The Whitelist

What counts as an email marketing result? Does that mean someone opened your email? Or bought something? Does that mean a click? Are there other email marketing results we would accept, some that aren’t as easy to measure? After all, open rates are easy to measure. So are click throughs. And we all like to measure the dollars made when an email results in a sale!
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Granite Carving

Dinner and drinks with Silverpop’s Loren McDonald tonight, fresh off the bus from the (huge) Atlanta airport in from SFO…  Got to catch up with LM and shoot the breeze, introduced him to a personal friend (old-time business colleague John Funchess) and JF got a crash course in email and social marketing (’share to social’ – nice branding by SP, though they are leaving it open for others to use).
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Today two of us ClickMail team members are at MarketSmart, the annual marketing conference put on by the Puget Sound chapter of the American Marketing Association. We’ve had great traffic at our booth and some wonderful conversations around email. What strikes me most though is how marketers are literally seeking us out. They’re either coming to us to ask very specific questions around email marketing, or in some cases coming up to us and saying “I know we should be using email more but we’re just not sure how.”

All of these questions just reinforce to me more how much confusion there is in the email marketing space in part because email is so easy to do. Huge caveat here: Email is so easy to do and that’s what makes it so easy to do it wrong. Companies are forging ahead with their email marketing campaigns but without really knowing what they’re doing, either strategically, technically or from a best practices standpoint.

That’s why it’s so important to make sure you have someone on your team–either on staff or an agency partner–who knows the email space: the ESPs, the ins and outs of digital reputations and authentication, best practices around html coding, etc. If you don’t have someone you consider a bona fide email marketing expert on your team, start looking around now for an email marketer to play that role. Because as with so much in the marketing world, it’s better to do email right than right away.