Lost in Translation

Some of you may know, I had twins a while back. Anyone who has kids can tell you that you end up on mailing lists for all things baby very quickly. I get mail from companies I have no interest in doing business with, but birth records are public so there you are.

Add to that, stores such as Destination Maternity sell your contact information to other businesses. I suspect this how Enfamil, a formula manufacturer owned by Mead Johnson & Company, LLC, got a hold of my email address.

From here, marketing hijinks ensue.

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One of the purposes of this blog is to clear up technology myths. I ran across an interesting article that just screamed to be written about in this blog.

This piece of “news” was released a few days ago: EXCLUSIVE: W.H. collects Web users’ data without notice.

In a nutshell, the article says “The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama’s promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.”

The article gives reactions from various groups who feel there is something sinister going on.

Bear with me. This post isn’t about politics. It’s actually about technology and business practices. And why this is actually not news.

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A lot of individuals are taken in by the hype surrounding email marketing. The websites look great, the results sound promising. I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again: “if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is”. The Internet is just like your offline life. Never believe the two are different. Just because it’s in writing, doesn’t mean it’s true.

So why would I say buying an email list is bad when so many say it’s so good?

For starters…those saying its so good are frequently after your wallet. Ask yourself: who’s saying its so great? Are they in the business of selling those lists? Or in a business that is in any way related to that? Or maybe they’re a novice touting themselves as experts, just parroting what they’ve read (and believe me, there are a lot of those).

Ok, that doesn’t really answer the question. So why is it BAD? Two good reasons. (more…)

Most people begin their adventures in the world of email newsletters by sending out very casual emails. After a while, they start noticing a lot of articles online about email newsletters. Much of that information is confusing and overwhelming. Some if it contains information about the languages used to create the email, such as HTML and CSS. That information isn’t too helpful if you’re just doing the writing and handling other non-technical decisions.

So let’s make this simple…

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