• by Loren McDonald , Op-Ed Contributor, September 6, 2012

In this and past political seasons, one often-discussed topic is whether it’s OK for a candidate to change his stance on an issue.

If candidates change their opinion because their views and assumptions have truly changed and evolved over the years, then I would argue changing one’s views is a positive sign. It can show a willingness to change and evolve as they learn more – through facts, real-world use cases and personal experiences. On the other hand, changing your stance simply to get more votes -- or because that’s the way the wind is blowing -- is cowardly or calculating or both.

As I write this column, I hear an interesting story on NPR about the University of West Virginia, which took the counterintuitive step of selling alcohol at football games to reduce drinking and violence. What you say?

When the college started selling alcohol inside the stadium, combined with forbidding fans to leave and return to the stadium (thus eliminating underage fans from drinking outside and then coming back in ), drinking-induced issues declined.

"In 2010, we made 117 arrests on game days. In this past year, we only made 79. See, that’s almost a 35 percent reduction in arrests we made,” said Bob Roberts, West Virginia University police chief.

Now this is only a single sample at one college, so it remains to be seen if this antithetical approach will work at most colleges. But the important takeaway is that the school’s athletic director, Oliver Luck, was willing to think outside the box and try a potentially unconventional approach to solve a serious problem.

What does this have to do with email marketing? To encourage you with two ideas:

1.    To rethink virtually every aspect of your email program. Ask yourself why things are done a certain way. I often discover when meeting with email marketers that they often aren’t even sure why a particular approach is taken or process is used. Frequently, this is because they’ve inherited the email program from marketers no longer employed at the company -- and no one in the company knows or can remember why the particular approach was taken.

2.    Coupled with rethinking aspects of your program is the idea of stepping outside your normal comfort zone and perhaps testing a radical new approach. This doesn’t necessarily mean pushing the envelope so far you risk annoying subscribers and breaking their trust, but do check your old thinking at the door.

So what are we talking about? What are some examples of email programs, tactics and processes you may want to consider rethinking?

• Pop-overs: These are not your older brother’s obnoxious pop-ups. Pop-overs, which are actually part of the code of the page they are on, are difficult for site visitors to block, but are generally viewed as less annoying than pop-ups – which are separate pages. But many marketers are finding that using pop-overs can lead to increases in opt-ins many times that of traditional opt-in forms.
• Subject lines: Have you been using short subject lines with fewer than 50 characters for years because some blogger told you they had to be that short? Why not try 100+ -character subject lines for a change? Have you tried product-specific subject lines rather than one-size-fits-all generic approaches?
• Sending Time: Have you fallen into a “send time trap” – always sending your emails at 4 a.m. local time? Have you tried sending on Sunday evenings -- or better yet, at different times for each individual recipient?
• Inactives: Is your current reactivation program based on sending a couple of win-back emails with discounts to subscribers who have been inactive for 12 months? How about trying an early activation approach – putting subscribers into a “wake up” program after showing little-to-no engagement after three months of inactivity.

What email marketing tactics have you questioned, finding, perhaps to your surprise, that a very different approach led to a much greater result? I’d love to hear both your successes or failures -- and especially surprises -- in the comments section below.

Until next time, take it up a notch.