The Cart Blog

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Transactional Email: Marketing Opportunity?

Filed under: Email, Marketing — thatsoftwareguy @ 6:50 am

Transactional emails are comfort food.  “Thank you for your order from ourstore.com …” with a shipping estimate and order management link is the sort of post-sale follow up most customers expect.  They get opened and read.  So why are so few marketers leveraging them?

Elaine’s suggestion is great.  I think I’ll add this as a switchable option to my cross-selling software.

Covey: Four Disciplines

Filed under: Books, Motivation — thatsoftwareguy @ 6:27 am

Four Disciplines
Just listened to Stephen Covey’s Four Disciplines of Execution. Classic Covey, no big surprises. The four disciplines are:

  1. Focus on your Wildly Important Goals
  2. Create a compelling scoreboard
  3. Translate lofty goals into specific actions
  4. Hold each other accountable all the time

What differentiates a Covey book from the typical “execution” or “decision-making” tome written by some ego-driven CEO is Covey’s distinctively avuncular manner. Somehow it makes it easier to take the hard messages.

The timing of this was serendipitous, because I just had a chance to listen to an HBR Ideacast in which the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls were interviewed. They discussed how the decision making cannot adequately be evaluated in isolation.  Instead, they argued that including quality of execution and follow-through would yield a more holistic measure of decision making effectiveness.

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