“Anticipated, personal and relevant messages always do better.”
That seems obvious now. In 1999, it was sort of radical.
This is my first real book, a worldwide bestseller and the book that launched the multi-billion dollar email marketing industry. When we started Yoyodyne in the early 90s, it was very much a zero-billion dollar industry.
The best way to explain what we were doing was to name it, and then, once the benefits were clear, I used my background as a book packager to turn the ideas and stories into a book.
The cover photo made a surprisingly big difference in spreading the ideas inside the book–because unlike most business books at the time, here was an actual author talking to you about something he had pioneered. That’s common now, but it was sort of amazing to see how that simple shift resonated with people in search of a new idea.
I can’t find any of the original talks from 20 + years ago, but here are two from the old days: