The Email Wars

What happens when you have preached to people so long to add your email address to their address book so that they are a trusted sender and you now are changing that? Have you gone through this change before? It is wise to alert people prior to this change so that you do not end up in their bulk folder before you make this change. 

Marriott went above and beyond IMHO at announcing this change. Now what I loved the most was the fact that this shows that they value email as a communication channel so much that they did not even try to get a booking out of it. Nice work. Sure they had their find and reserve in the top nav, but that is a typical element in their other programs. They took the road of making sure they they did not lose people as one campaign could do more to lift their program than the long term damage in lost bookings could drive if they added more than one thing to do. 

I am not sure overall from an industry perspective of how many subscribers do take the step to add them to a “safe list” but I would bet that this had some people that had not done so before to take that step now. 

Is this something you use in your programs at the opt in? And if so do you have any data that you would share on subscribers using it? 

I subscribe to so many emails for the reason not that I am going to buy from most of them (sorry for taking your metrics down) but to see what different industries are doing and how I might leverage some ideas in campaigns we are building. It is a knowledge management approach. Since it is hard to get real time data in the email marketing world that you might get in other industries from books, you have to set up honeypots to track industry leaders in order to learn. 

But I was excited to see the change this week in the creative from The Body Shop. It was not a dramatic overhaul, but it did pop more to me. 

They moved and changed quite a few elements. The forward to a friend in the top right is now a My Account button. So does this tell us that people are not using the Forward to a Friend ability as much anymore as an email asset and they see that this change is better for their users? I would wager from what I have seen that the forward to a friend is not as important anymore as it used to be. Not a metric or conversion driver. 

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I have always been a big fan of Diesel for the fact that they take major brand risks. Now that being said their brand is attractive because of the risks that they take. So maybe it is not a risk. This email that arrived this week was sent to announce the celebration of their 30th Anniversary (B-day) and drove to a video that has as of now gone viral.

Now the great thing about this email is that it references the email but does not deliver the email in the creative itself. It makes the shock value even stronger once you get in to watch it. Why try to deliver video in an email if you think it might scare people from clicking on it, or even worse it does not play in your email client.

I also love the landing page (which is built by city) for the fact that they still only give away sparse details on the party but you need to stay tuned to get the event location information. I can only bet that this is going to be a bash and I have asked our eROI NYC Office Director to follow this, go, and get some video of the event to post later.

There is also a good article on iMedia about Viral today you should read.

Video on the next page.

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I was driving home last night and thinking about a project I am working on for a client right now. They are having us work on their welcome messaging strategy and it had my brain churning. I am not sure why it was so important for me to think about, but I distilled it down to four things that I think are important when you are setting up a relationship via the opt in with email marketing. 

Identification, Trust, Understanding and Conversion. 

Identification:

You could make this simple: Who is sending this email and what will I know about them. Or you can think it out farther. We all know that you have a short time to capture the attention of the email reciepent. So what are the things you need to focus on? The from line, is it you or your brand. The subject line, what is the action you are intending them to take. If you can make this a Welcome/Thanks/You need to X subject line then you are ahead of the game.

This also lines up with the creative. Will they see your brand instantly? Will the creative match up with the look of the site that they were just on and carry over the voice of where they just came from online? You can focus on thinking about the split second reaction of the WHO to nail this. 

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In order to protect the innocent we had to spring to action this past week. We were presented an email that was designed by another agency for an event that we were working on. They had volunteered to do the creative work for the event and we were happy to let them take a stab at it. Now I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, but I can never understand how some agencies do not get the finer points (wait the basic points) of good email design. 

Since there was not time to make it not an ALL image email we had to look at what we could fix in a short amount of time. We took a quick look at it and had these questions. 

Before:

1. What was the event

2. Who did I want to see

3. What did I need to do

Now these should be some questions that you always ask yourself with a little change to the who, what, where and why. But eROI stepped into email triage and put some minds against it. In no more than 30 minutes we were able to drive home the message, I think. We clearly communicated what was going on, why you would be interested, who was going to be there that you would want to see, and what to do. Simple enough huh? 

After:

But in the end I want to focus on how we can help our agency partners get a better idea of how to approach design for the inbox. Email design is not print design. Is that clear enough? We are here to explain, help and even give you feedback. Use us as a friend and partner whenever you want. 

Now let’s execute some great campaigns.

Jet Blue sent me a new campaign this week. In essence they asked IF I was going to be traveling during a certain time frame (I was) to take advantage of a discount for future bookings. Great idea but a tricky deal with the understanding that they will need to remind me and get me to convert at a later point in time.

So I took the bait and went to the landing page… did they capture that action then to re-target me? I completed the form and got the thank you page. Done. But did that go to a new list, new campaign, or flag me as someone that they will need to target down the road during this time window? 

My other questions were around the idea of IF they do target me, will they have a system that is smart enough to remove me IF I convert during this time window? I hope to see and will share the results. 

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Now me, I am up to $135 that I OWE the Obama campaign since the night of the DNC election speech. Ryan, he has HOPE that the Obama team will starting using email more intellegently instead of email intellegence.

Feeling like the news paper boy is chasing me down the block 1-2 times a day looking for $5.00. Time to throttle it back guys and stop being panhandlers.

This election is providing us with so much real time data on the good and bad things we need to consider about our email marketing programs. 

The question it continues to leave in my mind is this: IF elected, will Obama continue to use email as a communication vehicle to the citizens of the United States? I would really hope that he would as it would be a great thing for all of us to have a direct communication method to the leader of our country as well as make a statement about the power and acceptance of email.

When I first saw this in another email service providers email newsletter last week, I did not know quite what to think of it. My first reaction was great idea for the small business that adds one or two people a day to their email lists. My second reaction was how in the heck was this a best practice or Can Spam compliant? 

Now since I don’t have all the data on this new widget yet my post here might be a little off. And that being said I welcome anyone from this company to respond and let me know how it works. 

My fear is as follows:

1. You are making it easy for people to add emails of those that have not opted in

2. You are setting an idea in your client’s minds that it is OK to just add email addresses collected from sources outside of a double opt in form THAT they did not initiate.

3. Making is easy does not make it right

Now for the other side of my thoughts. 

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Fingerprint just finished writing their first email client market share report. It’s the biggest study of email client usage ever conducted, using a sample of almost three million email recipients.

It’s exciting for them because it’s the first time they’ve released any of the data that’s been collected through Fingerprint. It shows the top 10 email clients in use for both consumer and business mailing lists.

I have been working on deploying it for our own newsletters (have you subscribed yet?), and will share OUR results soon.

Business Email Client Use from Study: 

Read the full report

Consumer Email Client Use from Study:

I am not sure how many of you have started to explore Twitter on your own to see how you might use it for your own marketing efforts. Many major brands are already using it and finding great success with it. You can even follow our blogs and eROI news using Twitter if you want. 

But I wanted to use this email as an example of how you can integrate it into your email campaigns. This is one of the first that I have seen that made it one of the top level calls to action in an email. What was interesting to me for those of you that know Twitter, is that they changed the icon of the bird. Now most would not notice this change, but from the Branding side it leaves me a little disconnected as why they would have not simply used the same icon. 

That being said here is how easy it is to use it. 

1. Set up a Twitter account for your brand

2. Set up some RSS feeds in your blogs, news and emails

3. Use Twiterfeed to automate the collection of your content

4. Let people know that it is there in your emails, at sign up and on your site.

I can tell you that as a driver of daily traffic to this blog it ranks in the Top 5 referring traffic sources. And think about how your main goal is to drive traffic and awareness. You might want to try this as millions of people are using it already. Don’t be left behind and be sacked by the FAIL WHALE.

If you have not heard about the new project that the Email Experience Council is working on for this year’s non profit project, you should get up to speed. Jeanniey Mullen has just posted the next update on the project on the ClickZ site. You can read about last year’s project here as well.

I can tell you that we have an all star email marketing crew on this from many ESPs, brands, PR firms, and agencies. There have been many calls and many meetings leading up to this effort that will soon start paying off for the Agassi Foundation. 

We would love you to watch how it grows to see if you have some ideas on how to help us spread the word on this project. It is going from a regional to a national effort. Any help that you or our company would like to provide would be appreciated. 

Read the article here >>>

Today the team sent me an intervention email. It is not that they don’t like me, it was that they are “concerned” about my love and embracing of ALL things digital. I IM, I email, I Tweet, I Facebook, I Skype, I blog, I comment, I Flickr, I YouTube, I Vimeo, I post in forums, and most importantly I forget to notice that it is still sunny out in Portland, Oregon. I guess that they have a point now that I have taken the first step in admitting I have a problem. 

So I am happy that they took the time to intervene. At least they used email as the vehicle, as last time the all company “meeting” in my office was a bit over the top. Guess they forgot about the baseball bat and the fire escape so close to my desk…

But on the other side of the coin, this is one of the simplest and best sites using email as the “viral” vehicle that I have seen in a while. MeetUp used a great idea about all of us and our dependence on online communication, “friends” (watch the video and see if you catch the 433,000 BFFs copy there, classic), and the fact that we need to use these mediums to gt back out and physically interact with those in the real world. After all it is where LIFE happens, not the inbox or the web. Sorry to burst your bubbles.

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There have been some studies in the past few months about how site navigation is being used in email creative. In our latest study we found that nearly 30% of marketers duplicate their site navigation in email. of those, 15% find it more effective than the main content in driving clicks, while 11% of marketers find their navigation converts better than the main content of their email.

So this being said this email from Storables stood out to me for using the site navigation in the email by using the ORANGE to make the SALE button in the navigation POP. Now I am a fan of the color Orange as it is not a standard color one sees all that often in email. The use of this pulled my eye immediately to that area and was all but pleading me to click on it. Did I need some organization systems in my life? I wasn’t really sure but the fact that it was different than the rest made me want to find out. 

I am not going to go out on a limb and say that this is a BEST PRACTICE, but I will say that it is an attention getter to me. And if you are trying to stand out in someone’s inbox, you better make it POP. So this being said I would say try some experiments with color in your nav to drive action. Who knows… it might make difference and drive some conversions. 

This story/case study in DM News caught my attention as I so often wonder how wineries do not focus more and more on email marketing as a communication, brand development and sales tool. It seems like a natural way for these business owners to build a relationship with consumers and fans when wineries are only located in 3 places. 1. The Winery 2. The Grocery Aisle 3. The Restaurant. 

If you can work to add a simple way to capture the email address at the winery or on your own site you are 99% of the way there to setting up a relationship that should drive more bottle sales at all three locations. Just knowing what wine to select when you see it can be a chore from a list and from the aisle. If you can work on your programs to get people to recognize the name and label you are winning the battle.

Owning and growing this relationship through email is most likely one of the best and best cost factor mediums to talk to your enthusiasts. As a wine lover myself I know that I appreciate learning more about the winery, vintages, events and in many way becoming a smarter, better educated imbiber of the tasty grape treat. 

DM News has the full story here >>

Bloggers Chouice Awards 2008

If you can give me a little love I would appreciate you giving us a vote for this blog. It does take the quick creation of an account, but you will love the access to finding so many other blogs that you might love. Al and Laura, don’t worry about it as I know you hate to give anyone your info in exchange for knowledge and sharing. Damn the community and the “forced” opt in.

http://bloggerschoiceawards.com/blogs/show/28135