The fine folks at the Email Experience Council have been doing yeoman service in sharing best practices and insights drawn from industry campaigns and their own experience as practicing email marketers. 

The transformation of two stellated rhombic dodecahedrons from a cube.

For the math challenged, this is a really cool video, up there with any great demo you might have seen.

Last night I read about the launch of City Poems, a location-aware iPhone app by Vic Keegan, a 70-year old Guardian journalist. Phew, that single sentence is rife with the possibility of so many stories. Location based applications (what I we did in a previous incarnation), poetry and what we can learn from it, the theme of this post, iPhone apps out of the UK (or India for that matter) and the story of Vic Keegan himself. But as better men than me have put it, I digress.

As marketers and writers there are several insights we can draw from poetry. Here are three things that I learned from poetry that are worth keeping in my mind, as we create content - be it  blogs, email newsletters or any form of written copy.

Context Growing up, whenever my father would read or narrate the story of Rama, the hero of the eponymous Indian epic, his eyes would water. Today when my teen daughters read "Lochinvar" or "Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead" it is my eyes that are not dry. How can these poems, written a couple of centuries ago or even a couple of millennia ago - move us to tears? It is because they are anchored in perennial themes - such as love, and the triumph of good over evil. Such anchoring provides immediate context - as each of us brings with us a whole baggage of (hopefully pleasant) emotions that allow us to relate and become part of the poem. Good poets can do this for even the most mundane of activities such as renting an apartment or trying to understand a 13-year old.

Precision One definition of poetry I've heard is "that which can't be translated (well)." Take any favorite poem of your choice and play around with the words in it. Does it sound better, if you replaced one or more words with others, removed words or even added words. Any poem that's stood the test of time is likely to only get uglier if we mess with it. Try it with Shelley's Ozymandias (written in 1818) 

Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

or if you prefer a more recent poem, try it with Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

Passion All too often, many of us in business seem to equate passion with an ungainly display of emotion. Yet, as any one who's seen a Steve Jobs presentation or one by Hans Rosling will immediately acknowledge that their passion not only sets them apart but helps communicate their messages even better. Great poetry communicates its message without being pedantic or preachy - whether the horrors of war (Dulce et Decorum Est), how appearances can be deceptive (Richard Cory) and packs the simplest of words with passion ("Casabianca" or "O Captain, My Captain") 

Keeping in mind the context in which your audience will read what you have written, keeping it precise and communicating the passion you feel, can set apart your own writing and message.

"The last time I did an email blast I received a very poor response," one of my clients told me during a meeting. I am surprised by how often I come across marketers who want to purchase a list and blast members on the list with their newsletter or promotional email. Here are three reasons why you should be concerned if your marketing person wants to send email blasts.

1. It is about relationship Your prospects or customers want to receive information that is important or relevant to them. When you share such information with them, you build credibility and over time trust. Buying a list and sending email blasts violates that assumption. You will have no idea of what the people on the list want to hear about. If you are not a big brand, chances are that most of them may not have even heard of you. Worse yet, you may be tarnishing your brand by being viewed as a spammer.

2. Language matters As with charity, language too, begins at home. Language is critical to effectively communicate your message but how you wield it also telescopes who you are and what you believe in. So when your marketers talk about email blasting, that language and attitude, will be communicated to the recipients of their blast. Which is rarely likely to be in your company's interest.

3. Blast is a euphemism for spam  97% of all emails are unwanted, found a Microsoft Security Survey conducted in 2009. According to most anti-spam laws, a recipient should have opted-in to receive communication from you, though some, like the CAN-SPAM Act 2003 are based on the opt-out principle. Purchasing a list and sending emails to members on the lists, is a prime candidate for being spammed and in some instances you may be breaking the law. 

The sooner your marketing team realizes that email blast is a 4-letter word, the easier the job for all email marketers.

How often should I send my newsletter? This is a question that everyone asks when starting a newsletter program. Some of this stems from a desire to be effective. Quite often the question stems from the feasability of sustaining a newsletter at the proclaimed frequency.

The frequency of a newsletter depends on both the audience that you are targeting as well as your objective. A newsletter needs to be opened before it can become effective. This means that you should not overload your audience with your newsletters. Email open rates across 16 industies stood at 22.2% for Q2 09, according to a 2009 survey.This means there  is less than 1 in 4 chance that your newsletter may be opened by a recipient. You don't need to make it worse by sending newsletters too often. As a rule of thumb, anything more than a newsletter a week is too much. You run a huge risk of spamming your recipients.

For a newsletter to be effective, content is important. But much like advertising, you need to do it often enough to stay in the mind of the audience. Anything less than a newsletter a month is most probably too little. If you are not doing at least a newsletter a month, you run the risk of escaping your audience's mind. Running promotional campaigns might be a better alternative in that case.

In summary, the frequency of your newsletter should be at least a month, but not more than a newsletter a week. An exception to this means that you have a very strong reason to do so.

This is a question that torments many of us as we embark on a newsletter program.

Should I talk about my products? Should I sell my products? Do I talk about my latest win? Is it okay to talk about why my product is superior to competition? Should I run a promotional campaign in my newsletter?

All of us have been tempted and tormented by these and similar questions in the course of our newsletter experience.

A newsletter is targeted at customers and prospects and it should cover topics of interest and relevance to them. According to a CMO Council survey, more  than half of consumers who opted out of e-newsletters, did so because the content was no longer relevant. Eventually, the newsletter editor, in most cases, the marketing manager, has to take a subjective call on what is "relevant". However, as a rule of thumb, it is best to go with a 80-20 split. 80% of content should be about them - the audience and their interests and 20% could be about us - our products, customers, promotions; 80% should be information and 20% could be sales.

"What is the ROI that you will guarantee if I start a newsletter program?" is a question often posed to me during my interaction with prospects. We tend to apply measures to everything that we do. As Michael Katz, a leading e-newsletter consultant puts it "...in my corporate life, we all pretended that if we couldn't measure it, it didn't exist. Things which didn't fit neatly into spreadsheets (like relationships) were ignored, because there was no easy way to track them."

Newsletters help us stay on top of our customer's mind so that when the customer  is ready to purchase or engage, we are the first ones he thinks of. According to the ConAgra Foods case study conducted in association with Marketing Sherpa in 2007, customers that opt-in for an e-newsletter spend 34.25% more than other customers. This makes good business sense, even for non-believers. The challenge is how to stay  disciplined and effective with e-newsletters.