Nearly every big marketing move has something in common with the other big moves. And that’s innovation. From the ’50s Marlboro Man to the more recent web buzz generating grasshopper , we can see that innovation plays a huge role in any marketing. From these simple yet hugely successful marketing campaigns we can conclude that creative marketing can generate a lot of buzz – and huge returns – if its executed properly.
The Marlboro man was an expensive campaign, but from Marlboro Man we learned that brand awareness can be shifted. 
Before the cowboy appeared, filter cigarettes were considered feminine, but with the massive campaign the brand was turned around entirely. Speaking in ideas and social context, the Marlboro Man was using a ‘breaking rapport’ tonality when addressing potential customers, who thought that feminine cigarettes were masculine. This means that the campaign was actually meant to change the client’s emotion towards something, and that is what made Marlboro Man – an emotional connection with the clients.
The Grasshopper, however, was a guerrilla marketing campaign where… well… you know. People emailed famous people chocolate covered grasshoppers. Besides some shocked vegetarians, the campaign generated tremendous results and the small company, which supplies -800 numbers to people, has had huge returns from this small campaign, as grasshopper entirely occupied twitter and the blogosphere with its odd marketing campaign.
These two ideas are great illustrations of wonders that creativity and genuine congruence about the value of your products can do. No one has to be a genius to come up with ground breaking ideas. The best ideas are often derived from other sources–which have to be hidden, as Einstein said. And besides that, email marketing is somewhat limited in terms of innovation, which is good. Because there’s less to think about.
So how do you become creative in email marketing, then?
At first, realize what you have to work with in email marketing. That includes the subject line, the ‘from’ field, the Web Sign-Up forms, things like market segmentation and personalization, etc. When you’ve covered your market comes the hard part; if you want to stand out from the crowd, try changing the stuff you can work with, one by one, to make it even more appealing to the customers.
Email marketing isn’t rocket science.
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