The Email Wars

I have long been a subscriber to Dell emails. Not sure exactly why as I am an Apple user, but I assume it is for market intelligence with some of the clients I work with. This past week as I as scanning my inbox I found it a little surprising as a I scrolled down to the bottom of the Dell emails and found offers for things having nothing to do with Dell or computers.

What I was presented with was FTD, Blue Nile and Brooks Brothers in the footer. Seemed odd to me that a company focusing on holiday sales was presenting non brand merchandise to subscribers. Now I cannot say it is a bad thing to do, but it struck me as odd. It made me wonder if Dell had hit a low point in sales of PCs that it needed to increase its revenues by selling flowers, jewelry and dress shirts. Or could it be a good way to use co-branded or partnership emails that I have not seen used by them before. I would assume that there is either a distribution partnership/trade in place OR there is a acquisition or revenue sharing agreement in place.

Is Dell now into this market space?

I turned my focus back onto Dell to look at the email itself and found something missing that I would assume (since they have touted how much revenue it is responsible for generating – 1 million last I saw reported) would be there. The Twitter link. Have they not made the jump to place social media into their emails when they have been staunch proponents of Twitter and using it as a sales channel? Maybe it was just this one I got that had this partnership offer in it, but I will need to go back through some past ones and look.

In the end as we move into the holidays it seems that real estate in emails is VERY important and focusing on driving your revenue in ways that you know work should be your focus. This partnership might have sold a few more bouquets or a nice shirt for that next big presentation but is it still moving as many laptops as it should? We can only wonder.

Update: New one today – same offers for more in line electronics Microsoft gear and found a SMALL little link down in the footer for Twitter that was a text link. Would have been good to use one that had the “t” brandmark in there for quick recognition.They changed the placement of the co-opt offer and seemed to do a full takeover for NOKIA and ovi instead. On the good side I loved the inclusion of the relevant survey on starting holiday shopping as I think it can be turned around to use and better plan in future campaigns on a one to one basis.