I heard an interesting commentary on NPR about the state of Retail in the US.  The Morning Edition Series was featuring the credit problems all week and this one talked about the challenges facing Brick and Mortar Retailers as they deal with the economic downturn. Click HERE to Listen.


Many of the Menswear Specialty Stores we have as clients have been feeling the credit pinch for years and are taking the steps to keep their costs in line to weather these storms.  Email marketing for small business has been a component  for small businesses  start to streamline their marketing investments.  The broadcast was overall very informative.  The overall conclusion was that a record 7.000 stores could close this year, thought it made no mention of the competition that brick and mortar retailers were feeling from the competition with web merchants.

. 

Strawberry Hill in Irish Town Jamaica is an incredibly cool place for someone wanting a rustic, off the beaten path Caribbean escape.  Located in the Blue Mountains fifteen mile above Kingston, my wife and I enjoyed 3 days of relaxing and exploring.  

The culmination of each day was the cocktail hour at the bar.  The ambiance was ideal for any baby boomer who could appreciate the music of his youth as the walls were covered with incredible pictures from the 70's of both reggae and rock stars recording music for Island Records.  Island records founder and Jamaican Icon, Chris Blackwell is the resorts owner and had used this retreat in the 70's to record music. Check out these pictures of Bob Marley, Mick Jagger and Sting:

We quickly became friends with our bartender, Troy.  His friendly personality, inviting smile and his generous pouring of aged Appleton rum made the cocktail hour a highlight of the trip.


Here's a picture of Troy and my wife Amy.  (The Menswear Specialty stores that we do email marketing for need to take note of his shirt)

This was the first time since I've owned a laptop (8 years) that I've traveled without one.  I opted for a book Piller's of The Earth by Ken Follet.  Needless to say, I was able to take a week off from the various email marketing campaigns that I  work on for the brick and mortar retailers and web merchants.  But that doesn't mean my marketing mind wasn't at work  for Jamaican bartenders.  When Troy gave us a taste of a drink he had invented the recipe for, I became his "self appointed" marketing guru.  He was submitting the recipe for a contest. The drink was delicious (it was a blend of Tia Maria, Creme de Cocoa, sweetened condensed milk, ground peanuts, pineapple and a few secrets) but it needed a name.  I christened it "Troy's Trouble in a Pitcher" and I will try and follow up and see how it did.  Hopefully we can launch his internet marketing campaign.

I was excited to be included on the SCORE (Senior Corps of Retired Executives) panel discussion.  Titled "CONDUCTING BUSINESS ONLINE
Advice and Tips from Those Who Do It", had about 30 attend.
The other panel members included KATIE DAS the founder of dasfoods.com, THERESA CARTER, founder of TheLocalTourist.com, and PAUL SEGEDIN  the owner of learningguidenetwork.com.

Attendees were very interested in discussing web sites, blogging and email marketing for small business.  The group contained a variety of entrepreneurs in Retail, web merchants and brick and mortar, and some in B2B. 

L to R: Katie Das, Paul Segedin, Theresa Carter, John Fell

The group seemed equally split between new start-ups and existing small businesses. There was one specialty store who was looking to transition to become a web merchant and shed the landlord expense.  Stay Tuned.

Hunter Thompson died in 2005 and his life was my inspiration for an article that I wrote a year later for “Logical Ideas” the email marketing newsletter that we send out at E-Mail Logic.  I guess like the shoemaker whose son who never gets new shoes we’ve been too busy at E-Mail Logic to send out our newsletter the last few years so it’s only appropriate that we use this article to launch our 1st blog.

Hunter Thompson once said: "Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why."  He would know.  His book on the 1972 presidential campaign, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail” followed his own wacky run for office in Colorado two years earlier.  Thompson waded into the fight himself as a "pro-hippie, anti-development" candidate for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, which included the ski town of Aspen.  Thompson wanted to win in order to save what was still a rural, live-and-let-live county from the influx of Hollywood stars, corporate hoteliers and the rest of the elite entourage that would make it the nation's premier ski resort.    While he ran as a member of “The Freak Power Ticket”, he shaved his head so he could call the crew-cut incumbent his “long-haired opponent”.  Understanding the power of branding, Thompson’s campaign platform called for changing the name Aspen to Pig City, Colorado.

Needless to say, Thompson lost the election (by only 500 votes) but his campaign style proved significant. Because of all the national attention accorded Thompson's campaign, the blueprint was noted by "new politics" candidates and activists around the country. They won power in college towns such as Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, and eventually in communities that were threatened by commercial and real estate pressures similar to those that were the target of Thompson's Aspen campaign.

So what does all this have to do with email marketing?   Email campaigns have changed dramatically in the last few years and those changes continue to amaze me.  When E-Mail Logic was started in 2002 we were just trying to figure out a way to send out and use email as an alternative to “snail mail” for a few clients who were using our Clothes Logic software to design marketing pieces using their digital images.  We partnered with Exact Target to use their technology to create and send our creative ideas and alas – an email marketing business was formed.

Four years ago we designed and sent email for clients to their lists – period.  Today that’s the smaller part of what we do.  Yesterday’s weirdness was deliverability, list hygiene, tracking, I.S.P blacklisting, “white knight status”, CAN Spam, email-filtering, SPF Protocol, and other terms and concepts that made me look to the nearest person wearing a pocket protector for interpretation.  Yesterday’s weirdness definitely morphed into tomorrow’s reason why. Yesterday we didn't have catogories for retailers such as such as   Today you can design the greatest, coolest emails – but without following the proper permission building steps and insuring that you’re compliant with all the various ISP’s delivering procedures your emails might only roam endlessly in cyberspace and miss the inboxes of your intended.  Today, it’s the “all of the above” that we now bring to the table for our small business clients and and I introduce the newest case of “yesterday’s weirdness – Our 1st Blog. We've got fout catagories to blog about; Small Business, Web Merchants, Brick and Mortar Retail and Menswear Specialty Stores so it's time to Blog!