My Inbox is also my To-Do list. If there’s a message that is part of an important project it stays in the box until it gets done. This can be a great productivity booster – many times if I am unsure about the importance of a project I leave it in the inbox. If I don’t remember what it was about by the time it hits the bottom of the box (or if the original requestor...

I don’t know if any other industries use this phrase, but it’s very common in software to talk about “Eating Your Own Dogfood” – in other words: Using the products that you make. You’d think this is basic “support the home team” kind of thing, but it doesn’t always happen, and when the word gets out it is usually a big PR problem. Now you...

Unfortunately I have been fighting a cold this week so writing has been pushed to the back burner. The good news is that I now have a backlog of topics again! I did get Marketing Over Coffee out this week, which talks about email and Taguchi testing, among other things. I also got to catch a game at Fenway with Jose, and got some decent pics: Popularity: 1%...

This is the best marketing I have ever seen for an email company. The only downside to this is that if you don’t know Salesforce.com you won’t get all the jokes, otherwise, brilliant! Popularity: 1% [?]

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...

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

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. 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...

Lots of stuff going on this week, but I did want to take a second to reflect on the importance of always trying to improve marketing tactics, always getting as close to 1-to-1 communication as possible. I’ve purchased from 1-800-Flowers before, because (don’t tell my wife) I look at flowers as a commodity. Granted, I do know enough about Winston Flowers in Boston (the...

For the past couple of weeks it’s been all about the lists. List management is ultimately the blood supply of all your marketing efforts. Anyone doing direct marketing knows that the company usually kneels to the ultimate power of “the house list”. The best part of an organization that grows quickly is being able to farm the list management out to a database specialist. I...

What a drag it has been this last week. I’m still feeling run down but I’ve been getting better every day. I caught 4 innings of the Sox game over at Fenway last night with the lovely Carin thanks to a ticket hookup from E-413. On the book front: Email Marketing by the Numbers arrived today, I’ve got 4 blog post-sized entries about email marketing. To celebrate – off...