Nov 19, 2009 Posted by alan jones

Write well always. One day you’ll need to know how.

First, enjoy this hilariously good customer email from Woot.com: Dear Bigyahu, esteemed Woot veteran - You’ve been here from the beginning, or almost the beginning. You saw Woot grow from a weird little deal-a-day site into a whole bunch of weird little deal-a-day sites. You saw us change our colors from eggplant to broccoli & carrots to pea soup. None of the two million new members who have come... read more

Nov 14, 2009 Posted by alan jones

VirginBlue shows exactly how NOT to email your customers

Wow, for a brand that I thought cared about its customer relationships, VirginBlue really messed up this week. Maybe Friday the 13th played a part and everybody wanted to squish the error in a hurry before the weekend began, but this episode was really worth thinking through a second time, even if it meant missing Friday night drinks at the VirginBlue watering hole.... read more

Nov 9, 2009 Posted by alan jones

Email marketing: ring a bell, get a food pellet.

Email marketing can be tough. Your strategy and execution doesn’t have to be that bad for it to shut down communication with customers. Here’s how: Every time you send an email to a customer, they can: Open, read and respond to it; Open and read it; Delete it without reading it; Unsubscribe from it; or Flag it as spam. You’d imagine that the consumer judges each new unread email from... read more

Jul 18, 2009 Posted by alan

Should our company have a blog?

I just signed up for the beta of business advice community Bizmore and wanted to contribute something to help them get started. Someone else had asked, “Should our company have a blog?” I’ve answered that many times in person, but I’ve never written about it. It’s a difficult topic to write about without coming across like shallow self-promotion, and the interweb does NOT need... read more

Jun 3, 2009 Posted by alan jones

Swap Marceau for Cousteau and the fun begins

I’ve rescued this post from my old personal blog, which I’ll be retiring soon. The post was written in 2002, when Marcel Marceau was still alive, but Jaccques Cousteau had just died. The importance of that information will soon become clear if you read on… It’s a shame Jacques Cousteau is dead, as it effectively ruins my chances of ever persuading him to swap places with Marcel... read more