A couple of weeks ago I had an epiphany an managing segmentation. I had been giving a lot of thought to one-to-one marketing vs. things like personas and how to go from the impressive strategy, to actually making it work as far as day to day logistics. I’ve been doing a lot of work with Manticore as far as email tracks and delivering relevant content, but the revelation I had was that...

Marketing Over Coffee has released a number of eBooks, and the latest covers email. It’s meant to work as a primer, introducing you to key concepts that you need to get started (White Belt tactics), ramping up to things like testing (Black Belt), and then going all the way out to Taguchi Testing and more advanced concepts. Chris has done the heavy lifting on the previous books, so...

David Meerman Scott wrote about his experience with an Email from American Airlines. Do check out that post first, but if you are too lazy to, the short version is he’s asking why he was sent an offer to buy 2,000 more miles to maybe use for a family trip when he has a quarter million in the bank and can already take them First Class anywhere in the world. He asked “What can we...

Things have been a bit slow here at the blog, that’s because all the work lately has been behind the scenes. Finally the time has come, a lot of stuff is shipping this week. In fact all 3 of the major projects from the past 3 months have all come down to Tuesday. At work we had a major product launch, that’s been eating up a ton of time, and just for fun let’s throw in the...

I have been writing for the past two weeks, it’s just that none of it has made it here. I’ve got about 20 pages of email best practices that’s coming together for an eBook. That and getting a roof fixed, and continuing my pledge to work on actual projects including a top secret photo project and music too! Here’s to being busy, I hope all is well with you. Popularity:

I had a Marketing Over Coffee listener ask me about using Manticore (Email, web analytic, demand generation) with GoToWebinar (Online meetings). I thought that this was too much “Inside Baseball” even for MOC, but it fits here. Do you typically send out your webinar invitations as part of a Manticore Demand Booster Process? It gets sort of tricky because once someone uses the...

An email newsletter is a challenging project, probably the most underrated from my experience. Everyone is under the impression that they are easy to do, and the reality is that it’s easy to a crummy one. An excellent and productive newsletter is a ton of work. If you don’t have an email newsletter and you’d like to get a look at what your to-do list will be after...

Ok, I’ve been getting flack for not having enough marketing stuff… so here’s some Excel Judo for you to work on. You have a list of 8,000 contacts in excel, you need to de-dupe them (remove the duplicates). Here’s a quick way to clean up the majority of them: Sort by email address In the first open column create an “IF” statement (click the f(x) button...

I’ve been reviewing stats from MarketingSherpa’s latest Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. It’s easy to get distracted by all the people in social media saying that email is dead and a thing of the past, but this survey of all the movers and shakers in the industry says otherwise. And I agree, although no longer the darling, both email and 30 second spots do get in front of a...

Jason sent in a comment on a prior post discussing deliverability asking about web auto responders. This is a distinction that is important if you are not aware of your IT infrastructure – the mail that gets generated when someone fills out a form on your site may be coming from a different place than your bulk email. This means that you may get differing deliverability rates, and may...