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!