idea can be overwhelming or frustrating to some. To others, they see it as an opportunity. However someone sees a new idea, be patient and be sure you explain it fully. Don’t be afraid to try new things and try something new. Often the path of resistance is a opportunity to win and win big.
Although a bit basic for experienced email marketers, those of you just starting out or wanting a refresher in some of the basics, EMMA has a good post of things to not do in email marketing.
Last night I attended a dinner with my wifes company and something strange happened. We used valet to park our car which was great because it was like 15 degrees outside, windy and kinda snowy….basically bitterly cold and miserable. At the end of the night we went outside to shiver and wait for the valet to bring us our car. When we got in, the car was warm and the heated seats were on. Even though we didn’t have a long way to go home, it was a surprise.
The valet went out of his way to ensure we were warm from the moment we got in the car and it was in my opinion above the call of duty.
When was the last time you went out of your way to understand your customers and give them something that would surprise them?
Instead of spewing your message from the inside out, when was the last time you marketed from the outside in?
Little things go along way with people. Customers or potential customers notice things that you might not have thought of.
Do this right now. Stop. Look around and listen. Find one thing different to do today that your customers would not expect….
I saw a post on Digg today about old computer ad’s. It was quite funny, but I decided to look for a site with a few more ad’s than that post. Here is a great site which has some really old but good computer ad’s. I love the Radio Shack ones with Isaac Asimov.
