The Email Wars

I have long been a fan of Diesel. They are in our face, original and always ready to take a risk with a new marketing initiative. Last month I had the pleasure of getting a campaign for the Diesel XXX Party that was celebrating the 30th Birthday globally. I quickly checked it out and summized that I had to get the crack eROI team on finding out how they pulled this off. 

It was early in the effort but this email made me wonder how it was going to unfold. Scanning the cities that were going to be used to stage this event I noticed NYC. VOILA. We are there with our office in Manhattan… quick call to Chris Masagatani to bring him into the plans. 

Chris and I talked about the email, the landing page and the campaign. I set him off with a Flip camera to document the campaign from start to finish. What I wanted eROI to learn is how email was used as the first touch point and how it caused the event to unfold with little to no other media around it. 

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I was digging back in to some email delivery best practices this morning when I came across this list from Yahoo in the Postmaster section. Worth a read. It is like the 10 Commandments of email Marketing and Delivery best practices. These should be things that you already know and live by, but a refresher is always nice.

You can get the full Postmaster resources here if you have not read it all

QUESTION: As a sender, what can I do to ensure that my email goes to the right folder?

To ensure that your email gets delivered to the inbox, simply send emails that users want. Our studies have indicated that when users see messages miscategorized, they notify us within hours of delivery. We will quickly react to the user feedback and update our filters automatically.

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Much has been written about social media and email. Most people that have “created” an email marketing system have added features to it that they like to say makes it “social media”. Well I want to go on record that adding a Send To a Friend, or a button that allows you to “digg it” or comment on it does not make it social. Email is social media. It is what the majority of the internet users harness for “social” conversations. It is one to one and one to many. 

But all of this being said above, here are what you need to understand in order to make your email marketing campaigns “social”.

I hope from reading my thoughts around the POST method you can understand what you should be thinking about.

POST: People, Objective, Strategy, Technology

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Do any of you ever notice the massive footers that are used in some industries for emails? Now I know that heavy footers are the design rage right now, but not in emails. Often times legal departments mandate that the legal terms for financials/investing, contests and regulatory issues need to be there. But do you think that they either build trust or help the email campaigns in any way? 

When I personally see them they are a turn off. They make me lose a little bit of trust, although legal will tell you that there are there to build trust (CYA here) and make sure that no one has other expectations. But why can’t they live as as hyperlink and live on a page on the website? 

I wanted to use an example of the video game industry as eROI has done a lot of work in this space over the past years. I can tell you from the example here that they are ego plays. Everyone wants to have their brand and organization represented in the email somewhere. What value does that bring to the subscriber? None in my opinion. This footer in the video gaming industry is always the longest to approve part of email creative. Is everyone there? Do they all have enough room around them to make all the stake holders happy? These are the questions that get vetted over and over again. 

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Mail Goggles. Not sure if it is a real thing or a marketing measure. Have you ever wanted to stop an email from being sent when you replied after a few cocktails? Well according to the Google Mail Blog you can now have that power. 

I can think of many email marketers that have sent a campaign ONLY to have someone moments later let them know about a typo, bad link, or expired offer. It’s like a pause button on your tivo for your email campaigns. Funny idea, but it has some real world (not the one on MTV) uses. 

We have a delayed campaign feature in emailROI that allows you to set up a campaign for later and if need be cancel it to make some changes. Not a recall function, but that would be genius.

Read the post here.

Are you ready for the holiday season? Remember when we used to think that it started in November? Well not anymore. Some brands are already talking in email about the holiday season, jumping Halloween and Thanksgiving. So what are you doing to be ready for the surge? 

Here is a study about shoppers attacking earlier.

Chad White reports : 

17% of the retailers I track have made at least one reference to the holiday season already.

Here is his chart from the last holiday season to show you how early it started last year. 

So what, in light of the market downturn and consumer spending fears, do you have planned. This is not a business as usual year in consumer sales. I am not trying to be a “sky is falling” type of person, but those brands and email marketers that do not have a plan together are in for a bad treat. 

What needs to be done? Here is my list:

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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: