Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

Long time entrepreneurs Nanci Garnand and Sony Jackson have both built successful small businesses. After meeting through a coaching program, the two became friends and over time began to think about ways in which they could help other small business owners. Strategic Success Tools was born. In this interview we’ll hear their stories of their beginnings in business, their challenges along the way, and the brilliant new tool they’ve created to make exceptional Customer Relationship Management simple and affordable. To take advantage of the free 30 day trial of Strategic Success Tools please visit http://bit.ly/ftfreetrial (Affiliate)

** Disclaimer: This isn't my normal blog fare. If you're interested at all in email marketing, this article might be of interest, but otherwise it's long and potentially boring. I'm also not offering it as a prescription for how anyone should do email marketing, or email in general. It's just some observations of my own. A couple of weeks ago I was presenting a workshop in which I was talking about my recent experiences with email. The gist of the story is that a few months ago, after getting tired of the vitriol in many online exchanges, I wanted to bring a more uplifting message to people. I started a weekly email message, now called Inbox Encouragement. I was telling the group about how I was seeing open and click through rates that were the highest I'd ever seen. Open rates as high as 80% and click through rates ranging from 25-45%. At one point in the discussion I was asked if I had any idea of any of the clicks were converting. In sales language that

A few years ago Gmail introduced the promotions inbox, which was kind of a intermediate spam folder. I stopped using it almost immediately, mainly because there were emails going there that should have shown up in my primary inbox,  which continued to be inundated with marketing and sales email. Hell, I can't turn down a good lead magnet. I've created a Google Drive file just for them. But the collateral mess that began to pollute my inbox became frustrating and overwhelming. I tried some of the inbox cleaning services like Unroll.me and SaneBox, but they didn't really unsubscribe me from mailing lists, they just direct deposited emails into my trash folder befoer I could even see them. This also became problematic when, later on I wanted to reengage with some of the accounts that had been included in the scrubs. Even the emails I wanted to receive ended up in the discard pile. A few years ago I created a completely separate email account that I use only for signing u