Even The Experts Get It Wrong Sometimes

We have all seen an email, offline DM piece, or other form of marketing that includes an error. In fact, most if not all of us have been responsible for a piece that contains an error at one time or another. So when I opened a piece from the UK DMA last night that was addressed to "Mr. Test TEST" and personalised "Dear Test," I let out that sort of over excited laugh that comes from the joy of knowing that I was not responsible for this offering to the marketing Gods.





This is not meant to name and shame; it is meant to commiserate. It is also meant as a reminder to us all to carefully check every aspect of a piece at least TWICE before hitting the send button.

Places I Will Be

The spring conference season is upon us but unfortunately, the credit crunch means that I will be staying close to home. No trips to the States or the Continent this season unless someone is looking to sponsor me. I would be happy to wear your logo while I wax lyrical about the email or digital topic of your choice.

As a free trip to Florida seems unlikely, these are the events I will be checking out over the next couple of months.

I will be hanging out on the dotDigital Group stand (E6065) at Internet World. If you find yourself in the lovely confines of Earl's Court in late April, stop by for a chat.

As you know I am not a morning person, so I am not one to usually promote an 8 AM start, especially on a Friday. The DMA Email Marketing Council is holding its first Breakfast Briefing on 12 june and this will be worth getting out of bed early. They have lined up:

• James Thurlow, Manager, EU Communication Products, Yahoo!
• Ben Isaacson, Privacy & Compliance Leader, CIPP, Experian CheetahMail
• George Bilbrey, President, Return Path Inc.

All hosted by Jonathon Burston of CACI. If these guys cannot improve your deliverability - nobody can.

I am also very excited to be working with the DMA and the good folks at Revolution Events on the upcoming Inbox/Outbox. I am back again in the Lunchtime Keynote spot on both days at 2 PM. This is the only event I know of that covers everything email from the latest archival and storage solutions to an update from the Information Commissioner's Office. Please plan to come to the New Connaught Rooms on at least one of the days for my talk. They always put me in a really big room which looks a bit lame if it is not full.

I will try to keep the events section of The Email Practice up to date and if you know of an event worth checking out, drop me a line. In the meantime, I hope to see you on the circuit.

Victorian Technology in the Information Age

I had one of those moments this morning where the technology from two eras collides with interesting effect. With the rapid development in technology over the past twenty years, eras are typically defined by weeks or months, but in my case it is an example of how a Victorian era figure adopted 'modern' technology to change the world and how a company rooted in its Victorian history just doesn't get the Web 2.0 world.

My father sent me this fantastic book called Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War by Tom Wheeler. The American Civil War has been called the first modern war because of three technological advances that came into play in the years preceding the conflict:

• Rifling made the weapons more accurate at long range
• The railroad extended the battlefield by facilitating rapid reinforcement from longer distances
• The telegraph allowed political leaders to be in near real time contact with the battlefield
  

The author's basic argument is that whichever side made the best use of these "game changers" would have a hand in the conflict. In fact, you can see this in the early stages of the war when the South made great use of both the railroad and the longer range weapons while the North's generals struggled to cope with these changes. The book then goes on to discuss in detail how Lincoln became an early adopter of the telegraph and used it to be the first political leader to be able to project his leadership onto the battlefield and ultimately change the face of the conflict.

In comparison, National Rail here in the UK is using Victorian thinking the Web 2.0 world. Anybody who has ever read Sherlock Holmes knows that you once could set your watch by the trains in the UK. That may have been true in the Victorian era but it is certainly fiction today.

To their credit, National Rail has embraced modern communications tools and provides a wide array of channels through which I can find out how late my train will be. They have seemed to have lost the plot however, with their decision to eliminated all competition on the iPhone platform by cutting off their live data feeds to both paid for and free apps and replace these with their own app, which costs £4.99.

As you can imagine this has not gone down well with the iPhone community. Most of the comments and feedback have been about monopolies and having to pay for an application that is no better than the popular MyRail Lite, which was free. Whilst I feel their pain, I think this is a great example of a brand that does not get the world in which we all now live.

They have approached this from the "information is power" school of thought which is an old and dying paradigm. In the Web 2.0 world, value add is king, so a better approach would have been to come up with a clever way to add more value than the other tools and offer it for free. This could then be monetised by add revenue, a paid for version with advanced features, etc. Alternatively, they could have used this to build some good will with a nation that is sick of its Victorian rail network.

In fact, their current strategy could doubly backfire because this morning I was not able to access the real time departure information that I had paid for, so while my train was unusually on-time, Network Rail still added stress to my morning.

Why Is Everybody Out to Get Email?

This has been sitting in my "must blog about this folder" (otherwise known as the place where rants go to die) since last week, but Dela Quist's excellent post and its repost stole most of my thunder, but that got me to thinking, "Why is everybody out to kill email?"

I know what your thinking. Oh boy, Skip has gone round the paranoid conspiracy theory bend, but I would argue that just because you are paranoid does not mean that everybody is not out to get you.

In the nine years that I have been in email, we have been bombarded with the "next email killer", which were in order of appearance:

1. Mobile (SMS)
2. RSS
3. Mobile again (WAP)
4. Social Networking
5. Mobile yet again (going for third time lucky with 3G devices)
6. Twitter (really?)

What did email ever do to these guys. I could totally see it if the above the line or direct marketers were gunning for email but you will notice that all of these channels are so called new media.

I am a big fan of the concept that a rising tide lifts all boats. Instead of thinking that we should be stealing usage (read as budget) from each other we should be working together to create marketing programs that deliver messages to consumers that they find relevant using a channel that is both appropriate to the message and convenient for them.

Looking at these key components in a bit more detail:

• Relevant - I defy any email marketer to speak about the channel for more than five minutes without using this word. The social network proponents would argue that something posted by one of my friends will be relevant to me. To them I point out that while he was a very charming character, would you pop around to Hannibal Lecter's house for dinner?
• Appropriate - Even though it might be legal in some countries. A text message is not the best way to ask your missus for a divorce.
• Convenient - My iPhone is always with me and I would be happy to begin a dialogue with a car company where they collect my details using the mobile channel and them move the conversation to a channel where I can get the details on the car more easily (such as email followed by web).
  

In this economy cooperation will serve us all better then competition. In the immortal but less quoted words of Rodney King, "Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it."

Seeing the C-Level

In the last week I have read two media post articles which encourage me to get to know the C-level better. The first explained how the CIO would be able to really help me improve my email program. The second encouraged me to get to know the CFO better. The theme that seems to be emerging here is one that has been an issue for basically ever. Marketers need to do a better job of translating their activity and spend into something that the C's understand. We spend a lot of time talking about how to communicate to customers using language that resonates with them - maybe we should apply the same techniques internally.

Oh The Irony

I received this email today from a PR agency. The email was about how PR and marketing communications need to change away from their traditional channels and embrace new channels like social networks. The email had no links above the fold and read very much like a blog post.

2009 Annual National Client Email Marketing Report

Denise Cox did such a good job describing this that I thought I would copy her text (below) or you can go to see the original post.

"I love email marketing stats, in particular european and/or UK specific stats - which can be pretty thin on the ground. If you are a UK marketer, please consider participating in the 2009 Annual National Client Email Marketing Report so the results will reflect one of the most up to date resources for UK email marketing research. (Survey link)

About: The National Client Email Marketing Survey is an initiative undertaken by the DMA UK’s Email Marketing Council. It’s designed to complement the National Email Benchmarking Report, which surveys the Email Service Providers (ESPs). The Client Email Marketing Survey asks client marketers to provide their answers to a mixture of response rate data, as well as attitudinal questions. The reports are produced on a quarterly basis. (Executive brief for 2006, Access to all past reports - free for members, fee for non-members.)

Survey guidelines: Where a % is asked for, please enter numeric values only. If you do not know the answer, please leave blank.

Taking the Survey: Participants will receive a complimentary copy of the survey results; insert your email address in the first box to receive the report when it is issued. (Survey link) Survey closes 29 January."