Shop Talk Podcast #12 - Listrak's Ross Kramer on common mistakes made in email marketing

The latest edition of the podcast includes an interview with Listrak Founder and CEO Ross Kramer. Ross discusses the ins and outs of communicating customer via e-mail, including the definition of the term "house file." (I didn't know what it meant either.) It was a fun and frank discussion, and I learned a lot.

You can download the podcast here.

Disclosure: I use Listrak's email marketing platform.

Related links:
Ross Kramer's blog

(Theme music: "Up the Coast," from West Indian Girl's latest album 4th and Wall.)

Tags:
podcast, email marketing, marketing

Email marketing--a second try

(For those entering our story in the middle, our hero had distributed his first email marketing newsletter in January, all by hand. It took three days of labor and caused him to swear revenge on his ISP. Click here to get the gory details. Somehow, it was a beneficial exercise, but there had to be a better, more effective way.)

It was now April, and time for the second quarterly newsletter. After checking out a bunch of email marketing service companies (there are lots of them--you can see them referenced at the bottom of virtually every email newsletter you receive), I signed up with Listrak.

The experience was light-years different. The service easily imported my two contact lists and eliminated duplicate addresses. It had an easy interface for me to load and edit my newsletter. I could send the newsletter to different test email addresses and see how it looked on Outlook, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. And with one click I could schedule the delivery of the newsletter at any time.

And it went out, last Thursday.

The results: 60% more newsletters delivered. 250+ bad email addresses identified. Clear traceability of who opened and read the newsletter. Tracking of each click on the newsletter. Oh, and about 80% less time spent on the process.

DISCLOSURE: Listrak's Director of Marketing is a former colleague of mine. She's written a lot of useful white papers on email marketing that you might want to read.

email marketing, marketing, social networking

Email marketing--how NOT to do it

Have you ever created an email newsletter?

Ever read one?

I thought so. Few people who read email newsletters see what's going on behind them. I was part of that group till recently.

In January, I created and distributed my first email newsletter, completely manually. It was agonizing. First of all, my ISP treated me like a spammer by throttling the number of addressees I could have in any single send (despite the fact that I pay them every month for the privilege of having email accounts and a web site--how many spammers pay for their email accounts?). Furthermore, I had to let an hour or more pass before sending the next email (thanks, Yahoo!). It took the better part of three days to get the newsletter out.

And then, like all informal email, it was very difficult to see whether anyone was reading. I could make some indirect assessments of click rates, but that was all.

Finally, more than a few recipients generously responded with, "Hey, you should use an email marketing service. It will be much easier on you, and on us."

Despite all the hassles, the first newsletter brought tremendous benefits. I reconnected with several dozen former associates, spurred a bunch of new consulting opportunities, and began the process of cleansing my contact list (by fixing or deleting email addresses that were tagged as undeliverable).

Come April, it was time to do it again.

What happened? You'll have to wait till tomorrow.

email marketing, marketing, social networking