Really smart email from the folks over at Southwest. I’ve been an A-List status member of the Southwest Rapid Rewards program for some time. At least 2 years I think. Earlier today I received this awesome email from Southwest, outlining my A-List benefits.
Even though I’ve been a member and an avid fan of Southwest, I couldn’t believe the number of benefits I had forgotten about. Smart email. Makes me even feel better about my A-List status.
Tony Franklin from Undertone has this great little email program called Tony’s Tidbits. Without failure, rain, shine, blizzard, etc. Tony sends an email to a number of folks with quotes designed to offer perspective and inspiration. I’ve tweeted many of them and filed away dozens of others. This morning he sent one titled, “Let Go,” by Mary Manin Morrissey:
Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you can let go of today?
It’s profound and something I generally apply to my life on a daily basis. As I wrote last April:
There’s just no value in looking back. Well, there’s no value in looking back if you want to look forward. If you’re focused on what can be, instead of what was, there’s no value in looking back. Looking back is dangerous. It holds you back and keeps you stuck in neutral. Life is no fun when you’re in neutral
It’s true. Don’t move forward. To reach your potential you must let go of your baggage, stop looking back and get focused on what’s ahead.
I’m a big believer in the idea of ethnographic research. I think immersing yourself into the world of your audience is much more powerful than focus groups, surveys and other “research” tools. Of late, there’s been a great deal of emphasis being paid to “Digital Ethnographies.” I won’t get into a lot of depth about Digital Ethnographies. This paper does a fantastic job of providing a lot of background on the subject matter. Here’s a great passage that offers a high level overview of Digital Ethnographies…the last line is particularly powerful.
In essence, Digital Ethno is the modern, digital equivalent of traditional, Malinowskian ethno-graphic forms. The critical distinction is that while traditional ethnographers physically immerse themselves in distinct places and their cultures, digital ethnographers capitalize on wired and wireless technologies to extend classic ethnographic methods, like participant observation, beyond geographic, as well as temporal, boundaries. This method is ideally suited to documenting the fluidity and flexibility already distinguishing contemporary cultures and communities. Participants communicate their experience via the Internet and other digital technologies. Digital ethnographers gather these details, whether they’re in the form of words, images, or audio files, and determine their significance as they are played out in the context of participants’ lives.
I think one of the most powerful sources of insight sources we can leverage is the inbox. What an inbox could tell us is amazing. For example if you looked at my inbox you’d find an insanely well organized folder structure. Everything is placed into a place, that’s then folded into another place, that’s then folded into another place. Things are organized by topics of interest, years, months, etc. and of course it’s all alphabetical. You’ll also find that there’s nothing in my actual inbox because I have a serious case of OCD. I can’t go to bed until my inbox is empty. It simply weighs on me. You won’t find any personal emails mixed in with my work email account, nor will you find any work email mixed in with my personal email account. I keep them separate. You’ll find that 65% of my sent emails are to the same 8 people and that 75% of my received emails are from roughly the same 20 people.
That’s just a little glimpse. Imagine if you could see who my contacts were and what was in my calendar. Now imagine if you could see all my email from the dawn of time? You’d be able to see how my relationships changed, what things were important and the things I attended/did. In essence you would have an amazing insight into me.
If you’re a girl and all you have are emails and contacts that are guys, what does that say? If you hold on to emails from exes what does that to say? If you don’t put emails into folders or vice versa, what does that say? What about about the content of your emails? Are they friendly? Short? Detailed? Filled with smiley faces and LOLs? Are they flirty? Serious? Do you email frequently? Are your emails mostly to the same people or do you spread it out? Do you have a lot of email newsletters? What about junk email?
Your inbox says a lot about you. Give some thought to what would happen if you let someone rifle through your email history…read your emails, see who you contact, what events you attended…and if you use gMail, what you said to people via chats.
Pretty heavy, huh?
This is a picture of my inbox right now at 6:29 PM. This is how my inbox looks every night.
On an average day I receive anywhere from 200 – 300 emails. Yet, at the end of the day, but inbox is empty. Several people have asked me how I do it. I can tell you that it’s not easy and it’s not because I read every single email. It’s also not because I’m a machine.
Truthfully, I can’t go to sleep unless my inbox is empty. I hate the idea that I’ll walk into the office the next day and be completely buried in emails. I prefer email communication to the phone; a fact I impress upon my colleagues, clients, and friends. In choosing email over the phone, I realize that I’m kinda asking for a boat load of emails to sift through.
So how do I have an empty inbox every night before I head to bed? Here’s my approach to email management:
I have been using this approach for over 10 years. Even as the volume of emails I receive has gone up, I’ve been able to stay on top of the chaos. The hardest part is staying true to the approach. People will try to break your approach. They will try to figure out a way to get you to change. If you make exceptions for everyone you don’t have a process anymore.
Give it a try and let me know if it works for you.
Ok, that’s a gross over-statement, but they don’t matter as much as they used to. This great article at HubSpot says much of what I’ve been professing for the past 8 months, but it explains it a hell of a lot better than I do. At a high level, here is why open rates don’t really matter:
Head of Social Media at Walgreens. Interactive marketer, innovator, boat rocker, continuous learner, movie lover, risk taker, dad and all around good guy. I'm always up for a spirited conversation. These are my thoughts and ramblings, not those of my employer.
