[thelist] <s>Spam</s> Marketing Email Return

Joel D Canfield joel at bizba6.com
Wed Oct 20 08:54:32 CDT 2010


On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Jack Timmons <codeacula at codeacula.com>wrote:

> Any assistance and/or "Quit whining, you sissy pansy" would be
> appreciate. Or directions to trusted resources.


If the Powers That Be are even slightly enlightened, they might
enjoy/benefit from "Permission Marketing" by Seth Godin (or your summary
thereof.) Since it earned him the position of VP of Marketing at Yahoo (back
when Yahoo was Google) it might carry weight with corporate suits looking
for validation.

I've rearranged his acronym, but he points out that all marketing must be
Personal, Anticipated, and Relevant. I've extended this to include that
Personal is the most critical, and that 'anticipated' and 'relevant' can be
fairly subjective if the message is personal enough.

Mass mailings, done frequently, quickly lose the 'personal' touch, making
'anticipated' and 'relevant' vital to avoiding being marked as spam.

Using an email service (MailChimp, perhaps? free and configurable and
trackable) will give you hard numbers on unsubs and spam flagging. If you
chart a few mailings and show a high coefficient of correlation between
frequency of mailing and increased negative response (and, if it's true, a
lack of correlation between frequency and increased positive response, i.e.
sales) then if you've got both common sense and hard numbers pointing toward
less frequent but more PAR communication, smart management will have reason
to listen.

It's the tap-dance of giving the suits empirical data to defend (in their
own minds, and to others) the commonsense human decision they'd love to be
allowed to make.

But, in the meantime, kwitcherwining, sissypants.

joel


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