The Email Wars

I love it when I see a company do a good job with keeping their subscriber base in the loop proactively to changes in their email services. When you decide to make a change to your IP, your sending domain, your ESP (Email Service Provider) or anything else about your programs that might make an impact on your delivery you need to make sure that you are clearly communicating these changes to all.

Why you might ask? Well it matters. With whitelists, adding to your address book, and many companies and individuals setting delivery rules around emails they get why would you not tell them.

Take a look at this example of how clear and simple they make it. They let you know the what, why, and how their subscribers need to know in order to help them continue to get the emails. Not only is it clear but they also provide a list of links to each email client in order to make this as educational and easy as it can be. Something you might want to steal if you need to do this for your own campaigns.

Now as great as it is, I did notice I few things I would recommend that they (or you) change to emails like this.

First off is to use the Pre-header of the email to drive the importance of this email home for those that might get this on a mobile client like an iPhone, Palm Pre, or Blackberry. Using “Having Trouble reading this? View in a browser.” is not the first thing I would want anyone to see. This old school message is immediately promoting that there might be an issue when there is not. Plus you could use that real estate so much better for your goals of the campaign.

The second point is to not suggest unsubscribing as the action at the footer, but instead ask them to update their preferences or information with you. Telling them to jump ship is not the most proactive step in maintaining your reach. Instead use it as a proactive progressive profiling or email frequency management step to allow them to tell you more or give them options to change how often or what they are getting from you.

The third point is that this is not a campaign but a transactional/account message. So although they are not trying to drive sales, page views or a visit, they do have an opportunity to use this email to feature an option for some type of revenue goal. I would think as a publisher they could use it to reward or offer a tie into extending, renewing or getting a print subscription to their magazine. As long as it was not interfering with the account status/change in delivery email in a tasteful way it would be a good opportunity to engage with a subscriber.

As a whole I am a big fan of this type of email even if it is not driving immediate revenue to your email marketing programs.

Think about how often you are making sure to let people know how they can not only help your deliverability but what they can do to make sure that they are not hunting for your emails in the junk folder.