The Email Wars

I’ll be the first to admit that it has been years since I “woke up with the King” but I am constantly impressed with the constant slew of campaigns radiating from the Big Guy in the robe and crown (king of like the eROI Crown don’t you think). This Angry Gram was first sent to me by one of the team – hope he was just sharing and not really ANGRY (since this email he went o Belize for two weeks and I hope he has recharged his batteries).

But let’s take a look at this campaign from an email marketing standpoint.. cool?

The Email – yes this was the Angry Gram I got and it made me angry. Why? Why don’t brands or agencies learn that LONG SCARY URLS WITH TONS OF ALPHA NUMERIC CHARACTERS are not friendly. Mask those in copy – create a tiny URL like KNG.me or BK.me – something rather than that. But then I am am email marketing snob right?

They actually tell me I can opt out from ANY other emails – so if other friends find this site to… hypothetically these emails will never reach me. Does that kill the viral effect/impact? Sure but it also is a great practice to keep people from really getting angry or reporting a spam complaint.

It comes from someone I know. This is a good thing right? Knowing that Alex sent this to me makes me more likely to open it then if it was sent from Burger King whom I might have never opted in for emails from. But it made me think of a discussion a few years back about should companies be allowed to use your name as the Sender name/email when they use a F2F system like this. Now I can go either way on it as it as an email that Alex actually sent to me that was sent from their email system. The other side of this is who is the actual sender? In the end it is the company here but it is a fine line of data collection and what they are doing with my email address afterwards. Hopefully nothing and the best thing is that they are not storing that record to use for anything again. There are others that use campaigns like this to build house lists and that is a bad idea.

The site itself is well done and simple. Right to the point of making email the driver for the campaign. The only thing I found out of sorts was a terms and conditions. Now we all need to do this, but it felt so angry itself. I doubt many people ever read the T/C but I like to dive under the covers when I get in bed with the King or anyone else out there. My main reason for looking was to see how they were addressing data and email capture. Unfortunately it was just a page that the legal team most likely passed on to the agency that did not address the data policy and set any sort of expectations. Basically it is a CYA policy that does in fact address that people using this are responsible for their actions, but does not address the intentions and responsiblities of the company.

Now I am a big fan of these types of campaigns as they work over and over again. The content is fun, is easy to share (only via email – might suggest some other social ways using FB Connect or Twitter to increase the placement and viral aspect of the campaign), and is compelling enough for people to want to use it.

In closing I think that companies (or agencies) need to explore the overall best practices in presenting data collection options and making it more clear as to what is (could) be done with your or your friends email address. If you take on a campaign like this you need to also investigate the end result format to make the email look more like one that your friend might send to you without massive PURLs (personal URLs) so that it feels more like something that was passed via your own email client.

Also note that email is not dead but one of the best sources to drive a campaign.