Couldn’t resist that headline? How about the puppy? Aaawwwww. Someone marketing-wise once told me to always have flags, puppies or kids in any marketing materials. I hate to admit that it works, even if it is a little hard sometimes to fit a puppy into a data center disaster backup scenario. With a little creativity though, most things are possible if a little messy.
This is the subject line of latest email from Marie Forleo and it made me laugh. It worked. I opened up her email. Urgency and deadlines are irresistible. Even if you know that its fake its hard to step away from the click. And once you have clicked .. the cookie has you tracked. They know I’m a multiple clicker and visitor.
I follow Marie and her protégé Laura Roeder in their efforts to make women entrepreneurs ”rich, happy and hot” because I am fascinated by their personalized emarketing technique. I am convinced that many corporations could learn from the effective simplicity of their approach. Brimming with confidence, glowing with the trappings of success whilst enjoying seeming easy days with long lunches, and cultivating that Tony Robbins “I’m affluent and happy” look .. with the promise that we can make you this way too. It’s the assumption of power. It’s a package that dreams of the American dream made possible to dream, even today. But that’s another matter.
I don’t think there is a trick Marie or Laura haven’t tried to get me to open that email and click on that link and sign up for that webinar. Even down to the “cute puppy alert” and the slightly tacky invitation to see “Laura and Marie In Bed” .. actually sitting on top of a bed fully clothed talking. about making you .. “rich happy and hot!” I must admit, the program itself is a mystery to me, and how they make money out of it. But that’s another matter again.
Good luck to them … may they make millions of dollars teaching people how to make millions of dollars via Twitter. If they don’t it won’t be for lack of persistence or creativity in their email. I have in my imagination Laura Roeder sitting in front of her computing dreaming up new headlines and videos well into the night. Or should I say, sitting in front of the pool lazily after slowly sipping freshly squeezed gazpacho a l’orange through a colander.
Would you call this spam email? It’s in the eye of the beholder. For me, being in the business of marketing, its personal training in the never ending search for best practices. I believe you have to voraciously look at the widest variety of lateral examples of people doing things well in order to learn. And you can learn a lot from the good, the bad or the indifferent.
The implication of this is this is that, of right this second, I just achieved 50,003 post-spam filtered emails in my account. I believe this is cause to celebrate. Why? Because I can look back at every Marie and Laura email sent in less than 5 seconds and track their thought process and, with a degree of guessing, tell which of their email approaches were successful, which is generally evident when they repeat a theme several times. Or when they weren’t, which I’m guessing is more likely when they proclaim an “unbelievable response” followed by six more emails.
In fact, I subscribe to almost everything that comes my way that looks valuable in some way, outside what is taken away by my spam filters, from people who are trying to grab my attention. And I automatically download many types of of content they offer, from audio to slides to videos, to 5 tips on this, to 10 tips on that. I let them through onto my white list with the bravura of an existentialist passionately seeking true self awareness. Then when I feel I have learned what I need I simply filter them out of my inbox to a place where I can find them later if I am looking for a technique or an idea later on.
Yes, that’s right folks. I never unsubscribe. Why bother? On top of filtering, the ability to organize emails as “conversations” is to me as revolutionary as email itself, as it means you can group and filter a thousand times faster. Unlimited storage means I never have to delete. And the latest email search means I can find any combination of things in my storage. With a few helpful one-click pre-defined plugin actions I can spam, file, delete, filter and search with one click.
Am I wasting my time? I don’t think so. The internet changes things so fast you have to scan everything that comes your way. It’s my own personal survey of email innovation. It’s invaluable what I have learned, whether from Marie, Tony (I’m more interested in your teeth), Oracle (sorry I’m not really a CIO, CTO), Vistaprint (No, I never will print that T-shirt), IBM (nice blue, nice stripes!), Dreamhost (too funny guys but sad), Radian6 (wow, if only I could), eCairn (I will buy one day – I promise), BrightTalk (darn, it my flash broke), Plaxo (how many friends can one man have?), Facebook (1,053), Marketo (I’ll get to the demand curve masters of my own domain thingy soon), Eloqua (the road the revenue is paved with many illusions guys), InfusionSoft (love those Saturday alert emails and I do think your CEO is a genius), Mailchimp (why would monkeys know about email when they could be writing Shakespeare?), HP (I know, I’ll never buy from IBM and Oracle again, I swear), SalesGenius (don’t be shy – you are just as good with less clutter), Apple (love is a many splendored thing), Hubspot (is there anything that matters more than inbound?) .. you get the point. I’m watching them watching me watching watching them. And learning as I go, every day.
Thanks Marie. Thanks Laura. For your emails. Your click throughs. Your landing pages. Your videos. For your unwitting advice. For teaching me stamina. As they say on the blue planet ..”I see you.”