Tools vs Technique

At the Marketing Sherpa conference last week Anne Holland started her presentation with a slide that I thought was completely right. It said simply:

                     

          E-mail Success Depends on Marketing Skill

I did 4 seminars last week in Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta, Boston and Cincinnati, I thought this was so on point that I repeated this very phrase in my own sessions. 

Indeed, giving these seminars made me thinks a lot about what has changed in the e-mail marketing world over the last few years. It seems that this phrase captures it.

By now, many organizations have the right tools for the job, and we're proud that nearly 1,000 organizations use our PatronMail system. But having the right tool is just the start, not an end in itself. That's where our industry is often short-sighted.

The people that get the best results are the ones who pay attention to what skills they need to learn, and practice their craft just like any other. I think that there's an e-mail divide happening now - between E-blasters (people who think they are doing e-mail marketing by merely sending out periodic e-mails) and E-mail Marketers (people who focus on strategy and technique).

What I came away with from the Sherpa conference was that with the right technique, arts marketers can be every bit as successful as their corporate colleagues, and none of this technique is really that hard. It's all common sense - but you have to want to invest the time (and sometimes money) to really learn it.