Comedian Owen Benjamin (ooh) tweets:
“Yeah. Being ahead of the curve will always be attacked. But in 4 years I’ll get letters and stories of triumph and trust and respect. And that’s how a strong community is propagated.”
A lot of people despise Owen and/or think he’s practically the devil.
But he’s absolutely right about being ahead of the curve getting you hated. This is nothing new of course. People have literally been executed — probably even beheaded — for being ahead of the curve, accused of heresy, etc simply for putting out differing theories/ideas/solutions about whatever, right, wrong, didn’t matter. A lot of people I know up in this business who are reading this right now can probably relate even on a small level today. We have seen a bunch of blue flame specials on social media spazzing out, for example, even with something as non-controversial as BerserkerMail since the day it launched.
How have we been ahead of the curve?
1. Talking about the low importance of tracking open rates — those bots sure love to open your emails, but they ain’t buying. Ditto with a lot of clicks now, too. Not to mention more and more inbox clients across the board bragging about their ability to block tracking.
2. Not caring about soft metrics over ROI — only people online brag about their soft metrics, because there are admittedly still sufficient numbers of make muney online guys and would-be clients who are easily dazzled by bull shyt. But soft metrics are just vanity metrics akin to valuing yards run over points scored in football.
3. Teaching the realities of online sales attribution — copywriters love pounding their chests about how much money their copy or emails made. But attribution online is a lot more complicated than that, with many more moving parts, and much of the credit belonging elsewhere. Goo-roos running around claiming their copy or their emails made all the sales from a launch or whatever are simply full of shyt.
4. Focusing more on building the email list rather than the social media audience — all roads should lead to the list first that you can export and backup, not to the 3rd party platform owned by someone else, in our way of thinking. That is literally direct response marketing 101. But in 2024 it might as well be an advanced direct response marketing 400-level concept.
5. Images in emails hurting deliverability — which more and more marketers are coming around to finding out for themselves. We barely even have to waste time talking about it anymore, and even other ESPs are begrudgingly (since they cater to people who think they need pretty templates, etc) admitting it.
6. Daily email — I have yet to see even one other major ESP advocate daily emails probably for two reasons: 1. They don’t mail their own lists their own offers, and are run by managers, bankers, and social activists, and simply don’t know the relationship building, lower spam complaint potential, and upside sales daily can grant a business. 2. Their clients sending daily emails costs their platform more money. Email ain’t free, and you get what you pay for, but instead of working their economics around it, they would almost prefer you send no email at all while paying them each month like a good little soldier.
7. Mobile apps — we’re still a few years ahead of the curve on this, and admittedly nobody really gives us any flack over it. But most online marketers are still waiting for a guru to grant them permission to use mobile app tech. And even those who do use mobile apps are foolishly using big tech they have little control over and that does not integrate with their back end email, marketing, or offers like Learnistic does. But something like 90%+ of customers are on their phones most of the time, and are in an app when on that phone nearly all the time they are on the phone.
i.e., go where you customers are — which is in an app.
Anyway, those are a few examples.
All right so enough of that today.
If you are interested in my paid Email Players newsletter go here:
Ben Settle
