fresh blood

the last three weeks have been a whirlwind...

a respected colleague gave notice, and a new co-worker started on the same day. needless to say, i've been busy with training my co-worker and in learning as much as i can from the colleague who is leaving - and dealing with the thoughts and drama (internal, external, real, and made-up) of my colleague's departure. all in all let's say it's crazy in the office right now...

but with change comes opportunity
training my co-worker is awesome. she is full of new ideas, fresh perspective, and well frankly it is like christmas in our cubes...each day she tells me something new she has found in our prospect management tool, and even though she has as much ability and knowledge as I do, she listens, makes notes, and counters with arguments and thoughts - or even commiserates with me about challenges we've seen in our years of doing this.

i think eventually we'll have tacky matching drag queen rings that we'll touch together, and ala-wonder twins say "spammers unit, shape of a rolled eyes....shape of 'you've got to be kidding me...' we talk about strategy, and the biggest thing is data management...this i think is the bane of every marketers life simply because:

1. we know what we want, data wise
2. we know how to get it
3. we know how to manage it (my internal dialogue for data management is 'crap in, crap out')
4. we know how to control it
5. we know how to report it

but as marketers in an IT controlled business, we know we don't control data. it is hard to implement work-smarter-not-harder strategies when it appears that IT is more concerned with controls (and frankly my argument really is their job security) than the bottom line - happy customers mean easier conversion, easier conversion means more revenue, more revenue means a bigger paycheck (or so the cycle would predict).

but all in all with those challenges, we keep chugging along and work toward the goal of getting people through the lead funnel and converting them from prospect to customer. the new ideas in a time of change is good because it re-centers me on the work and the goals i want to accomplish.

getting new staff all ramped up is easy though, especially when they know as much as they do, and it allows me to tackle larger projects - like branding and voice for our emails and to develop out suitable templates for all the major players here.

so the moral of this post is to look at all the change that may get thrown at us as not challenges, but opportunities to excel and finish tasks that have been on the back-burner for a while. that sense of completion really does take away from the feeling of drastic change.

follow-up: gmail isn't doing us any favors these days

i've been thinking about this topic again... cause it is really bothering me.

gmail clipping messages, at first i thought this was based on the tags that we as marketers use - some email coders are just pulled from the web-dev team in our organizations, so they use common tags like '<class="header">' and '<class="footer">'. this we've been told for a while is a no-no, and actually one i agree with, gmail and other web-based email clients strip out the header and footers of our messages to avoid any display issues with their own headers and footers and that makes sense.

message clipping could have bigger implications for us as marketers, as i discussed here. if you view your messages in the gmail app on android, there is no way to display the clipped portion of your email, but this isn't true on the web-based gmail interface. this has been a known bug in the gmail system since at least 2012 - did anyone else miss that memo, i did - and i use the gmail app on my htc one.

the questions we're asked as email marketers

this week, i was asked an interesting question...what are two emerging trends in email marketing for 2014? it's not an easy to question to answer, but here's what I came up with...

1. adaptive design for emails 
2. content being king

but kirk, these aren't so much trends as they are the current mantras and blog topic that we are all reading on a daily basis...they have been drilled into us for the past couple of years. i know that, here's how I defend these two choices...