I chuckled to myself for the past few weeks as I received promotional emails for more computers. I gave them the benefit of the doubt – maybe I’m an IT professional who buys several computers. Today, I received an email for a deal on the exact same computer I bought which hit the head on the nail that Dell, as great as a computer company they are, does not know email marketing.

Considering I had to login to their cart to make my purchase, and considering I used the same email they message to as my login, shouldn’t they make the connection that I just bought a computer and I will likely not buy another one tomorrow? If it were a sandwich shop or a dry cleaner, I might want to make another purchase tomorrow, but I might not buy a new computer for a couple years.

I’m not saying they should stop sending me emails. There’s a huge opportunity for them to send me more emails promoting the things I am interested in. They know which product I bought, so why not send me an email with a deal on accessories, or software or peripherals? I received nothing and I do need to purchase some accessories for my new machine. Coincidentally, my cart on competitive sites is full of those accessories.

The problem with email marketing, is that for some reason companies refuse to learn to do it right. Email marketing has been around for several years now. The email marketing tools available are extremely sophisticated and email marketing is still a very viable method to reach your customers. So why don’t companies, especially large companies, do it better? I’ve noticed that some companies do it well and have been for quite some time. The rest of you sleeping giants need to wake up.

Today I’ve installed the SimpleX theme and modified it with the following:

• Changed the CSS link colors and behaviors.
• Modified header nav bar to omit the home link since I’m using a static page for the home.
• Modified the main page template to omit the title (The home page title was “Home” – tacky

I’ve got a few more modifications to make to the CSS, which will make it an ongoing project but I think I’m at a good place so far.

• Using CSS for more than text decorations.
• Building templates with div tags.
• Learning a few extra, yet basic,  PHP tricks
• Hosting and the associated database administration – though minimal with WordPress.

There are a million resources on the web for setting up your own WordPress blog. The reality is that it’s not that hard to do. The hard part is using it to build a sustainable communication vehicle which takes a lot of planning and ongoing management (I’ll get into that later).

Although I have several pet projects in the works that use Worpress, you can view a real life example of my work at http://blog.sandiego.org, the official blog for the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau.