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Brain Buster Email Marketing The Marketeer

Direct Marketing, you know, Mailing People Stuff

I started doing direct mail in 1997, and as hard as it is to believe, this was before email was huge. This was during my time at DCI (remember that whole tax fraud thing – see Breaking Rocks). Direct Marketing (DM) was king of all that it surveyed, and those in the know learned from DM News. DM News is the New York Times of direct marketing, the I-Ching, the bible, insert large important document reference here.

I was elated to see an article today that lead off with a quote of mine. The funny part is that probably 99.9% of my friends and family (and probably you too, dear readers) don’t even know it exists, but to me it’s a great honor.

But you didn’t come here to listen to my blather, and fear not – you should go back and click to the article and read it, it’s excellent stuff. It touches upon the difficulty of selecting a control group, using Half Life (which was new to me, and I love it), segmentation, long term results, and getting statistically valid results.

It crystallized another point for me too – testing is not like experimenting because the test itself affects and taints future results. There are a bunch of other topics this naturally leads to, such as B2B vs. B2C, and how to find the optimum emailing frequency, but those are thoughts for another day.

Categories
Daily Life Email Marketing Podcasting The Marketeer

3 Important Things

  1. America is drowning in processed sugar and flour, Jason speaks the truth, notice the power of marketing in step 4.
  2. The world’s greatest marketing podcast is going to take over your brain, resistance is futile. Lots of good stuff on email marketing
  3. All that too much to take? Look at my soothing Flickr Photos
Categories
Brain Buster The Marketeer

Tales from the Chasm

Mad Marv sent me a link to this post discussing Crossing the Chasm. I’ve talked about the Chasm in many podcasts, the soundbite is that there’s a gap between the adoption of technology by geeks from adoption by the rest of the world.

I’ve found the Chasm to be very helpful because it bundles a lot of concepts such as targeting niches, creating an error-free user experience (ok, reasonably error free), and usability, that can help grow a business.

Here’s a big idea from the post:

The problem is that compared to a few years ago, the speed with which new technologies are coming to the market has increased dramatically. All these technologies are aimed at the early adopters. And they love it and they try it. But the question is what happens when your early adopters run off to play with a new great thing before you have a chance to take your technology mainstream?

For example, some people who used to blog regularly, blog less now because they discovered Twittering (microblogging). Or, early adopters who have discovered Second Life might not have as much time to spend on MySpace anymore.

And from the conclusion:

Early adopters are enticed by new things much more often today than 15 years ago. Expanding on how to retain the early adopters would be good thing to do in the next edition

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of patience reading analysis that becomes more academic than practical. It’s interesting how the comments go from bubblegum pop (Blue Ocean and The Tipping Point), to academic textbooks (Castells).

Here’s my cranky old man assessments:

  1. If the early adopters run off it’s time to put the office furniture up on Craig’s list. You’re done.
  2. Don’t confuse social apps like MySpace with useful technologies, buzz and crowds are different from products that are sold to customers.
  3. You get your customers one at a time, this is a mindset you need to use to balance your plans for bridging the Chasm if you want to continue to make payroll.
  4. In my experience the VP of Sales gets the axe before Marketing, but your mileage may vary.

I’m off to record Marketing Over Coffee now. Marv, thanks for getting my brain warmed up!

Categories
Daily Life

BlogDay, August 31: 5 blogs to check out

Doug tagged me for BlogDay, so here goes:

Blog Day 2007First, the rules established by Jeff:

1. List five Blogs that you find interesting and if you can tell, include the city/country where they are from.
2. Identify five Bloggers to tag to join in this game with you. I recommend emailing the bloggers you tag to give them a heads up of you tagging them.
3. Use the tag: BlogDay2007 in your blog post.
4. (Optionally): Contact the owners of the blogs you shared as your “blogs to take a look at.”

A Lotta People Don’t Know That – This guy blogs about the idiot in the cube next to him

Retro-Remixes – 80’s tunes you can’t find

Mike Champion – My arch enemy, I am forced to track his every move

All Eyes on Jenny – With Sex and the City no longer on HBO, at least there’s something good to read, and it’s even real.

DS Fanboy – Nerd Alert.

The reading lists I want to see (I tag you) – Dr. Penn, Mike, Jenny, Barbara, and Clarence

Categories
Email Marketing

Email Deliverability

This is one of the sexiest topics a marketeer can work on. Just kidding.

But it is important. If you are doing any kind of mass email deliverability will become an issue sooner or later. In simple terms there are 4 points where an email can be blocked.

  1. The mail server itself can be blacklisted, at the ISP level all traffic can be denied for a specific IP address (these are named by numeric codes that look like this 123.23.54.12).
  2. Mail can be filtered and rejected through a spam filtering service before it hits an organizations mail server. The company I work for uses Postini which captures a lot of spam, but sometimes cages some of the ham too.
  3. There’s a pinch point at the corporate mail server. Your IS department may set up your mail system to reject everything from a specific IP address.
  4. The end user may set up filters to move your incoming mail to the trash, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Worse yet, they might mark you as spam causing you to be locked out further up the chain next time.

So, what do you do? The first thing to do is make sure you are managing expectations. Keep in mind that a good campaign will have around a 25% open rate and a 10% click through, so you are talking about 3 per 100 sent on a good day.

It’s very easy to test deliverability if your email system uses HTML messages to track opens. Keep in mind that if one person at a corporate location gets a message you can reasonably assume that you are it least getting past the first 3.

Resist the urge to mail yourself. This will work well in the beginning but as soon as you start having problems you are going to be the person trying to get yourself off a blacklist. Vendors that have hundreds of customers using their email services have established relationships with the ISPs that you don’t.

And for the love of God, if you are going to mail yourself, don’t use the same server as your regular corporate mail. There’s no faster path to the unemployment line than tanking email for your whole company because of a spam complaint.

Categories
Daily Life Podcasting

Where can I get a fake eyeball?

I’m back from another busy weekend. We were out in Western Mass and I’ll have some photos up on Flickr by tomorrow night.

If you want to get the story behind the fake eyeball and some other interesting and funny stuff, check out the latest M Show, which I must admit is a good one this week.

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

Whole Brain

No, that’s not where organic food zombies shop, but it is another half baked theory I have. While trying to find good Marketeers I’ve found an interview question that I like: Marketeers tend to fall into two camps: artistic or analytic. Which one are you?

The truth is you need both to be a great Marketeer, but the pendulum has swung hard to the analytical side in the past 10 years. Tomorrow on Marketing Over Coffee I’ll see if I can get some other traits of great Marketeers out of Mr. Penn.

In less serious news you can check out the Flickr photos of my vacation.

Categories
Daily Life Podcasting

Once upon returning home

Just hanging out at DTW getting ready to catch a flight home. We’ve been delayed 1 hour but given the stories I heard about delays over the weekend it sounds like we are not that bad off. The latest M Show is up with some live reports from the trip to Torch Lake. I think it’s better than last year but I still haven’t been able to catch the lightining in a bottle that I found during CigarCast 1.

We had a great time and I’ll be posting some photographs up on Flickr so you can see the lake. More when I get back to business  tomorrow.

Categories
Daily Life

Happy 40th Madman

Today is Mike’s 40th Birthday (more about Chicago Mike) and his wife sent me a letter saying that she was throwing a virtual party and everyone was encouraged to call, email, etc. For some unholy reason Mike actually follows a lot of this crap I churn out. I’m sure it’s because of the wisdom and charm of my co-hosts, and perhaps fond memories of cranky people in Boston.

I met Mike when I came back to Boston around 1997 and joined the Boston Junior Chamber of Commerce. The Jaycees are a civic organization that develops leadership in 21-40 year old young professionals. Serving with Chairman Mike on the board of directors was an invaluable experience that I could not get anywhere else.

All the best to you old man and see you next time you are in Boston!

Categories
Geek Stuff

Friday Night Fights, Round 2!

So I got lucky in round one, when checking out everyone’s posts it looked like free for all fighting, but after hearing from Bahlactus, the lead promoter himself, he’s going for more of a true boxing Friday night thing, making my HUGE metallic molar-rattling cross hit right on target.

I really had fun digging in and checking out all the writers out there, it’s great to find some people going beyond Wizard talking about what is big this week and can dig back deep into the archives to find stuff that’s STILL 25 CENTS! or even further back.

I’ve got a $5 starbucks card for the first comment that can tell me what happened to Daxam during the Great Darkness Saga.

Enough running my jaws, let’s rumble. Last week I got a kick of seeing Cap vs. Cap, shield to shield (which I can’t find now, link anyone?) and that reminded me of Peter David’s fantastic “Future Imperfect” (done with Perez I think?). Hulk is taking the shield slinging to the next level: