| |||||||||||
PRINT
COMMENT
SUBSCRIBE
RSSI'm as guilty as every other strategist or consultant in our space who makes "best practices" presentations to clients, spouting every statistic in the book to describe the consumer/marketer landscape and what works. But when push comes to shove, and I have to show five "best practices" examples of relevancy in e-mail programs, triggered e-mail programs, surveys, opt-in registration pages, or media creative... I grit my teeth and smile and present work from the industry to show what others are doing. Does that make it "best practices," though? I've seen three presentations from e-mail vendors in the last month about "best practices," and I find them less and less useful.
Best practices are like benchmarks. They are very personal and contextual. Applied incorrectly, best practices can become handcuffs. Let's face it, you can't build a differentiated business or strategy around some other company's work. While I don't completely discount looking at what's happening with your competitors or others in the online marketing space--and I've stolen an more than an idea or two that way myself--too many marketers and consultants have a copy-and-paste mentality these days. We're 10 years into this channel, and there are very few things that we haven't tried in e-mail marketing. Yes, the landscape has changed; we have more robust technology, better reporting, more dynamic abilities, a more complex delivery environment, and a more complex consumer to reach. However, the principles of what works in marketing have not changed. Honestly, I still refresh from best practice presentations from years ago and chuckle when I see the same content re invented today.
Meet David Baker at Email Insider Summit Utah!
David Baker will be there speaking during "Conference Opens and Opening Remarks" on December 07 at 9:00 AM. Top executives will be there. Will you?
Register today and save.
Register today and save.
I tend to scoff at people who tout the "best practices" as a test-and-learn approach. They remind me of the consultant who did a brainstorming session and wrote everyone's comments on a large sheet of paper. After the session he walked out of the meeting and left the sheet with all the critical feedback on it behind. What's worse, he never realized his mistake or called up to ask for it. We felt cheated, as is the case with most "testing" strategies.
When you've been in the space long enough, you have already learned or figured out 80% of what you need to do to be successful at e-mail and integrating it into your interactive or customer relationship programs. The value you bring is your ability to apply it as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is called "applied learning".
As marketers, we are so tasked with production-side marketing that we are relying on artificial creativity to spawn our programs. We need to build interruption exercises into our routine to infuse creativity into our programs. (See my article from last week on how to run a creative brainstorming session.)
While many folks make a living off copying other programs and tactics and re-applying them in a different context, the best marketing programs don't rely on best practices alone. They rely on a mix of discipline, business rules, creativity, and timely intervention to reinvigorate the programs and teams.
RSS FEEDS
The one topic I would disagree somewhat concerns "test and learn". To me whether or not this is best practices is semantics. I do feel thought that it is an integral part of tailoring exectuion - learning what went wrong, what changed, what should be modified in a particular case.
All in all though, nice article that I plan on forwarding.
Regards, Will Cleaveland G2 Knowledge Consulting
"...programs, initiatives or activities which are considered leading edge, or exceptional models for others to follow." www.sbed.gov.bc.ca/SportBranch/Glossary.htm
"Concept of achieving a minimum standard for a construction project; to possess the following basic qualities: acceptable aesthetics, solid construction using appropriate materials, and safety" www.angelfire.com/biz/BuildingPathology/durb.html
I think of best practices as being closer to the second definition. Along those lines, email marketing best practices would be:
- provide contact information for the marketer - provide an opt-out link for future communication - include a plain-text version with any HTML formatted email - provide a link to view the email in a web browser in case it is read on a plain-text client or the client doesn't render it properly. After all, Microsoft just changed rendering engines in Outlook 2007 which breaks many designs.
Best practices is commenting your code, it's optimizing your images for efficient download, it's designing your site to be accessible by a variety of browsers including speech readers for the blind.
It is not the use of unique image names to track open rates, link ids to track click rates, the embedding of java, javascript, html forms or flash into emails (in fact, I would say a best practice is to not embed any of these things, but others might disagree), those are creative, technical or marketing techniques that work for you in your situation. They should be termed "our practices."
Best practices to me, is doing the right thing, or doing something the right way by not cutting corners. As I have experienced more of business, I have had to add to that: "within the constraints of the budget, timeline, and relative to the expected lifetime of the product." If I'm putting together a site that will be up for 2 weeks and will never be touched by anyone else, it's not worth the extra effort for me or the client to write the code in a way that can be easily updated or worked on by others. On the other hand, if it's to be a highly dynamic site that will exist for the forseeable future, even if I'm the only person working on it, I may not be at the company forever, it would be appropriate for me to write it in a way that others would be able to pick up where I left off.
I've been tracking what I call the "unintended consequences of email best practices" -- here's a few of them:
http://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2007/01/09/the-unintended-consequences-of-email-best-practices/
-- Ron Shevlin
-Tim
Remember the world is one big community and at the heart we are all the same.
The secret is finding out what makes the heart beat. A real world needs real people.
Kind regards lorna info@worldinvitations.com