Me Again

We're reading a guide to email marketing for the holiday season. We're having a big Christmas marketing meeting tomorrow (which I dread btw...these things are killer.) This booklet originally really excited me. Yay! Finally a researched guide! Perfect! But then when it has headers, which I'm assuming are suggestions, like "Target High-Volume Shopping Days" I begin to wonder. Because the information after such a headline isn't based on "these companies targeted these days and saw greater return." Instead it's, "Here's the number of retailers sending emails this particular day so you should do it too."

And that's it. It's stats on what other people did but not the outcomes of what they did. This is a trap I see people fall into all the time for all sorts of things but I see it most significantly in web 2.0 marketing. Other people are doing it may mean it's working, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's working.

*sigh.