• by Chad White , November 1, 2007

The DMA 07 conference last month was an eye-opener for me, with a few events coming together to convince me of something undeniable in the email marketing space.

First, in the lead-up to the show, the Email Experience Council collected questions from our members and subscribers for the Wall of Questions at our booth. We posted 11 questions and rounded up more than a dozen email experts at the show to answer the questions, which we posted on the EEC blog after the conference. The questions were great, but most of them were what long-time emailers would call "basic," with some predictably looking for that elusive silver bullet answer.

Second, while at the show, I met a lot of first-time email marketers -- the person who had been doing email for six months, the person whose company was planning to start emailing soon. A lot of these folks were looking for Email Marketing 101-type information. Many were doing their email in-house and a few didn't understand the basics of permission-based email marketing.

And third, I met a few fans of my blog, RetailEmail.Blogspot. They were all really appreciative of the information and examples.

What this convinced me is that there's a huge demand for basic email marketing education. The industry is growing, which is great news for everyone. But that necessarily means that new people with very little background in email are coming into the space. At the show I was discussing this issue with Elie Ashery of Gold Lasso, and he said, "Education is the Achilles' heel of the email marketing industry."

Thankfully there are a lot of great resources out there for novice email marketers, including these Email Insider columns. However, all these resources require marketers to reach out and teach themselves by reading an article or by attending a conference. What about the people who aren't reaching out? These are the people that we most desperately need to reach -- because they are likely doing the most harm to email's reputation.

For example, I ran across a blog post a couple of days ago by Web site designer Jim Lillicotch, who wrote that he "saw an ad posted on Craigslist the other day from a person who wanted to find someone with software to spider the Internet and collect email addresses to send their ads to." Jim actually took the time to try to dissuade the guy, who was in the insurance business, from doing it. This is the reply that he received: "It's only spam if you go to an ISP, NOT Web sites. They invite people to email them. Big difference, and we only go to web sites in our profession, not general public." So here's someone who thinks that when people post their email addresses online, they're giving their permission for everyone to send them commercial email. Frightening.

These are just the people that we need to reach with our message of responsible, permission-based email. We have a few cool outreach initiatives planned between now and the Email Evolution Conference in February, but I wanted to take this opportunity to mine the MediaPost readership for ideas. What can we do as an industry to reach out to people who aren't reading the trade press, industry blogs and latest email marketing research? How can we catch the attention of the mainstream press, college professors and others who can possibly reach the unconverted? No idea is too big or too small