The Email Wars

On the way to work yesterday I was reading tweets (yes I know it is dangerous) but I saw some of the words that people were using to describe email marketing. What caught my attention was that all of them were very War-like in nature. So why if this is one to one segmented communications that are supposed to define strong relationship building do we choose to use such words? Maybe it is time for us to all change our vocabulary? I mean after all why did I choose to Title this blog The Email Wars? Well maybe it is my old Army training that drove this for me.

But what about the industry as a whole? Knowing most of the people at all the ESPs and Agencies out there I know that they are nice people. I know that they are only trying to do good things. I know that they have goals of driving results and shepherding people in the right and positive direction. So maybe it is part our fault for using these below terms. Now I have not listed them all, just the main ones I hear over and over again. I am sure you might have some to add, and hope that you will share them with me.

Deploy: We are going to deploy an email campaign.

Blast: We all hate this word and when others use it as it really goes against everything that we should be using ESP systems to get more segmented and one to one.

Target: Sure targeting is important but it is a hostile word

Capture: Lead capture is what we do with forms, opt ins etc. Should we be trying to capture or really trying to give enough reason for someone to want to share their information with us and build a relationship?

Spray and Pray: Similar to blast but the creative way of telling people that mass emails to everyone might work to some degree but really you are just lazily trying to do your job with the hope that it works.

Blacklist: Isn’t this the type of list that people built around wars to politically destroy one another?

Trigger: Yep what is the first thing that comes to mind?

Campaign: Based on the military idea of mounting an attack on a certain area or group.

Purge: Sure we all try to keep our house files and databases clean but should we be “purging” them?

I know that I use a few of these words as they are the words that we have all become accustom to using. But maybe it is time to start creating a new vocabulary list that starts us on the right path to creating terms that represent where we all want the industry to go.

If I hear “blast” one more time I might go AWOL.

Are there terms that you think we should use?