Preface: So Kyle tells me its been a month since I’ve posted.  I’ll be honest - between conferences/live blogging, guest bloggers/contests and new writers, I’ve kind of been sitting back and letting the madness settle.  But to make up for it, here’s a nice little 1,000 word post on email marketing that I’m sure no one will read all the way through.  Enjoy!

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Last week at Stamats, I was involved in more than a few sidelines conversations about becoming a higher ed blogger.  Some people felt intimidated, as if they didn’t have anything valuable to add to the conversation.  Others were concerned about backlash from their institutions if other employees (or even worse, their bosses) found out about their publishing.

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One week from today, the 2008 Presidential election will finally come to a close.  No matter who you vote for, it’s been a campaign of milestones.  As an e-marketer, the most fascinating to me has been watching all of the emails coming out from either side.  Comparing the two makes it clear why Obama has raised an unprecedented amount of money utilizing an aggressive strategy, while the McCain campaign has floundered by not really “getting” the medium.  

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Why do email marketing? Mark Brownlow’s post on of that title on Email Marketing Reports presents an excellent argument about why email marketing is still relevant, despite all the claims of its death.  Here are the highlights:  Read the rest of this entry »

Are you live blogging HighEduWeb? Leave a comment and I’ll add your posts!

Follow it Live on Twitter »

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In my Five Commandments of Email Marketing, I argue that timeliness is one of the key components of sending effective email.  Hitting your user at the right time is one of the key elements in converting them from opening your message to taking your call-to-action.  Barack Obama is great at this - many of his messages are triggered by a specific milestone in the campaign, whether that be the last day of the fiscal reporting period, the convention, or a statement made by his opponent that he feels it necessary to respond to.  It gives it that extra sense of urgency that results in a more compelling emotional connection to the message (and subsequently you opening your wallet and giving him money!).  

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Yesterday, I received an email from MoveOn.org that merged the name of the town I live in into the subject line.  I’ll admit, it got my attention, as it was the first email I can recall seeing with this type of customization.  But it didn’t necessarily catch my attention in a good way - I thought it came off as way too spam-like and it reminded me of a few years ago when it became the craze to merge the first name of a recipient into the subject line of a message.

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I breezed through a bunch of marketing books this weekend, but the one that really stood out as useful was Neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin. If you do marketing in any way, shape or form this book should be on your “to read” list.  It describes how the brain makes decisions and how you can hone your designs and messages to give your organization a competitive advantage.

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This week I attended a demo of Harris Connect’s email marketing tool.  Harris is a popular tool for maintaining alumni communities and the email tool they offer is fairly sophisticated in regards to segmentation your audience to target a message to the audience.  But where it lacks is reporting, leading to what could be statistics that could be characterized as deceiving at best.  Other tools that I’ve demoes in the past are not dissimilar to Harris in this respect.

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In her guest post yesterday, Rachel Reuben argued that higher education hadn’t quite found a use for Twitter yet.  I’ve long argued that higher ed should be paying less attention to what other colleges are doing and more attention to what other industries are up to. While it may be true that few colleges out there are effectively utilizing Twitter, if they looked outside of its walls they would find many example of other industries utilizing it to effectively market to and communicate with their audiences.  

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