The Email Wars

The other morning I was forwarded the email opt in from another ESP by a co-worker at eROI. Now I am not going to share it at this point as it got my juices flowing. I started to wonder… if all of the ESPs out there are stumping on their soap boxes about best practices, studies, and how people are not doing A-B-C of the basics of email marketing… then are they following these rules themselves. 

If you are preaching about closed loop, double opt in, the thank you page, the welcome email and the upsell or cross sell, let alone the triggered emails… are you doing them yourself? It actually made me want to audit our own systems on our site. So I did as well and I will share that with you too. I found some things in our own program that I wanted to fix immediately. Not from a compliance stand point, but from an opportunity standpoint.

So earlier this week I got to work. I started visiting all of the ESPs that I know well, read studies from and know are telling their customers on the road shows, white papers and studies how to be the best email marketers ever. And what did I find? Well that I am going to slowly release one at a time over the next few weeks. I can tell you that it is not pretty. It was actually rather shocking. I took screen shots and notes of all the screens and emails that happened afterwards and need a few days to get them all in order to share them with you. 

Now I hope that some of these ESPs (email service providers) are not going to get too worked up about what I found. Some are doing it right, others are missing the boat entirely. And what I hope that this brings to light is that IF you are going to preach, you need to be drinking the Kool Aid yourself. Take these with a grain of salt and use them to go forth and fix your own systems so that we ESPs can be the best examples to customers we work with. It all starts with us, so let’s get on it.

Stay Tuned…