As a marketer and a company, you sometimes have to decide that the data won’t guide you. Today, it’s both easier and harder to take a creative leap.

Testing an idea — creating an ad, buying some targeted placements, measuring the results — is relatively easy. It’s never been easier to produce amazing, compelling stories. It’s easy to test them in a controlled metro area.

However, when you make a really big creative leap, it IS harder than ever to keep them quiet. Especially if you’re a big brand. Social media, YouTube, email, whatever. We’re connected like never before. The new NIKE World Cup video got a few hundred thousand hits on YouTube before NIKE launched any other support for it. People found it and shared it.

“It’s the sweaty socks and dudes hitting on me at the gym that I really love about working out. I mean, it’s great to look nice, but it’s really the EXPERIENCE that I’m after.”

And I pointed out that: “In advertising, it’s never bad to turn a perceived weakness into a positive… Unless your weakness is for Boy Scouts.”

Groups Suck
What I’ve found is that sending one email and cc’ing multiple people routinely fails at generating anything. They all stare at each other and assume someone else who is less busy than them will take care of it. And after all, it’s just the blog. It’s not like the earth will stop turning if we don’t post something.

Oops, You Made a Committee
Worse, they’ll turn it into a committee. “Should we be talking about this?” or “Shouldn’t we do more research around this?” or “Perhaps we can come to consensus. Let’s call a meeting.”

Bang, your blog post is dead. Get out the shovel and bury it.

Individuals Do Things
The more successful route is to send a very similar email to one person at a time, asking them to weigh in on something. In it, I usually emphasize a few points:

1. Minimal effort: I just need a paragraph response. I’ll handle the rest.
2. No writing: They can swing by my desk and we’ll write it together.
3. Flattery: They said something about this to me earlier that was BRILLIANT, but I can’t get it quite right. What was it again?
4. Secrecy: I’m working with a few other people, but I’m really interested in YOUR opinion.
5. Leverage + Flattery: I talked to your boss, and s/he couldn’t say enough about how much you totally understand this topic.

The problem with this route is when you’re fishing, and the person maybe isn’t the best resource. And they forward the email to someone else you’ve already sent it to.

This is just one of the many ways to get people off their ass to write something. I’m sure I’ll cover a few more.

This is the real world where you’re interviewing CEOs of small businesses. And the reader typically needs to get something out of it — if you’re not thinking ahead about why the reader would bit.ly your link and send it along, you’re dooming yourself to obscurity.

We had a situation like that today, so this is what I shot back to the writer:

Here’s what I’d propose: re-read over this and ask yourself what Laura can teach all of us. Because at the end of the day, Laura is NOT a celebrity. So we need some utility for this article. What, as someone outside this company, will make this article valuable? Why would I forward this article on to someone?

Secondly, make your points AFTER you’ve illustrated them. SHOW our “distinct culture of internal support,” rather than tell me. Give me a story. An anecdote. A quote. Don’t tell me he’s funny. Show me.

“A skeleton walks into a bar,” Kevin said, apropos of nothing, talking to apparently no one. “He says to the bartender, ‘give me a beer and a mop.’” Even camels call Kevin’s humor dry.

He didn’t like the idea. Said there’s no better way than to just give back the text all marked up.

I approached it differently:

“You’re gonna scare the crap out of them with so many edits. Show them a few examples of your edits before you finish. Get them comfortable with those. Then they won’t fight as much when you hand it back mostly rewritten.”

He said he’d try.

When you have time to do so, sharing work early makes life easier. People get bought in. You can incorporate good ideas. You make them a participant. You spread the accolades.

The risk you run is that you share an idea too early, and the critical feedback you hear nips a good idea before it can bloom. This often happens when you’re still exploring a concept, and the unfinished nature of it freaks people out.

It’s more important with original work than edits. But if you deliver a piece back that’s bleeding with red ink, you’re best served prepping the soon-to-be-bruised ego. It’s not heartbreak if they agree with you.

So here’s my test about when to start you inside sales job. If you can answer yes, then go start selling:

Can you explain it to your significant other?

Does it have a catchy headline or tagline?

Do you have a specific concept or idea you want feedback on?

With those, you will represent the concept well. You will give your audience a fully-formed thought. And you will likely get some decent feedback as you put on your inside sales hat.

I can’t say it’s the best organized writing in the world, but perhaps handy if you’re trying to quickly understand email marketing.

How Marketers Measure Success in Email

1. Numbers of emails successfully sent: Sometimes you get bounces, spams, or bad emails. It’s good to track those numbers and clean the list occasionally.
2. Open rate: Total emails sent out / Emails opened = open rate percentage. The biggest three contributors to whether people open an email are:
   1. Do I know who sent this to me? The name and email address in the from: field.
   2. Is the subject line interesting to me? Words like “Free” usually end up in spam, but knowing that it’s the user’s birthday or that their anniversary is coming up can generate interest. The more relevant personal information you can add in the subject line (in a way that’s not creepy), the higher your open rate.
   3. Is this a good time to talk to me about this? Emails about insurance sent at 5 pm on a Friday? Not going to get opened. Emails about “three fashion tips you already have in your closet” at 4 pm on a Friday might get opened for the “going out” crowd.
3. Click-through rate: Total emails sent / # of clicks in all emails. Typically, just like a web page, the biggest visual will get the most clicks. And the stuff at the top of the page will get the most clicks. Know what your client really wants from their email campaign, and put it up there.
4. Spams and Unsubscribes: A certain number of people will categorize your email as spam and a certain number will unsubscribe. Marking an email as spam is easier than unsubscribing, and many people use it. It kinda sucks, but you’ll get a few. Unsubscribe is fine, because you can  at least offer them incentives for staying in the course of unsubscribing, like a free flashlight or something. Or you can ask why they’re leaving: “Hey wow, bummer. Did we not send you interesting content? Maybe you could choose from one of these three things to help us do better next time.” At least you get a very short exit interview.

Just like online ad campaigns, the email campaigns are tracked on the website to see what people who clicked through did.

• Did they buy? What? How much? Did they abandon?
• How much time did they spend on the site?
• How many pages? Where did they go?
• What was the bounce rate?

Custom Content and Measurement
Email, like every other type of marketing and advertising, is about relevance. And prior behavior tells you a lot about future behavior.

You can start to tell patterns about people based on how they click. Some people are female, but only shop for males. Maybe they’re buying gifts. Other people only click-through when there’s a deep discount. Some people want the newest thing, like “see what Hollywood is wearing this spring.”

Those patterns are important, because you should choose to send emails with dynamic, auto-generated content based on click patterns. This dynamic email content is the backbone of the company’s system. So basically, if the client is offering a 35% coupon, the email system will let you create a group that’s based on prior click patterns (“give me everyone who clicked on a discount link between Q1 2008 and Q1 2009.”)

Plus, you can create a regular email where there’s a bucket of content that’s subject to different rules: if they like discounts, fill it with discount copy. If they like new stuff, fill it with the hot newness content. If they like men’s stuff, fill it with men’s stuff.

Different types of campaigns: awareness vs. sales.

• Awareness: We want people to know about this product or service, and we want them to want it. Typically, there’s a click-through to a product page. Once there, maybe people will even buy. With a campaign like that, you want to try to use as much information as you have about the customer to focus on what they might be interested in. And you want to keep your design and offer language streamlined — don’t try to squash too many options into a single email or people don’t know what to click on.
• Sales: With a sales email, you’re probably offering an incentive to people to buy something. Or at least to check it out. The key is to know what motivates different people in your email database. Some may be motivated by discounts, others free shipping, and others just want the newest and hottest and fastest thing.

List Building
OK, we want to send an email, but where do we get all these people? I’m sure there are other ways, but here’s the four big ones.

1. Email sign up form on the website, perhaps during a purchase.
2. Product registration online or mail-in cards.
3. List rentals or purchases: With these, you can only send the list one email where your call to action is “please subscribe because we have a lot to offer you.” If they don’t actively subscribe, you can’t send them any more emails.
4. Salesforce.com or whatever customer management system the client uses: With this, you have to be careful. Small businesses often get away with importing from their CRM, even though people didn’t explicitly say, “sign me up for this list.” But this company probably has a policy similar to the list rental or purchase policy due to spam issues (see below). It’s not cool, and I always recommend against it.

List Cleaning
List cleaning comes after a mature list has been used for a while, and there are people who simply aren’t opening or clicking. It’s not inherently bad, especially with the economy like this, but it screws up the numbers on which you are judged. It makes you as the project manager look bad.

So maybe once a year with a big account, you might send out an email that says, “Hey, if this email newsletter isn’t right for you, maybe try different content that you WOULD like. If not, this will be your last email. Click here to keep receiving it.”

Techy Stuff
Different email programs (technically, these are called “clients”) have different HTML rendering issues. It’s a giant pain in the ass for the industry. Your programmers will know all the ins and outs of this, but sufficed to say, they need to time to test their HTML in different email programs. And email will not render (look) the same in every email program. It’s the same as testing web pages in different browsers, except instead of four major browsers, there are like 10 major email clients. SWEET!

The good news is that the company’s database will tell you what the lion’s share of recipients use. That lets you focus the team’s time.

One other thing: most email is designed using very old-school HTML with tables and junk. It’s TERRIBLE. Most web designers would hate it. But that’s just the way things go with email due to all the conflicting programs/clients.

Spam
The company probably has a long list of prohibited words that tend to set off spam filters. Stuff like “free” and “discount.” Your writers will need to get creative to work around that. But again, you should be sending content that is relevant to the user, so hopefully there are multiple subject lines depending on the user’s prior click pattern. Content within the email might also set off alarms, so… you know, work with your writers.

This company, like all email service providers, is likely in a constant battle with Internet Service Providers about spam. Being very diligent about having a good list, not renting or buying lists very often, and unsubscribing people quickly are all critical. This lets them avoid being “blacklisted” by email powerhouses like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and others.

Text Only
Most emails sent via email service providers are probably HTML based. Some users may choose to have text-only emails sent. Or increasingly, they may have a mobile version sent. Those emails need to be much simpler. Line breaks, ALL CAPS, lines of hyphens, and bullets are all good ways to get people to read text-only email

Tough.  A lot of near misses. A lot of helpful emails. Tons of support from the best cast of friends I could ever hope for. A few meetings with a lot of coffee and a fair amount of beer.

Before I left for Canada and Washington, I had two interviews with local companies. Neither led to anything. The first had the funding pulled for the position. The second asked me for a writing sample, which I delivered late after a misunderstanding (“You want it when? I’m camping on an island. There’s no wifi here. Crap…”)

I also received a tentative lead for a small print project from another friend, which after talking to the client via email I started to understand why he passed on it. Still, I’m not really in a position to be picky. We’ll see what I do with it.

Thursday, I had a meeting with a great friend who works in a similar industry. We’re considering pitching some businesses together. Not quite a partnership, but a close confederation. It’s a good fit, and we’d do well when we go after a few local businesses.

Another friend has been working channels for me to join his own company. It might be a good fit, though it looks like the timeline might be a little further out. Still, nothing feels better than having friends look out for you.

Finally, by the end of the week, yet another friend set up a lunch and afternoon of interviews with a local company who I’ve written about in the past. Bonus: there are other friends from a past job there. I brought my resume and my portfolio, but never brought either out because everyone had talked me up so much!

So, we’ll see what next week brings us. The outpouring of support — texts, IMs, tweets, e-mails, and wall posts — really touched me. It reminds me what my folks always told me: “The nice guys may not finish first, but they always finish happy.”

Thanks, everyone.

My business cards, from Moo.com

• People like to like things.
• You can’t bore people into buying.
• Your friendly neighborhood copywriter.
• We all speak English. I happen to do it for a living.
• LOL
• Will write for money.
• Words that make the page bleed.
• The word “solution” is never the solution.
• People love stories.

They’re supposed to arrive Oct. 6. We’ll see.

The King Retail Solutions homepage. Click for a larger view to read. We got a new client in Europe within a week of launching the site, who specifically said it was because of the site.

I fought solutions. A lot. I mean seriously. You want one navigation item to be the word, “solutions” and the other to be the word, “integrated”?

The "integrated" section of the KRS website.

As you can see, I lost that battle.

And yes. Solutions. "Hmm, what should I click on here? How about solutions?"

But the site was a winner.

When I took the job, we’d just started re-designing the website with their agency, DeepPlay. Awesome group. They did the design and I did all the copy.

And interviewing the department heads (so I could actually write the copy) turned out to be a great way to get up to speed on the company and the industry quickly.

I also coordinated several other marketing endeavors: brochure writing and printing, sales sheets, PR, and design contest submissions. I even got some of our photos into a coffee table book about grocery store interiors. (I didn’t know they existed either.)

Side story

It was at King that I first learned about search engine optimization. The day after the new site launched, the CEO called me in. He liked some things, disliked a few others. But the reason that the site “utterly fails” was because when he Googled “King,” we didn’t show up on the first page.

” Wait, did you say, ‘King’? The single word ‘king’? Really, the King of England comes up before us? Martin Luther King Jr. comes up before us? Burger King comes up before us? Wow, you’re right, that is really WEIRD. Hey, what happens if you search for ‘grocery interior design’ or ‘grocery interior manufacturing.’ Oh sweet. Front page? Yay us.”

I can be a defensive and snarky SOB at times. I’m just saying.

Slam City, a knock off of Sin City. "Every city has a dive like this. The neon sign says it's 'The Post,' but it's really a gauntlet..."

SPARQ stands for speed, power, agility, reaction and quickness. The sports company’s goal was to scientifically improve the training that young athletes did — focusing less on the weight room and more on well-rounded athleticism.

It was a fantastic job. Combine my love of sports, coaching, and teaching, then add in a team of psychotically brilliant people who’d rather work until midnight than accept mediocrity. We did five years’ of worth in one year.

A team of three of us published a 60+ page quarterly magazine (I was the managing editor) coordinating writers, photographers, designers, and even other editors.

I also ran the website and the email campaigns. We had events across the country, did mailers, signage, packaging, five different mobile bloggers, and re-launched the whole website all over again.

Homepage layout when we had two brothers earn SPARQ Ratings over 110. Insane!

I’ll soon show more of the narrative work we did in the magazine, take a quick look at a  few PDFs in the meantime. And drop me a line, and I’ll bring in a few hard copies when we meet.

Reggie Bush lights up the cover of the last print issue of SPARQ Magazine.

• Slam City with Brian Grant and Fred Jones.
• USC football’s first Hollywood pro day.