How Not To Suck at Email Marketing

How Not To Suck at Email Marketing:

Here are few easy ways to avoid sucking at email:

Source

I love that the first recommendation is to be transparent in your headlines. Direct headlines/subjects are both clear to humans AND perform well in search engine rankings.

One of my favorite examples of a headline that accomplishes both is How To Change Fonts in WordPress. Guess what that post talks about?

Sometimes Deliverability Doesn’t Matter

Have you read the 9/11 Commission report published back in 2004 (if memory serves correctly).

One of the things that stood out for me was the ingenious method by which the terrorist used free email services (Hotmail) to “deliver” messages to one another.

They would log into a Hotmail account and write a draft (and NOT send it). Then a terrorist cell at another location (often another continent) would log in to the same account (using same username/password) and would read the draft.

This means that the email NEVER left the server on which it was sitting. It NEVER touched trans-continental email gateways on which government is able to “listen” for conversations. See Echelon.

The other things that stood out for me was that the FBI couldn’t get access to these email accounts. First because courts were slow to grant the “search warrant” for email accounts in questions, and once the court did provide FBI with the search warrant, Microsoft’s default deletion time kicked in and MS wiped out terrorist emails from their system.

So, FBI never got to many of the emails and accounts suspected of terrorist activity. What a quagmire.

Giggity.