Best practices?
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 16, 2007
In a recent commentary, David Baker has a little dig at email marketing best practices.
His basic argument is an indirect appeal for more innovation, creativity and independent thought when it comes to your own email marketing program.
It is implicit recognition that the uniqueness of your list and business means that not every general lesson applies to your situation.
There's a danger, though, that this laudable stance gets interpreted wrongly as rejecting best practices per se. An interpretation that plays well with the more elitist among us.
Creativity and innovation are all well and good once you have the basics of email marketing sorted. But the reality is that outside of the email marketing "insider community," very few people do have a full grasp of the basics.
Not because they're dumb. But because they have other priorities. These folk -- the vast majority -- need a set of basic and timeless best practices so that they can quickly set up an email marketing program that works.
But what they also need is a dose of critical thought.
Ron Shevlin gives some examples of "the unintended consequences of email best practices" in this blog post. As Ron himself states, "It's not that the firms shouldn't have used these tactics, it's that they didn't implement them correctly."
That's the point. Best practices are a great and necessary guide, but the onus is on the marketer to think critically and intelligently when it comes to their application.
Bringing us full circle to David's original argument about simply treating best practices with a little more circumspection.
In the end, it's about taking your marketing off auto pilot and putting it back under manual control.
More on tactics and strategy | Tags: email marketing best practices, email marketing strategy
His basic argument is an indirect appeal for more innovation, creativity and independent thought when it comes to your own email marketing program.
It is implicit recognition that the uniqueness of your list and business means that not every general lesson applies to your situation.
There's a danger, though, that this laudable stance gets interpreted wrongly as rejecting best practices per se. An interpretation that plays well with the more elitist among us.
Creativity and innovation are all well and good once you have the basics of email marketing sorted. But the reality is that outside of the email marketing "insider community," very few people do have a full grasp of the basics.
Not because they're dumb. But because they have other priorities. These folk -- the vast majority -- need a set of basic and timeless best practices so that they can quickly set up an email marketing program that works.
But what they also need is a dose of critical thought.
Ron Shevlin gives some examples of "the unintended consequences of email best practices" in this blog post. As Ron himself states, "It's not that the firms shouldn't have used these tactics, it's that they didn't implement them correctly."
That's the point. Best practices are a great and necessary guide, but the onus is on the marketer to think critically and intelligently when it comes to their application.
Bringing us full circle to David's original argument about simply treating best practices with a little more circumspection.
In the end, it's about taking your marketing off auto pilot and putting it back under manual control.
More on tactics and strategy | Tags: email marketing best practices, email marketing strategy
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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