Defeating the Purpose
Monday, June 22nd, 2009This week I was over on the Washington Post site to read an article that I was pointed to from Twitter (one of the best things about Twitter is the link sharing of relevant articles) and noticed a great new call out on the top left corner for newsletter sign up. Of course being a email marketing student (in the slant of I learn and search for new things each day) I was excited to see them dedicate such prime real estate to
the opt in when typically portals like this focus just on the ad placement. So figuring that this was one of the last remaining lists I might not be on, I clicked through to sign up for some emails to keep me in the loop.
Simply enough right?
Well no. What happened was a major let down to me. They wanted me to create an account. Last thing I checked I was just signing up for some newsletters to come to my inbox and not thinking I needed a full blown account to do so. Quite a disconnect IMHO. Well one good thing they had going on was using Facebook Connect to log me in. But yet this did not solve the problem of signing up for the newsletters. It was only to log me in temporarily into the site. Although I am a BIG fan of using Facebook Connect for the log in ability (we use it on many eROI client sites now) it did not close the loop of getting me registered for newsletters.


Not at all like this image here in this post, but it is a little tricky and if you do not do it right you could fail. What I mean by this as if you are going to do it you need to be really careful that you are matching the file path location exactly. If not you risk inserting the wrong image or blowing out the creative. They need to be the exact same size.



So what is the crazy man talking about here? Let me illustrate in terms that might be relevant.
What IF email stopped using images and copy formats that you use today and instead had a rule of 140 characters of less in the subject line, body and links? Are you following this? What I am trying to put out there is the idea of focusing on getting the point instead of selling the dream. We spend so much time on the crafting of the copy that so often gets in the way of the action we want a subscriber to take. Why 140 characters? Well that is the new “black” of web communications. The UPDATE is the new manner of personal communication and maybe our email campaigns need to test the new approach.










