The Email Wars

This 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.

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Come on now we all know that black and white is so 2002. What we need to see more of is great colors used to drive the user through the email creative. When you see this email it makes this hotel seem so much more than just a place to lay your head on your next stay. It is selling the experience of travel and the many things you might be able to enjoy.

What some people might immediate feel about this creative though is that it is ALL image based. So little copy that what happens if images are blocked? I agree on this point, but since I did not have my images off nor did I have this coming to an inbox that blocks images I cannot tell you if they had alternate versions set up to render differently in email clients with different settings.

But what I do know is that the visual presentation was enough to make me want to read down to the bottom of the email. It is simple, well organized and easy to navigate. Even the “footer” area with the city names were great links to “save” my scroll and incent me to explore the cities that I travel to often in order to see what might be of interest to me on my next trip.

Why do colors matter to drive action? Well they make us take notice of action. Anne Holland shows us this in a recent test she ran that might help you understand why. I encourage you to try bringing more “life” to your emails and the experience that color brings to action.

There are many ways to say thanks and recognize your subscribers on your email file. You can simply say thank you. You can give them something that no one else has access to. You can give them an incentive - or best yet you can combine all of these ideas into an email campaign that drives business results.

Smith and Hawken did just this in their recent campaign from this past week by using the top of the email real estate to tell subscribers thanks while at the same time not only giving them access to save through this email campaign, but using it to extend an offer that lives through the whole month of June. Why do I like this? Well we often use email campaigns to present an offer that is focused on just this specific campaign, leaving people to trash it if they are not interested at this exact moment. But using the whole month as an extension of this one email campaign provides a way for people to keep this email available.

You might not be in “market” today but the idea that you might anytime in a month is a good way to increase the value of the offer. Not only on one purchase but on anything you decide you might want to get over a 30 day period. Smart.

I also love the subject line as from tests I have tried the numeric list (10 things) seems to tell people that there might be something of value besides just the one offer.

Try to think of new ways that you can extend the value of your campaigns past NOW while at the same time making it feel more important by thanking them at the same time. Well executed.

There was an interesting idea at Online Marketing Summit in Chicago last week about mapping the image paths you use in your emails to file locations that you can change IF there is a timely event. What does this mean? Well imagine that you have a time based event or sale going on and your email creative has images in it that give a time based offer or discount code. So what happens to this email if your subscribers open it after the event is over? Should they still get that image and offer? OR could you control the email after the send?

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.

Well I think that you can and maybe you should. Why? Well to get an email that is now past it’s date could create a bad experience. Maybe you REALLY wanted that offer and it is gone. You can swap out those images when a sale or event is over if you hard map the image locations in the email creative. Then when the time comes you can simply replace those images at those hard coded image paths so that if they get called or loaded they are replaced with new ones. No one ever knows. No harm no foul.

Many email platforms store or cache your email creative from those that I am familiar with so you will need to look into that in your specific scenario. But if possible you could extend the life your your campaigns to have an even greater impact on those that did not open them (due to so many reasons) after your event is over.

It was an interesting idea that was advanced that I thought I would share with you to see if it might help you in your email campaigns.

You have them, we have them, they have them. You might even be one of them. Who are these people I am referring to? Well quite simply I heard them referred to last week as the “emotionally unsubscribed”. I loved this term and I am not sure if I had heard it before last week.

The funny thing is that without any more explanation of these people, I knew who they were. I even knew that I might be one of them for some of the emails that I am subscribed to. I will bet that you could be one of these as well. What do you think? Are you?

The notion of labeling people on your lists are are active subscribers to your lists, but do not read or click your emails for months on end. It is not that they are not interested in you or your emails, but just not lately. These people are not going to break up with you anytime soon. But they are going to have an impact on your results. So what can you do to re-engage them? There are a few things that I thought of (as actually we are going through a 9 month review our our own newsletter at eROI in order to segment and make some changes to the layouts and content) that you might be able to do. What are they?

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So now it is your turn to give me some feedback. With each quarter the team here at eROI likes to have a conversation with a few hundred marketers around the world to see how they feel about issues that face all of us.

This time we are looking at how those responsible for email marketing either test or don’t test. We are looking for honest answers from all of you about the elements that you have tried to test to make a difference in your results.

Trust me we know that most of us are not always testing as we want to, but most do experiment from time to time.

Thank you in advance for your 5 minutes to help us out with this. You know you will get this time and all the results back in spades in just a few weeks.

Give me 5 of your minutes for 5 years of blog posts…

Two words that are simple and often not used right are “Click Here”. We spend so much time looking at how elese we can tell people what to do and then poke fun at people that cannot be more creative with thier copy writing. But maybe simple works? Do we over complicate the notion of how we try to tell people what to do in emails and landing pages?

User experience professionals focus on telling us to create user behavior in word and buttons by share the expected experience your clicking of a link or button are going to provide. But maybe we are over thinking this? I am not sure as I try to be creative with the campaigns we work on and typically try not to use things that are so simple. But J Peterman made me think about this idea some more.

Maybe just trying it out would be worth a test. It is like stepping back a few years in the ideas that we try and put forward to be better in not just email marketing but web marketing.

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Not sure how familar you are with the concept of badges and rewards in terms of the internet and social communities. In all the research and work we have done at eROI in social community development and social campaigns we have found that the notion of giving badges or visible rewards are a motivator that work. The concept comes from the video game indutry where people receive visual recognition that are displayed in their profile page letting people know of their accomplishments in regard to the community. There can be based on number of connections, type of account, games played, comments given, and more.

But what we have not seen, until now, is the use of profile badges into an email. I was a little excited to notice this idea used in an email newsletter. Notice how in this email that the badge is used to display profile information about what you have available in your own account. It is a simple notion and for the sake of an email not publicly facing outside of your inbox, but I think it is a good way to use it. Other examples might be more typically seen in your rewards point account information in hotel, airline, or book club email where membership benefits are shown to you as to what you have earned in miles, points or how many more stays you have to reach a badging point.

There must be some more ways that we could look to use this information to make an email more “sticky” and worth reading and maybe even keeping tucked in a folder for later reading. Think about what you might have in your business to display as rewards or badges. Everyone should have something that they can think of and if not it is an opportunity to create something.

It is funny sometimes that companies just stop their email newsletters cold turkey. Often times it is due to the fact that they are just not sure as to why they are doing them, what the return is, internal resources dry up, the technology platform that they use becomes more of a chore to use than is worth the time, or there is a clear need to step back - take a look - and renew their efforts in a clear manner.

We see all of the above factors play into a newsletter stoppage but what do you do when you bring it back to life? I thought about this not only because a client of ours did just this recently, but I actually had another client make mention of this exact example to me this past week.

For any reason listed above, or one that I might have missed, you need to develop a clear positioning when you bring a newsletter back after some months of down time. I was happy to see our client do just this as they began to re-mail their newsletter opt in list after some time getting the ship back on track.

Take a look at the header article. In the RED box you will see a clear Welcome Back message with a explanation setting the expectations of when you are going to be getting these newsletters. Also as a added bonus they added (YELLOW BOX) a link to their social links on Twitter, facebook and more. But do notice as I think that it is important that they do not try to add every social platform link known to man. Keeping it simple and driving people to the two that they have committed to makes it work. The other box I noted (GREEN BOX) was flagged as after looking at the metrics it drives just as much click through action as the important article areas. This tells me that the readers are big on images when they want their news/articles.

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I was reviewing some stats on some client sites this week and thinking about the two ways that we give away content and how it impacts site visits, time on site, conversion, and the site bounce rate (not talking about email here but how fast someone comes into your site and leaves %).

What I was thinking about was how these two approaches differ to paths to success and how they each can impact and determine some of your measurables/objectives/results.

So what is the crazy man talking about here? Let me illustrate in terms that might be relevant.

1. The Free Content Display Method:

So you have things to share. You have spent hours, days, weeks, months of time researching, reviewing, writing, designing and making sure it is rock solid. Well traditional marketing would lead with a press release, speaking tour, interviews and locking the content up in your site for any visitor to grab as they want to use in an unrestricted manner.

Now this is the idea behind so many site today. Putting your content out into the world in order to grab attention, mindshare, search results and hopefully customers down the road. This way is becoming more popular as it follows the idea of information is free, expertise is open, and opinion is everywhere.

2. The Give to Get Approach:

The same scenario applies but instead you provide a level of access and ask that visitors complete a form to get access to it. Registration in order to get the value of the documents you are making private is the notion that has been around for a long time. The give to get is how many of us grab leads and grow our database. You run the risk of bad data, people not completing the steps you set forth in order to get your research, and the constant struggle to fine tune forms, user paths, and scent trails.

But the perceived value is stronger in most cases as the value in the relationship is clear that you will make everything right behind the curtain of trust.

So which one wins? Which one is the right one?

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Well maybe “rules” is a little confining word choice, but let me put this out there for you to think about.

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.

The idea is that all of the new social media platforms are forcing simplicity and frequency on the audience with “updates”. And people are becoming used to it. We might be driving the idea without realizing it that less is more. Now is important. And brevity rules.

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Last week I was going through an internal meeting for eROI marketing plans and I was trying to illustrate the power of TEXT and headline copy for a program I am working on. Well about 15 minutes later this email came SCREAMING into my inbox. I mean you see it… and you know what to do. There was not a chance that you had a second doubt that you had been commanded to follow.

And not only that but if you follow you are entered to win. Folks… this is headline copy.

More and more I am starting to become a fan of the font in more ways than I used to. Words are powerful, time is valuable and actions are the goal. So why not take a chance to get simple, focus on your copy length and work hard to use it to the maximum power it can release.

I know you have it in you to rid the world of 10-14 pt copy in email for headlines.

Good design makes an email. There I said it. All we read about in blogs, magazines, white papers so often is how data, timing, delivery, frequency, etc, etc make a campaign. Well if you don’t have design and a clear eye for email layout you are only fighting 3/4 of the fight. In the end if it gets delivered, has good copy but the design fails, then all that work fails. I want to challenge everyone to spend more time on the pretty and not just the nitty gritty.

There are so many emails that I could use to illustrate this, and most likely you or I could shoot some holes in this one, but it is just so damned pretty. Design is an art in itself that makes people have an experience that represents how people feel about you as a company. So please try to put your best foot forward when you put another email into the inbox. Create an expeirence through your design that makes people look forward to your next interaction with them. Just text and shiny buttons only go so far.

Are you happy with your design or your internal resources? I know many people I talk to are happy with the efforts but want some outside help. Well lucky for you we are not only in the business of business making, but in the business of functional pretty.

I don’t pimp eROI that much, but as a reader I think you owe it to yourself to look to us for your next idea or campaign. OK self promotion over. Thanks for allowing me the rant.

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.

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Over the past few months we have seen more mainstream companies and emailers adding social media to their email campaigns. Now maybe it took 1000 articles in major publications - or even Oprah telling everyone, as we know she is a tastemaker - but more and more often I am seeing this added into emails.

Now some ESPs are touting that they did this deal or that deal to add social ties to campaigns, but anyone can do it in some simple ways. I believe that the two that truly matter to the larger audience are simply Facebook and Twitter. The others, while cool, are often overkill to the vast majority of online subscribers. Keep it simple, focus on the larger networks and do it right.

Once you have taken the step you have also opened up more to do. If you are not keeping these two locations updated throughout the day for your own brand you are just doing it to do it. You need to be serious about these tools if you are going to get into this “new” medium. Which leads me to ponder… who in your organization is responsible for community management and content creation? Is this going to fall under your job functions if you add it? Or do you already have a media/PR/customer outreach team who keeps these sites fresh? Should this new function fall under the job responsibilities of the person that handles email marketing?

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