Aaron Weiche

When visiting the Minneapolis Star Tribune this afternoon I was bombarded with a page of ads for email marketing services.

Both iContact and Vertical Response were serving up banner ads on the newspaper's home page.  It could only mean one thing, Minneapolis is the place for email marketing.

In all seriousness though, it shows how widely accepted email marketing has become. Business big and small, non-profits, interest groups, associations and even neighborhoods use email marketing to communicate, market and sell.

Though widely accepted and used, there still lies a great distance between using email to market and greatly leveraging the tools capabilities. List building, segmentation, purposed messaging and performance measurement can all be taken to great lengths with email marketing when done right.

Email marketing offers a lot for sure, but it's also important to see past just "doing it" and really unleash its power.

As a Minnesotan, I'm well used to the "snow hype" we seem to put into rumored snow storms.  Each one starts with initial forecasts of 2 to 4 inches, then somehow through TV news, gossip and other ingredients, it ends up being a forecast of at least a foot of snow.

What if you can grab onto that hype and join the spin?
I was surprised to get an email from a local hotel where I live in Buffalo, advertising a "snow rate" of $69 for the night.

I applaud them for jumping into the topic of the day and using it to put their name into the mix.  It's a great and clever marketing strategy that offers both branding and a call to action.

Here is another example of snow storm marketing, Green Mill Restaurants via Twitter.

Now I'm wondering why the ski and snowboard hill near me doesn't send me an email telling me what I should do with my day tomororw?

Video from me out in Snowmass, 2009