The Email Wars

When you go into designing an email campaign most likely the last thing that you are thinking about from a marketing perspective is the footer, right? This is where you tell them who it came from, how to get off a list, and the address that they can use to tie a note to a brick to hurl through your window (I use our CEOs Suite # as it is much closer to the street level and I like to make things easy). But what about providing some additional value in the footer and even some humor to make people think twice about bailing out?

I noticed this past week one of the email I subscribe to from the UK that does just this. The footer it seems is not just a past thought, but just as important to the voice and goals of the email campaign itself.

At first glance the average user might never notice it, but if you got this far in the email why not take some initiative to protect yourself from losing them? Since their site aggregates content from all over the Internetz it seems that they have had feedback about opening new windows to get the links to work. They addressed this with a simple text line which may have stopped complaints, frustration and emails asking them if the links were broken. The second touch was the use of humor in the copy of the unsubscribe. They provide a clear and unobstructed way to take this action, but they surrounded it with simple copy addressing someone removing themselves from all email (or at least set the expectations of the action) by addressing that they could remove themselves from this one email they got, not all. While I am sure that you could remove yourself from all, the simple act of the copy mentally might keep someone from bailing completely. Nice idea. They also use emoticons “: ( ” to give an idea of sadness to see you go. Again a simple touch to an area that is often just a matter of business and best practices.

Do you have a way of doing this with your own campaigns? Or would you be willing to test it? I think it is worth looking into if you have control over your footers. I know some of you do not due to your choice in ESPs/Agencies (wink wink, nudge nudge :> ).