Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

ExactTarget Press

I don't normally tout press coverage here, but I'm really excited about two recent stories. 

The first is an interesting piece by Karen Bannan of B2B on email as a key component to Channel Marketing.  You can read the story here....

The other is a story in Peppers & Roger's 1to1 Magazine.  (sort of the Rolling Stone of we 1to1 deciples) :-)

Crafting a Marketing Masterpiece -  Chris Baggott likes live music and the convenience of ordering tickets online, which is why Ticketmaster emails him a list of concerts each week. But he stopped opening the emails months ago. “They should know what kind of music I like,” says Baggott, who as chief marketing officer of ExactTarget, knows a bit about custom email. “Yet the emails they send me are completely irrelevant.” Enter JamBase, a concert-ticketing and music information site with a tour-date search engine that earned Baggott’s loyalty by sending him less frequent, more relevant emails.

You have to register to see it, but by registering you get a free subscription to their monthy print Magazine as well.

Is a 'Newsletter' Relevant?

I'm having this discussion with my friend Sharon Long Baerny.  She is pictured here, and is the principle behind
We Know Words (www.weknowwords.com)

Sharon's company is very successful in helping organizations with the writing and publishing of their email newsletters.  Our debate is over the appropriateness of the term 'newsletter'.   I thought I would share my thoughts on the subject here:

What I don’t’ like about the term 'newsletter' basically comes down to three things:

It implies batching.  In the old days of print, we had things we wanted to share but because of the limitations of paper, printing, postage, we were forced to batch all this stuff together and send it out as a quarterly or monthly 'newsletter’.   Well guess what?  Email doesn’t have that limitation so you don’t need to adhere to the historic concept of ‘newsletter’.   

Think about the freedom of that.  Got something to share?  Share it.   Don’t have anything to say?  Keep still (rather than distribute junk just because it happens to be the 15^th of the month)

Which brings me to point two:   Subscriber Focus.   The term newsletter implies that everyone gets the same information.  Again, this is a legacy of the print worlds limitations.  We batched in the old days, remember?   The fact is that you have things to share that may be appropriate and interesting to some but not to others.  Email takes off those shackles.  Now you have the ability to only share the right content with the right audience.

Point Three gets me to the concept of dialog.  I often think that one of the most underappreciated aspects of email is the ability to actually engage in conversations with individuals.   This is a revolution that was never possible with paper ‘newsletters’.   With the exception of a few letters to the editor, there was no way to actually engage your subscribers in a real dialog.    People who think of their publications as simply a replacement for their paper ‘newsletter’ really miss this opportunity to take advantage of real human to human engagement.

So I’m officially making a commitment to begin a campaign (another term from the old world I can’t stand) to erase the term ‘newsletter’ and replace it with dialog…or something J

Healthcare Email

I wanted to share this article from Marketing Sherpa.  Some pretty good practices...although I would advise more personalization :-)

Read it here....