Live blogging Karlyn Morissette’s (@KarlynM) session

*Watch the presentation Video*

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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 »

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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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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It was brought to my attention the other day that there are some concerns about e-mail addresses published on our college’s web site and the effect it has on spam.  It turns out the filters here run through about 10,000,000 emails a day, about 7% of which are passed on as being actual, legitimate messages.  We are not a huge campus, but I’m going to guess that many of you would see a similar ratio.  Naturally, this has brought up conversation of obfuscating e-mail addresses.  We’ll set aside the “closing the gate after the horse got out” metaphor for now, because techniques can always help prevent spam from hitting new addresses, so at least that way we can lighten the load for our new users.

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The question I hear novice email marketers asking more than any other is “what is the best day to send email?” It’s the wrong question to ask. Here is the example I use when I give talks on this subject: Let’s say, for arguments sake, that I think the best day to send email is Sunday and I say so in blogs and at conferences. Now you’ve got a group of people, presumably competing with each other on some level since they are going to the same conferences and reading the same blogs, who are all going to start sending email on Sunday and it instantly becomes the worst day for them to send.

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