Guest Post: Your Problems Are Bigger Than You Think
6 May 2010
A few days ago, I was approached by a delivery consultant. Frustration abounded, and while this person didn’t need my assistance with anything, there was a need for someone to vent at for a few minutes. This person, whom we shall name “Gary” for the purposes of this post, agreed to write up a paraphrase…
I Can’t Give You What You Want
4 May 2010
Yesterday, I was talking with a potential client about engaging my services. The prospect asked for a guarantee of results with regard to a smallish blocking list, and left the telephone call unhappy because I would not do that. The reason that I, and indeed ANY email delivery consultant, cannot guarantee results seems obvious to…
The Problem Might Not Be What You Think
22 April 2010
Today is the second day on some lessons email marketers can apply from learning some basic emergency medicine. Today’s lesson deals with squeaky wheels, grease, and problem diagnosis. My sister-in-law is a nurse. She spent several years as a ER nurse and sometimes takes part in emergency preparedness drills at our local hospital. Once, a…
Can I Help You?
21 April 2010
I just finished an Emergency Medical Responder course. I’m not a paramedic, I’m not even an EMT, but I am now qualified to stop and give people help until those folks show up. As I reflect on the course, I see some parallels to email marketing. Over the next few days, I’ll be talking about…
When is a press release an advertisement?
3 March 2010
One of the first things I learned when I became a legal assistant is that there are rarely any pat answers. A blanket assertion is almost always wrong. (Did you see the attorney-like weasel wording there?) There has been an interesting discussion on Twitter today regarding a February Techcrunch post (and wow is a half…
“The recession has forced us to drop this etiquette.”
22 February 2010
semantics definition se·man·tics (-tiks) noun the branch of linguistics concerned with the nature, the structure, and the development and changes of the meanings of speech forms, or with contextual meaning semiotics the branch of semiotics dealing with relationships of signs and symbols to the things to which they refer, or with referential meaning the relationships…
The Eleventh Commandment
3 February 2010
When you do business with a government agency, at just about any level, you surrender a certain amount of privacy. Whatever you give to the agency is likely going to be subject to so-called “sunshine” laws that go by names like “Freedom of Information” or “Freedom of Access.” Recently, some sportsmen have discovered this the hard…
When is transactional mail not transactional anymore?
2 December 2009
An interesting question came across my desk this morning. Here’s the request from someone we’ll call “Joe”: I need some help understanding CAN-SPAM requirements. I represent a membership organization. From time to time, we send marketing message to our members and, of course, some of the unsubscribe from those messages. Now we are getting to…
The hard truth about email
30 November 2009
Many clients expect email to be sort of an automatic thing. The thinking is “I should hit ‘Send’ and it should arrive within moments.” So, sometimes those of us who work in email hear comments like the following: I understand that these delays may not be your fault, but we can’t have delays. and: It’s…