Give The Boot To “Shrute” Thinking About Email Marketing!

How fast word travels in the apparently small world of email marketing!  Until last week I hadn’t written anything in my own blog since Jan. 2009.  My writing time has been consumed since then by ghost writing a blog for a client (nearly 350 articles to date for them).

Yet less than 24 hours after I wrote about Mail Chimp’s attitude toward purchased email lists I had inspired a sort of modern caricature contest on Mail Chimp’s blog for who could best combine the pictures of kindred spirits Ben Chestnut from Mail Chimp and Dwight Shrute from the TV show The Office.

As I looked at these two characters more closely, I realized there were more parallels between them than I thought:

- Dwight is the top salesman for the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company and has won numerous awards for his successes
- Ben is apparently the co-founder of Mail Chimp.  His company has also won numerous awards.

- Though successful, Dwight lacks social skills and common sense
- Ben only advocates a very anti-social type of marketing called opt-in email (targeted mass email is so much friendlier, well adjusted and doesn’t grovel for attention or recognition), an obvious indication he lacks basic common sense in marketing.

- Dwight is the butt of many jokes in his office
- Ben apparently is too.  I wish I knew PhotoShop.  Someone at an office I once worked at mashed up me with Shrek and sent it to a bunch of people in the office.

- Dwight has pretensions to authority in his field – he thinks he is assistant regional manager.  Dwight is actually assistant TO the regional manager (a much less important position)
- Ben has pretensions to authority in his field – but he is merely “going with the flow”

- Rainn Wilson (who plays Shrute) describes Dwight as “someone who does not hate the system, but has a deep and abiding love for it”
- Ben is a reactionary too.  He loves conventional email marketing (IE permission opt-in emailing only)

- Dwight is a former volunteer sheriff and has been trained in surveillance
- Ben works at Mail Chimp’s abuse desk monitoring their clients and policing them with Gestapo type tactics

- In the “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” episode, Dwight reads the children a story from the German book, Struwwelpeter. He claims they are cautionary tales for kids, and the particular story he reads is about a girl who sucks her thumbs and then gets them cut off by a tailor after her mother had warned about it.
- Mail Chimp’s blog has an Abuse Desk Stories section of similar cautionary tales with similar consequences for disobedience

Still, I do have to thank Ben for some of his insightful blog articles (the Cloudmark one was really good) and especially for referencing my article in his blog – my blog and website experienced a huge surge in traffic in the days following (I’ve been doing virtually no promotion in recent months – I’ve been too busy with existing business from my campaigns last fall) – 173 blog views on Friday, the day he posted it.

Still, it’s not the most blog views I’ve had in a single day, thanks to marketing my business via targeted mass email (that record is 230).  And it’s nowhere NEAR the record number of visitors to my website in one day – 1000 unique visitors, all of it stemming from an email blast to about 200,000 qualified prospects.

Check out some of my free pre-recorded webinars on targeted mass email marketing and learn why you should give Shrute type thinking the boot!

Advertisement