Cautionary Tales
Wrap your head around this story… A business owner delegates LinkedIn to an assistant. The assistant gets an AI-powered robot to help him. He gives the robot the URL of a LinkedIn post. The robot “reads” the content. Then the robot composes and submits a comment under the owner’s name. The marketing assistant loves the…
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This was one of those mornings when I woke with an empty brain. Not a single email idea buzzing about. So I fired up Notion.so (highly recommended) and opened my “Email Stories” idea file. I came across a note titled: “Bad Email” The note contained an email that landed in my spam folder on December 22, 2021.…
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Here’s a cautionary tale for you to tuck in your “how-not-to-network” file. The saga began last week, when Barry sent me a LinkedIn message asking to meet. Barry used to run an agency in St. Louis that competed with the email marketing firm I founded and ran, MarketVolt. We crossed paths occasionally back then so…
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Yesterday, I showed up on Zoom to lead a complimentary strategy session and discovered, instead, that I was attending an unsolicited pitch-fest. Dan scheduled the strategy session a few weeks ago during a presentation I delivered at an online summit. I invited my audience to sign up for a free one-on-one session… …if they were…
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The mouse was mocking me. He crawled from his hiding place under the dishwasher, skittered toward the fridge, and then paused to stare at me – as if to pose. I could have sworn I heard him squeak, “Look at me, sucker!Catch me if you can. Ha! Ha! Ha!” And then, cool as a cuke, he…
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Oh no! I swallowed some Ryan Deiss click-bait… …only to discover I’d been fooled again. The subject line said, “Re: Refund Request.” Maybe I’m still in a post-vacation haze. Maybe the morning coffee hadn’t kicked in. Whatever my excuse, my lizard brain told me to open the email so I could see the status of…
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Greetings from my temporary home in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, France, where I’m staying in a 600-year-old house, along a back alley that reminds me of Diagon Alley. I got lots of great feedback regarding my email last week about rotten marketing tricksters who “swim in the shallow end of the tactical gene pool.” Like this reply from subscriber Gill who…
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Yesterday, I heard Troy Broussard dish some dirt on marketing jackasses who resort to stupid tricks… …such as ending mass emails with “Sent from my iPhone.” Those cunning tricksters want you to think they’ve sent a personal email, composed one thumb-tap at a time, just for you. Troy said, as I often say: You don’t…
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On Thursday, Dean Isaacs and I will host a 5in25 training: Metrics that Matter – 5 Things to Measure in Your Marketing and Sales… …and (spoiler alert): Email open rate is not a metric that matters. A story to clarify: A few years back, I attended a conference where an “email marketing expert” spoke. He described a…
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I crossed paths with a desperate marketer yesterday who craves more followers for his company’s LinkedIn page. A competing company recently gained 1,600 followers in 30 days, and Desperate didn’t want his company to fall behind. So he posted his story to a marketing forum and asked for help. Then the rotten advice began to…
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