Category Archives: E-mail

Salesforce.com Webinar Invitation Gets It Right

There are many things that work well in the Webinar invitation below from Salesforce.com, but one of my favorite elements is the smallest: the link at the top left corner that reads: “View on a PDA.” Click and you’re linked to a hosted, plain text, narrow-column version of the same… Read More

How Often Should I Email My Database?

A client writes: “What’s best practice in terms of how many times per month you hit each key contact in your database?” This is becoming a common question, driven in part by the trend in B2B towards more proactive lead nurturing and the rapid adoption of marketing automation systems. Suddenly,… Read More

A Simple, No Cost Viral Marketing Technique

How many business emails do you send in a day? Dozens? Hundreds? Now multiply that by the number of people in your company. The number of contacts that your company’s employees correspond with every day dwarfs the number of friends or connections they may have on social networking sites like… Read More

Friend Me? No Thanks.

Companies are tying themselves in knots trying to figure out how to best leverage Facebook for driving customer engagement. The core obstacle, of course, is that Facebook is ultimately a network designed for connecting friends, not customers. Here’s an example of one organization, a credit union, trying their darndest to… Read More

SAP E-Mail Needs a Dose of “Operational Excellence”

A few weeks back I savaged a Webinar invitation from Oracle, so it seems only fair that I critique an e-mail recently received from one of Oracle’s main competitors, SAP. Oracle’s e-mail was ostensibly promoting an event; the SAP campaign is promoting … well, I’m not really sure. That’s because… Read More

Lipstick, Pigs & Lead Generation

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about putting cosmetics on farm animals. Naturally, this made me think of lead generation. No connection, you say? Consider this: Most lead generation campaigns are just internal strategy or positioning statements with some stock imagery added. These internal documents, meant… Read More