While Rand was out of town he received an email from a man named Darren Barefoot. Since Rand was up to his ears in meetings, presentations, and consultancies, he forwarded the email to me and asked me to take a look at it. The email subject was "Can You Spare 88 Seconds?" My first thought was, "Probably." (Really, 88 seconds is not much time to sacrifice.) The body of the email asked us to spare 88 seconds to watch a video message that Darren recorded for us. Intrigued I was--I mean, it's not every day that SEOmoz receives video messages directed specifically to target us.

So, what did I do? I watched the video:

• Personally address your target. Everyone hates those "Dear webmaster" emails (In fact, today Scott received an email that said "Dear webmaster, my name is webmaster." Um, okay.)--they reek of laziness and spammy link efforts. Not only did Darren email Rand personally and address us personally in the video, but he made a reference to Seattle, demonstrating that he did a little bit of homework and injected a little sumthin' sumthin' to get us to go "Hey, we do live in Seattle! This guy must know us!"
• Engage your target. Darren made quite an effort here. He recorded a personalized video and edited some clips from the Elastic Path videos into it. This marketing campaign was definitely something different than the slew of generic, vanilla emails we receive every day asking us to check out a new feature/site/monkey's paw/whatever.
• Keep it brief! The short email and the 88 second video really made me think "Okay, it looks like this guy is going to get to the point quickly, and I like that." And Darren didn't disappoint. You need to capture your audience's attention quickly. Most of us don't have time to read long, drawn-out emails detailing every minute feature about your product. Get to the meaty stuff quickly or you'll lose your audience.

Well done, Darren--you prompted Rand to make me blog about something he thought was interesting, and that's no easy feat (usually I just ignore him). Keep up the good work, and as for the rest of us, well, I'd say that this is an interesting study about how email marketing isn't dead after all--it's just requiring a bit of creativity.