With summer here, I'm looking forward to a favorite pastime shared with my father: fishing! I got to thinking about what's needed to make this fishing trip a success and chuckled at the similarities to how marketers approach an email marketing campaign. It seems like an apt time to have a little fun and use this fishing trip as an analogy (or shall we say methodology) for approaching your email marketing programs. So let's go fishing!

Inertia and fear determine more marketing campaigns than most marketers are ready to admit. While companies talk the talk about customer-centricity and relevant communications, what comes out of their servers is that same old/same-old, one-size-fits-all, spray-and-pray messaging. When reading that each of their millions of customers should be getting individualized emails, the prospect of doing that actually frightens some of them and questions their competence as marketers. Their incorrect perception of the required effort (it's much less than they think) feeds that fear and stifles their ability to move forward with better campaigns.