It is getting late but there's a great webinar on Brighttalk. It's being hosted by Stephanie Miller of Return Path. They're a company that, from what I gather, helps businesses understand what works and doesn't with their emails.
So beautifully simplistic.
The name of the webinar is Intelligent Data Mining for Higher Email Marketing Return. If anything my experience working for an event planning for-profit company taught me it's that metrics often act as filler. There's so much going on that people don't pay attention to what drives the audience. We create so much process that the humans are actually just squeezed right out of the equation. Isn't that funny? (Well, not if you work in accounting)
Case and point. I worked as a recruiter. We used a communication protocol. Day A= Email. Day B= Phone Call. A + D days old= You're not contacted
I ended up with the highest conversion rate in the office for weeks on end. More of my people actually bought our service (i.e. event) than my peers. Turns out, my Outlook wasn't even connected!!! When the Operations Manager turned it on I had over 5,000 emails in my outbox!!!!
That's a very bad employee.
Do you think anyone said "Well, perhaps we should evaluate the way our communications stream works. Maybe, we're sending out thousands of emails that nobody actually reads," of course not.
Emails can break, or build, relationships too. Treat them just as you would a phone conversation. That's your point of contact.
