The Email Wars

I have seen quite a few opt out pages. I could wager that you have seen your fair share as well. I have never seen one that takes this approach in the email marketing break up. Have you? Take a look at the copy and the image. Not only is the image a classic one and on brand with Thrillist, but the submit button is titled “Fire”. Is this like take a shot at us fire? Or The Donald’s version of your fired? Not sure but either way it stood out.

Now I am still getting this daily as I love it, but I wanted to share the humor that they placed out on the line only to show you how different people approach the same situation. Heck they got me to post it and maybe that will drive a few more subscribers of only to be able to unsubscribe for yourself.

I would assume that your brand would not be able to pull this approach off, but props for them to staying on brand.

Just a little email marketing food for thought that I saw last week from David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007).
274: Average number of personal emails weekly.
304: Average number of business emails weekly.
26%: Opt-in email campaigns as percentage of total inbox email.
74%: Email users with 2 email accounts.

These are some good numbers to get your head around. Look at how many business and personal emails we are dealing with each and every week. And then think about you are working against close to 600 other emails on average for the attention and the midshare of your subscribers. So you better make them impactful, relevant and worth our time.

The funny thing is that on average the typical person has 2 inboxes. One work and one personal. Now this is the typical number we have, but I would wager than many of you have even more than this. This is because we are not average. So stop thinking about what you would do or where you would read your emails. We are not marketing to the abnormal person, or are we? The answer to this really depends on who you are marketing to. Mothers (maybe 2), blue collar (maybe one), tech heads (maybe 4-5). But my point here is to think like them. Understand who your market is and act accordingly.

This bit of news today only highlights that email marketing has power and is one of the best channels. First we had Jason Calacanis taking about how he was ending his blogging and moving to a controlled newsletter and now this news. We also had Disney scoop up a daily newsletter we love called Ideal Bite a few weeks back. IS there a move to reinforce the power of email marketing as the prime communication channel underway? What happened to everyone jumping on the bandwagon of RSS and thinking how to sell ads in RSS? Well the fact remains that no matter how hard we try to force a new technology into middle america (aka the masses) we end up seeing middle america move slower than we ever though that they would.

Or is it just a move to increase ways to drive revenue, ad sales and traffic with all of these 2.0 properties? I think a healthy combo of all the above.

Here is the story from CNET

When you are using dynamic content in email, you better make sure that you have data in all the fields you are going to use for ALL subscribers. Often times I see people trying to get to a one to one relationship and they fail to check and test their data sources before they send. And what a bad impression as well as impact it makes on the brand. Especially when they send it to someone in email marketing. This example was passed on to me from Maddy Hubbard (whom we adore) at another ESP. Yep it is okay to like someone else at the competition.

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Yes, we have reached and passed a milestone. 

For the record, there were 275 days in 2005 that I was blogging. Of those to present there have been 82 in 2005 were weekends. In 2006 there were 105 weekend days. There were 104 weekend days in 2007. And in 2008 there have been 56 thus far. That makes 347 days. Why is this important? Well I typically do not post on the weekends, just the week days, but this is when I do a majority of my writing. So out of 1201 days I have reached over 1000 posts on this blog. Quite a milestone for me and a lot of time and thought for one person alone. Here is to more posts, more comments from the rest of you lurkers, the great work, the bad work and news worthy finds to rant and rave about. The best part is the majority of the content is original and not just email news regurgitated.

I really want to thank all of you for consistently reading it, even with rushed thoughts sometimes my typos, I blame the latter on fat fingers and a racing brain. It is more of a place that I use to journal things for myself and let them be shared with everyone else. I get asked all the time how I keep up the pace. I can tell you that truthfully it is not easy to keep up the pace. It takes constant clipping of emails that float through some of my inboxes (yes I have more than 2 and less than 8) and remembering of why I wanted to save them. 

So here it to you and to me as a collective community of knowledge. Here is to more posts from me and more comments from you!

I am a big fan of the use of images to tell the stories in email. I know you will bash this as well images can be suppressed, but when it works and it done right pictures can evoke a click often times more that too much text. Copy, although important, is so often over used and truly just creates more things to do and drives less impact on the desired action to delve deeper into the story, item, purchase, conversion, etc. 

This example of Adobe is their newsletter which connects with people on so many levels. Not only for the fact that it is outright sexy, but that it can tell the stories quicker with images than it would with text. Simple layouts like this are growing and evident more in the movement to simplify our web interactions with the 2.0 design philosophy. 

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More than 75 percent of all email today is spam, placing a significant strain on your network, budget, and employee productivity. Our objective is to leverage mail security intelligence from the Symantec Global Intelligence Network to help protect your business from spam. By offering up-to-date expert resources, such as the monthly State of Spam Report, this site gives you a central source to turn to for the latest on spam.

Overall: http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=state_of_spam

July 2008 PDF http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/other_resources/b-state_of_spam_report_07-2008.en-us.pdf

This recent email from GQ Magazine gets right to the point. Here what we have to offer, this is what you get so take THIS action. Now the LARGE RED arrow does the trick of keeping you focused on the task they want you to take. No reason not to be completely clear of the intended purpose here. 

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I am sorry I was just so tempted to write a fun teaser line for those of you subscribing by RSS. I really just wanted to highlight some new work that eROI just finished for CBS Sports. I was not personally involved in this project but it came out great. 

All the details are here, and PSSST if you like Fantasy… Sports, sign up at CBS. 

It is  not just about what you see here but all the newsletter creation as well as the process. It has been a great project to work on and everyone here at eROI is happy to be involved with not only a project but a passion of many sports junkies here.

Notice how we keep it simple.
 

“For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool’s Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World.”

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/070108-mcafee-spam-experiment.html?hpg1=bn

Every once in a while I come across a funny post or in this case Tweet, about Spam and what it means to people. This one in particular I think we can all, no matter our profession, can understand. It is that little thing that keeps the crap in our inboxes coming, the fact that people no matter what will still click on an email that they KNOW is not valid or right. 

But I think we can all laugh at this.

The trend has been growing and I am very happy to see this I might add. The more that I see people asking for you to set and manage your profile, email preferences, and giving you the ability to tell them more about yourself makes me feel that the world is getting to be a better place for email marketing. Piperlime, personally love them, does a solid job each week with the creative but also stands tall as an example for retailers building the trust and admiration of their consumers. 

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So often publishers feel that they have the right to use your email as much as they want, with whom they want and for what purposes they want to. Now being that in the old skool world that they came from, many of them are still trying to figure out the ropes of how email marketing works for them in a print world. 

I am never sure why I get some emails that I do from them when they have simply rented the use of their lists to a third party to send me emails that in many cases are not relevant. The house file is a sacred one and in the old world of DM there were often few things one could do to keep DM from the mail box on the street. Our way of dealing with it was to simply take it from the box to the curb or the round file next to our kitchen or work desk. In today’s world we can simply unsubscribe and these publishers are now seeing how important it is to own that relationship for the long term when we can churn so fast.

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I have been reading over this study a few times now. It is well done and yet totally confounds my sense of thinking around keeping it short, driving home the point, telling me what to do, and being relevant. So if you have not read it yet it is the Alchemy Worx study that is reporting longer subject lines have a great impact on read to click as opposed to shorter subject lines that are just read…

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I have been looking for more email lately in light of the ever escalating prices of CRUDE (like the impact of our company name EROI, not becoming the term for Economic Return on Oil Investment in the Blogosphere) and how companies might use it as a marketing message. 

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