The Email Wars

I have been seeing more and more creative ways of taking email to new levels lately. Most of these are done by entertainment or hipster brands. And of course I test them out. If you are not familiar with FlavorPill, you should get to know them. I have long been a subscriber, but actually heard one of the team present on a panel at OMMA East 2007 this fall in NYC. The panel was great as I wanted to learn more about daily emails as we have been doing more and more with new clients like BeThree and others. What I really want to understand is content, frequency and list burnout (aka attrition).

But when I was paying close attention to this email the other day, I noticed something that had been there all along, the ability to send events listed in the email by SMS to your and others phones. It was very cool and worked flawlessly. IPSH was the one that powered it and really the 800 lb gorilla in my mind in the SMS space with entertainment brands. I know Warner Music and others use them.

What was cool to me, and more importantly useful, was the content it delivered to my phone. It was all the relevant info I needed to get to this event and had things like the address, the band, the time and date that made it all easy to add it to my blackberry calendar as well as get the map to pop up in my google maps mobile version. Killer use of email and 2.0 thinking.

Now just to figure out how I am going to use this in a client campaign.

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