The Email Wars

I have a confession to make. I have let something I used to care about die. Yes my attention to the new new thing, the shiny thing, the next thing made me forget and neglect one of my longest life partners on this mad ride we call the internet. Now it was not something I was doing on purpose, we just grew apart over time. I found corporate accounts, gmail and social tools to pull my attention in more often and in less locations. Hell I had changed my preferences so many times I just had to simplify. I needed more but needed to check less places.

It was love at first site. Email, an inbox, communications, connections, wild mind blowing stuff…. well even today email still intrigues me. So many others jump from tech to tech, thing to thing, but one thing stays a constant not matter what you throw at it.

You (MSN/Hotmail) were my first and I am not sure why I keep you around as we have grown so apart and our friends all know where to find us at other places. Maybe it was just convenience and old habits. Maybe it was just time and attention.

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Any good relationship needs a foundation that can be built upon. Here are some elements that will help you build a strong email program.

Trust
What will you do with the information you collect from me? Will you protect it and make sure that it will only be used how I have asked it to be used? Will you make sure to honor it even when you think that a “blast” is ordered down from the C-Level? Your job is to take an oath to make sure that the information shared is clearly identified from opt in and presented in a clear manner that builds trust.

Clarity
What am I giving you my information for? Is it a contest? Newsletter? Purchase? What will you send me in the future? What can I expect from you in my inbox? A good program will clearly present the uses of contact, communication and the premise of the relationship. It is your job to honor that and keep your word.
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When it comes to relationships, is your goal to continually hunt for new ones, or to make the ones you have into long term commitments?

Most marketers are caught in the eternal struggle to gain more opt in records, having no plan on how what happens next aside from “let’s email them.” Marketing, not just email marketing, needs to have a plan for how to grow relationships once they have started. If you can think about next week / next month / next year, you can nurture healthy relationships and get out of the grow-my-list game.

One of the challenges I continue to see is most interactive marketers not beginning the thought process around where their relationships are going. They live in the now and rarely think about one month, let alone one year, from now. The better you are at listening, reviewing and making plans, the better health your relationships will be in the long term.

Prospects enter into new relationships online with the hope that they will get, clearly communicated to them, something valuable and beneficial. We can use a real life relationship metaphor to talk about this, as it sometimes places it into an easier to understand flow for most.

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I have been seeing a resurgence in the use of animated gifs in email campaigns. In the past they have been an eye sore, but this past week I was surprised when one in my iPhone made me stop, pause, and actually pay attention. Now it was a really simple method but got me thinking about how we could use them more (and the fact that they rendered on my mobile device).

But creating action in an email does in fact help sometimes. See Style Campaigns post on it from yesterday.

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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.

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Sure you have heard this once or twice, heck you might have even used the line yourself. But what I am so encouraged by is seeing Abercrombie & Fitch continue with a strong mix of expected, long and WIDE emails entering into this retail season. We have seen close to 16 in the past weeks and see no sign of ending, to me this means that it is working with their email subscriber base. That for me is very exciting as I am a BIG fan of the WIDE email. Now I don’t want everyone to be jumping on the WIDE band wagon (sorry for the TUESDAY IS THE BEST DAY TO SEND EMAIL CAMPAIGNS – guys it is different across lists, industries, and many other factors), but I am hoping to see a few more companies give some new ideas a try in the inbox.

One other thing it looks like is that they are learning what is working when trying these formats out. I have seen PLUS 2700 pixel wide formats (too big for Outlook) and now this one is 1550 by 700 pixels. To me that is a good sweet spot to test. The range of 1700 to 2200 pixels is kind of a good place to try and still have some good controls in place.

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Taking a strong cue from the Price is Right this week, Alaska Airlines unveiled their Mystery Discount Campaign. Does this defy all logic of TRUST? Or it does it build the excitement and anticipation for travel junkies like myself to want to jump on in?

What they do right here are things that a trusted brand can do in email. They offer fun, excitement and give you a link to click that you have no idea where you are going… or do you ever really know? Maybe it was the fact that “mystery” was attached to the offer. Not sure why it made me pause, scan and then dive in.

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About 3 years back I went and opted in to 12 different automotive manufacturers campaigns. The reason (besides loving cars) was to watch the types of programs they put together, look for best practices and new ideas. I have saved each and everyone that I have received and enjoyed the majority of them. What stuck after reviewing 196 emails so far was the major differences in each program. Now not being clear of the exact goals of each I went into it with an open mind and was interested in getting a few years in before making any observations.

What I found was very interesting to me as the results of these communications were across the board.

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Being a subscriber to the Daily Beast – fun daily email if you have not seen it – I noticed some odd things on the home page of the site that I wanted to take a few minutes to share. These things were multiple opt in forms to sign up for the newsletter on the home page. Now at first glance I had a hard time finding them, yet notice I had not scrolled down yet, but once I saw them another thing popped into view. Two different types of newsletter opt in form. One being the long – give me everything about you – and the second being the just the email please. It got me wondering if this was a test of the form length on the page or just a tactic as the daily email is a primary driver of traffic to sites like this where daily news is the driver of opt in.

The first in the top right hand corner of the site asks for 9 fields, some check boxes and some opt in frequencies. It also allows you the ability to create a user ID and password for the site. I was not sure exactly why I needed a U/P but maybe it is to comment and interact. Odd for a news site to require this instead of just using comment forms. The other strange thing to me was that ALL fields were required to sign up for the newsletter in this form (in small type at the top) yet there were not any required indicators next to the fields. Little bit of a disconnect to me if someone misses it and I am requiring it for opt in.

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We know that so many people spend time and money to create an email template that works well in all the email clients, save time and money with each new campaign, build an expected email for subscribers to know where to look and what to do, and give some flexibility for promotions and new content. But what gets to me is when people fail to actually use and complete a template leaving a area of it blank. It feels so JV to me and makes me wonder why they don’t take the time to see what else can be added, or simply edit the template to work for that campaign.

As I travel frequently I am signed up for most of the Airline emails and am impressed with most of them. But SW seems to frequently be the culprit in using an email template and failing to use it right. I mean they are a discount airline so could this lack of content save them money? Doubt it.

What I would hope that you learn from this post is to look at how you are using your templates if you use them in your email platform and find ways to create a few versions of them so that you can not leave massive blocks of emptiness in them. It feels unprofessional and to me shows a lack of effort by the email marketer. Even taking the time to reorganize the content in this case could have helped them to deliver a flushed out email, avoiding the gaps.

Have you ever been guilty of rushing a campaign out the door with a lack of content or taking the time to button it up?

Here is the funny thing about this email that I am critiquing, I actually booked a flight from it for a trip this month… so maybe it does not matter in the short run to conversion, but instead does some harm to the overall brand.

Thoughts?

Love it when I see a retailer trying something new. This past week I found that Banana Republic was doing an After Five (5pm) sale through email. Now it could have been used at either the online store or the retail location which is a great way to send traffic (people) to both your physical and online location, why should you care as long as they are buying right?

The part about this that I like (and I don’t know about their own stats) is that we see a majority of people shop online after 5pm with campaigns that we work on. So why would you not try to use time of day targeting in an email earlier in the day to remind people that the sale would be that night. It makes more sense to me to give people some early warning so that they can plan to shop after work instead of surprising them with the email at 4pm or 5pm. I mean you might have missed that window because of being late in the day.

It was also great how many times they noted that it was AFTER 5pm. When you are doing a time based sale email campaign you want to make sure that people are clear of the time to that you are not flooded with emails and phone calls (and even angry customers at a store) so repeating it so many times was a good strategy.

Nice work BR. Love to see some day parting testing going on and I hope that the tests are converting in sales in store and online. I also hope that these emails are giving you some valuable information for future campaigns.

If you aren’t testing you aren’t trying to make an impact on your programs. Get in the game.

I was caught the other day by a banner ad, yes a banner ad, that had me wanting to click deeper into it to learn more. Why? Well first I love all of the cast in this new movie, and second they promised footage that I could not see anywhere else.

So of course they had me as many banner ads do not.

When I hit the landing page I saw a lead capture form, but was it? Well kind of. It asked for first name, last name, zip code and date of birth. I assume all of this was done for reasons of verifying age and identity as we saw some time back with the SuperBad movie site. But what was missing? The email address was not asked for. This caught me a bit by surprise, as if they would have asked I would have provided it just for a chance to see Jeremy Priven and Will Ferrel in action for a quick afternoon laugh. But nope, they never did.

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I pulled out an article I wrote recently that was featured in iMediaConnection that you might enjoy. It covers some past posts that I wrote into one article that highlights the things that you should look at to learn from with your email marketing campaigns.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The Ultimate Email Fail

The more experience you gain as an email marketer, the more you come to understand the true purpose of an email. It isn’t simply to blast something to subscribers without relevancy or reason. It isn’t to make a quick, dishonest buck off them. It isn’t to pull off a massive bait-and-switch. It isn’t even to release the hounds on the competition. It’s about nurturing, building trust and relationships, and ultimately increasing and solidifying the reputation of your brand.

Every email sent must have a purpose and needs to personally relate to the subscriber. If the email lacks personalization or has no purpose, you’re taking a risk that may cause subscribers to not only opt-out of your emails, but also mentally and emotionally opt-out from any future engagement with your brand. When this happens, the recipient immediately becomes emotionally unsubscribed. We in the industry identify it with a very technical term: email marketing fail.

Everyone fails at some point. A recent study by Return Path discovered that up to 20 percent of top brand marketers continue to send emails to addresses on their lists that have unsubscribed — more than 10 days after a confirmed unsubscribe request.

Read the full article here >>

Look… I have not always been a fan of animated Gifs in emails, sometimes they work with a promo or special event, sometimes they just make things look cheap. But this Saturday AM (PS great day to get me thinking about going to drive a new car) I got this email from Lexus that has captured my attention. I think I might have looked at it 30 plus times and shown it to 4-5 people already. Maybe it was the car, but I have really thought that the idea behind the use of this was good.

I mean you run a risk running an animated gif/image as the lead into your email, the whole email in essence could be completely blank if the images are suppressed. You might not find it the biggest deal, but without any content it looks spammy. Is the fun animation worth the risk?

Now it is not because it is an animated GIF as the lead image in the email, but how it was executed. It was different. I mean it loads with basically an empty top half (which is all I could see) with a search box. My honest first impression of it is that it was junk. But then it started the dance. Slowly loading in terms into the search box (storytellling) that kept me engaged. Then the reveal of the brand and the car. It was clever.

It has had my head spinning with new creative ideas to test. And I might even go take that car for a drive too.

Here is the web version of the email so that you can see how it works. I was trying to grab the code from my inbox but could not get it to work perfectly. So enjoy the execution outside the medium here

Have you see animated gifs used well in emails? Do you have any good examples so share?

We have seen reports from Dela Quist and his team about response rates from long and short subject lines. I personally don’t think that over 75 characters is better as I have not had that experience with trying overly verbose subject lines. Blog posts and sentences in this blog are another thing….

But this past week I saw this email enter my inbox and could not believe that someone actually tried to make a subject line this long. I could not read it, follow it nor understand it. I mean really can you with this example? I have a firm belief that concise copy in emails and subject lines in emails that are targeted, focused on a result, and driven to the right landing pages work. When you throw the whole kitchen sink at a subject line my opinion that no one knows what to do with it and the most likely path it has in store for it is the trash can.

What do you think about the best practice from performance you have had with email subject line testing?