Non marketers speak

A couple quotes from different folks, who aren’t actually in marketing, but have insightful comments on marketing.

Anyway, remember: outsource your marketing, outsource your reputation and ethics. Popehat

And 2 posts from a favorite author about self promotion by authors. Her first post is about having other authors excessively promote themselves.

There is a difference between promotion in our own spaces and promotion in the spaces of others. One is appropriate and necessary. The other is a very fine line, and stepping over it can result in lost readers and hurt sensibilities, and that’s never a good thing. Adventures in Self-Promotion.

The second is a list of 10 things authors should remember when promoting themselves. As the only woman to be nominated in 4 separate Hugo award categories, I think her thoughts on author promotion are well worth reading. So are her books (as Seanan, as Mira), by the way.

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Best Practices: your mileage may vary

YMMV. One of those abbreviations us old folks used ages ago before email had pictures and the closest we had to social networking was USENET and social gaming was in the form of MUDs. I rarely see it used any more. In a lot of ways that’s a sad thing. It was a very useful abbreviation. Using it at the end of a post full of advice was a sign that the author was providing information but knew that different situations may require different solutions. It acknowledged that what might be the best practice in one form may not be the best for another.
It’s not just the usage that seems to have declined, there seem to be a lot more people who just want to share The Answer! and not acknowledge their experience may not be universal. This seems particularly rampant in email marketing, at least to me (YMMV).
I’ve talked before about how I don’t believe there are any universal best practices for email.
Let’s be honest, the experience of a well known national retailer buying, or appending email addresses is not going to be the same as a local business doing the same thing. The national retailer acquiring email addresses and sending well targeted mail to their purchasers probably won’t cause too many delivery problems, and will generate revenue. The local pizza place probably won’t be so lucky.
A number of marketers have complained that they all too often hear “it depends” when they ask a question about email. But how well a particular email campaign perform does depend. Success depends on the audience and the offer. But more than just the specific offer, success also depends on how well known the brand is and what their real world reputation with customers is.
Customers are a lot more likely to give brands the benefit of the doubt if they like the product. That means poor practices don’t always result in poor results. It also means other companies may not have the same success with poor practices.
Your Mileage May Vary.

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Delivery and marketing part 2

A while ago I wrote some thoughts about the conflicting requirements of delivery and marketing. I posted something similar over on the Only Influencers list, too. My thoughts generated a very interesting discussion, one that helped me clarify some of my somewhat random thoughts from earlier.
Marketing is about finding mindshare. One way you get mindshare is repetition. But people tune out repetition pretty quickly. Sending the same offers, the same copy over and over again means recipients start to tune things out.  When recipients start tuning out mail, they may not bother opening it, they just read the subject line.  If too many recipients start relying on the subject line then delivery can suffer.
Effective marketing relies on getting mail in front of the target audience. That’s the delivery component. Without inbox delivery, even the best marketing will not work.
No one will see marketing if it is in the spamfolder.
I don’t think you can cleanly separate delivery strategy from marketing strategy, but it’s important to realize they have different constraints and different pressures. When I talk about delivery with a client, I’m talking about getting mail into the inbox. And, most of the time, they’ve come to me because they’re not getting into the inbox and they have to make changes. The genius of their marketing is irrelevant, because no customers see it.
But once mail is in the inbox you can’t just ignore delivery, either. Sure, it becomes less of a pressure on the copy and the marketing strategy, until such time as the mail isn’t getting into the inbox any longer. Then it’s back to working on delivery and maybe having to implement some aggressive data hygiene. Back in the inbox and you can be aggressive on the marketing again.
Successful email marketing requires balancing the constraints of good delivery against the constraints of good marketing.

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Motivating people

I’ve been thinking a lot about motivating people recently. What really motivates people to do things? Why do we make the choices we make? How do you convince people to do things when they’re unsure they want to do those things?
Let me give you an example. Friends of mine are fostering dogs for local rescues. A neighbor of theirs is trying to start a rescue herself. The neighbor is trying to motivate people by posting pictures of dead dogs in garbage bags. On one level, I get the neighbor’s point: that image is what motivates her to take action. But all that’s doing for other people, my friends included, is driving them away from working with her.
What she needs is a better grasp of how to motivate people. She needs to learn how to speak to people in a way that will motivate them to help her. Unfortunately, she thinks that what motivates her will motivate everyone, except it doesn’t. In fact, it’s doing the exact opposite for some people who are actually sympathetic to her cause.
What does this have to do with email?
I’m often surprised at how many marketing professionals can’t or won’t tailor their argument to their audience. Look at filters, many marketers have told me over the years about how mean ISPs are to them, how the ISPs make poor filtering decisions and how what should really happen is marketers should tell the ISPs to fix their filters.
In very few cases, though, have I seen a marketer actually try and talk to an ISP rep on their terms. It seems so simple to me: marketers are people who motivate people for a living so they should be able to market their own wants to ISPs. They just need to find the right message, but they don’t seem to be able to think about things from the ISP perspective.
I’m not sure I actually have an answer. But how do we motivate people to do things has been a major topic in my head recently. I think the best motivation is often to convince the other party that a given course is in their best interest. The tricky bit is selling that message.
How have you sold a message the other party didn’t want to hear?

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