My birthday was last Saturday and for my birthday I got a copy of Beatles Rock Band for the Wii. One of the songs on that disc is “I’m Looking Through You”1 from the Rubber Soul album.
In 1965, Paul McCartney was engaged to Jane Asher, but he wasn’t that happy in his relationship. That frustration gave rise to this song. And as I listened to the lyrics, I realized marketers often forget that relationships are not forever.
Not only that but there are powerful messages in this song for marketers. Consider the following lyrics:
Your lips are moving,
I cannot hear.
Your voice is soothing,
But the words aren’t clear.
Things will cool at a certain point in your relationship, and the recipient won’t be responsive anymore. They’ll see your lips moving (your mail in their mail readers), but they won’t listen anymore. If your lips keep moving, they’ll eventually get your mail blocked (either by their filters or by their ISP), and then they will truly no longer be able to hear you anymore.
You’re thinking of me,
The same old way.
You were above me.
But not today.The only difference,
Is you’re down there.
I’m looking through you,
And you’re nowhere.
What used to work doesn’t work anymore. Marketing-related blogs are full of posts on how email marketing isn’t the same as paper marketing. But still, even today, many marketers are looking at email recipients “the same old way,” thinking that they are above their captive recipients, even though that’s no longer the case. The customer is king in ways that they never were before.
Not only that, but ISPs are paying more and more attention to what your recipients are doing. Permission and authentication alone are no longer good enough. Now, engagement is the rising star. If you aren’t keeping your recipients engaged, they’ll be looking through you, but you’ll be nowhere.
It’s time to leave the past behind and understand that things aren’t the same anymore, and your approach has to be as different as the times in which you live. Otherwise, your recipients will be singing this song — to you.
Footnotes
- The Beatles, I’m Looking Through You, (1965). ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
