SUBSCRIBERS RULE!

Fab 5 Inbox Fun

A Fab High Five Executed to Perfection.

There’s a bit of fun happening over at MediaPost’s Email Insider this month thanks to Razorfish’s David Baker.  In his November 10th column, he shared a list of five emails that he looks forward to receiving in his inbox and then posed a question for readers to answer — Who’s in Your Fab 5 Inbox?

Lisa Harmon from Smith-Harmon then picked up the cause today and shared her Fab Five Inbox as well.  So, to keep the ball rolling, I dug into my personal Yahoo inbox to uncover those emails that make the top of my own list as a subscriber.  Here they are, in no specific order:

1. ITunes Tuesday: It reminds me to sync my iPod and lets you test-drive a free tune, music video, and occasionally, a TV show.
2. The Wailing List from Despair.com: Dry, biting humor from the anti-Successories folks.  Always elicts laughter and every few months, a purchase.
3. TED: If you don’t know the TED conference and it’s weath of video brainfood, do yourself a favor and visit www.ted.com now.  Their stuff is a constant source of inspiration and entertainment on long, cross-country flights.
4. Continental Airlines: Living in one of their hub cities, I’m a loyal frequent flyer who’s always on the lookout for a good deal for family travel.
5. YouTube Comments: Long story short — Two years ago, I posted a video of my son singing an impromptu version of The Turtles “Happy Together” at a local event.  155K views and growing, people still comment on it to the tune of 10+ comments a week.  He has a global fan base.  Crazy.

I’ll leave it to the psychiatric establishment to discern what my Fab Five mean, but I can tell you that the exercise definitely helps take you out of “marketer” mode and think like a subscriber.  Many of the emails I enjoy don’t exist to elicit an immediate purchase — but they sure go a long way toward solidifying my relationship with each company, organization or website.

So if I may echo David’s question, what’s in your Fab Five Inbox?

You Have BrainMail!

I'm sorry, my brain inbox is full.

Fresh from the “strange but true” inbox here at SR! comes a report from the Discovery Channel that:

The U.S. Army is developing a technology known as synthetic telepathy that would allow someone to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. The concept is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG.

If you thought spam was a problem today, wait until the unfiltered thoughts of C-Level execs and undisciplined marketers rain down upon an unsuspecting populace like a thousand tiny migraines.  It will make Minority Report look like the Colgate Comedy Hour.

So, if you needed another reason to educate your company as to why now is the time to commit to a subscriber-centric marketing philosophy, look no further that a future in which UCBM (Unsolicited Commercial BrainMail) literally competes for mindshare.

My instinct?  Just as they do today, consumers will opt for relationships with the companies that don’t give them headaches (buh-dump-bum).  Thank you!  Remember to tip your waiters & waitresses…I’m here all week!

Inbox Insanity or Why 23 May Be Enough

Are your inboxes driving you insane?

Here’s a rather mind-blowing exercise for a Friday that brings home the challenge we face as one-to-one marketers today:

• Close your eyes
• Count how many inboxes you have whether you check them regularly or not
• Be sure to include voicemail, online, and postal inboxes

So, what’s your total?  Frankly, I’m a bit overwhelmed with mine — 23!!!  Here’s my complete list:

1. Postal inbox - home
2. Postal inbox - work
3. Voicemail inbox - home
4. Voicemail inbox- work
5. Voicemail inbox - mobile
6. SMS/Text inbox - mobile
7. Email inbox - work (Outlook)
8. Email inbox - personal (Yahoo)
9. Email Inbox - personal (Gmail)
10. Blog comments inbox - work
11. Facebook inbox - personal
12. LinkedIn inbox - personal
13. Twitter Direct Message inbox - personal
14. Twitter Direct Message inbox - work
15. YouTube inbox - personal
16. YouTube inbox - work
17. Flickr inbox - personal
18. Banking inbox - personal
19. Credit card #1 inbox - personal
20. Credit card #2 inbox - personal
21. Credit card #3 inbox - personal
22. Frequent flyer inbox - personal
23. Nintendo Wii inbox - personal

There are several thoughts that jump out at me thanks to this exercise.

First, this is proof positive that I am an unapologetic, online marketing geek.  To understand the rapid evolution of digital media, you must consume it.  Unfortunately, this list may demonstrate that I’m on the verge of being consumed by my media.

Second, social media tools are a significant driver of inbox inflation.  Take Facebook for example.  As a spam-fighting measure, it remains a closed-loop email environment — only friends can email friends through Facebook.  And yet, Facebook needs its users to have external email accounts because that’s where they send your account information, friend requests, and other notices.

At some point, one has to wonder if Facebook will simply throw open the doors and become an open email environment.  Not only would that potentially eliminate one inbox from my list, it could also wake up their entire user base to the notion that they may not need that Yahoo or Gmail account now that Facebook is wide open.

My third observation from this exercise is that the biggest driver of the inbox explosion are those who have been burned by spam, spoofing, and phishing scams the most–the financial services industry.  In the interest of increasing security and assuring message delivery, my bank and credit card issuers have begun setting up their own, closed-loop email systems tied to customer accounts.

The upside of this approach is that the bad guys can’t get in.  The downside — well, how many of us check our bank account inbox as often as our work or personal email inboxes?  My guess is not many.  Accordingly, I suspect that what these companies are gaining in security they are losing in terms of immediacy and customer response.   After all, I check my work and personal email accounts throughout the day whereas I check my online banking email inbox only two or three times a week when I log into my account — and then, only if I see that I have a message.

I could go on and on, but my prevailing thought is that 23 is enough.  In fact, as Dick Van Patten once proclaimed, 8 is enough.  What this means, I leave to ponder in a future post as surely I’m going to break Wordpress thanks to the length of this post.

Until then, I encourage you to share via the comments how many inboxes you have these days - and which ones I might have missed.  Can you beat 23?

Subscribers on the Street #3

Back to the streets!  In this third installment of our “Subscribers on the Street” inteview series, we give you two questions for the price of one.

We first asked folks how frequently companies should send marketing messages via email.  We then followed-up and asked people to explain how their email inbox differed from their traditional, postal mailbox.  The responses are as varied as the subscribers we asked.   Enjoy!