New ideas are central to marketing success, but sometimes getting back to basics can be effective, too. The Email Experience Council just posted a very basic guide to email marketing. The guide provides simple questions and answers on issues that many marketers are still struggling with, such as legal compliance, growing your lists, and choosing between different formats.
The guide won't be much help to experienced email marketers, but that's not the goal. Rather, the goal is to help newcomers. As Chad White noted in explaining the guide: "While there are some organizations doing amazingly advanced things with email, most companies are still nailing down the fundamentals." Moreover, White noted, the demand for email marketers is growing fast, and few university marketing programs do a good job on email marketing.
How might this apply to your own marketing? Although It's tempting to play to your most sophisticated customers and prospects, you probably have a large group sitting a lot lower on the learning curve. Providing basic "beginning" educational materials on the issues they are facing might well be a valuable service for a large constituency in your market. It certainly can't hurt, and it will help make sure you have a clear sense of what the basic questions are and how best to address them. And it would probably be helpful inside your company as well, where some employees may be too embarrassed to ask "stupid" questions that are actually central to their work.
UPDATE: Just after posting this, I saw that New York Times technology columnist and blogger David Pogue produced "Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User" today, noting that "what’s common knowledge isn’t the same as universal knowledge." Check it out; you'll probably learn something!
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