Curation Revolution

You know, the place where you typically see no-reply@some-domain.com, or null@some-domain.com? Well, I hate that. If I'm getting an email, I want it to come from a human. Is that too much too ask?

Marty Note
This article is a fascinating and TRUE to my experience read. The section that talks about having a heart attack before pushing the send button is something I can relate to; nothing like emailing a mistake to a few thousand people to make you feel BAD and possibly be looking for a job (lol). I wrote a piece about this stress about a year ago:

http://www.atlanticbt.com/blog/email-marketing-is-live-amunition/

The other intelligent question is does email, as practiced, make sense? Email marketing was always our highest margin channel when I was a Director of Ecommerce, but open rates were terrible as noted in this piece.

Bulk Email Is Dead
If you are still blasting the same offer to your list I suggest stopping that now. Nothing will fatigue your list faster than sending middle of the offers to everyone. At the very least you should have new, returning, returning and have purchased, returning and have purchased a lot segments in your list.

Creating personas to define the characteristic archetypes in each segment is a great idea too. Read Managing Content Marketing by Roze and Pulizzi for more on how to create personas.

Mobile?
We are seeing curation of communication as one of mobile's most universal uses. Deleting emails on smart phones and tablets is often much easier and faster than on desktops and laptops. A large group of power users curate emails with their mobile devices. Email marketing just received a new hurdle - emails must look engaging on a small screen or tablet to move to a place customers are likely to actually buy (laptops and desktops). If your email looks bad on a mobile device your unsubscribe rate will double as open rates decline. Check your emails on mobile platforms. If they look horrible hire someone to fix your emails on mobile immediately.

Social?
I agree with the author "noreply@...." seem nasty in our one-to-one marketing present, but I also agree with the horror story he shares from trying to be personal with a large list. Perhaps one resolution is to pitch social as the place to share reactions, comments and ideas. As a Director of Ecommerce we learned the live address lesson the hard way. Live addresses, even generic mailboxes, will receive a lot of "unsubscribe" requests, so it can be dangerous to do use a live address. Miss those unsubscribe emails and before you know it you are in court.

Best idea is to build a "feedback" loop into Twitter. See how Zappos uses Twitter for the best practice.

As far as BFF or enemy? Neither since social seem antagonistic to some aspects of email marketing and complimentary to others. Jury is still out.

Read the attached article to shake up your email marketing process.

Via Mario Lanza