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 know that most of you are one of these “Tethered Workers”. Don’t be ashamed, as I am not better than any of you. We can form a 12 step group for internet addicted people. I bet in 10 minutes we could have a support group of hundreds of millions. 

Do you think that if 50% do work email, what is the percentage of people that are checking personal email? Now once you digest this, think about how your campaigns can be targeted to these type of workers based on time of day, day of week, and by the type of behavioral interactions they have on the weekends. 

Below is a snippet from the study found here in full.

Tethered to Email

Some 22 percent of employed email users say they are expected to read and respond to work-related emails, even when they are not at work. Blackberry and PDA owners are more than twice as likely to report that their employer expects that they will stay tuned in to email outside of the office. Fully 48 percent say they are required to read and respond to email when they are away from work.

50 percent of employed email users say they check their work-related email on the weekends.

22 percent of employed email users say they check their work email accounts “often” during weekend hours, compared with 16 percent who reported the same in 2002.

46 percent of employed email users say they check email when they have to take a sick day; 25 percent say they do so “often.”

34 percent of employed email users say they will at least occasionally check their email while on vacation; 11 percent say they do so “often.”

“Email is still the primary artery of workplace communications in many professions, and it has clearly started to spill over into personal life,” said Sydney Jones, coauthor and research assistant for the Pew Internet Project. “Over time, workers have become more likely to check their email outside of normal working hours, and many are expected to do so by their employer.”

Read the full study here.

As an email marketing agency we love the use of good fonts, clear copy, buttons and design. Now this Subway email is not a bad design. They have a BIG button and it is nicely laid out. But what did go wrong is the amount fonts, font colors, and copy they used. 

There is just so much going on I was not really sure what action to take. They could have stopped at the first box and if they needed to include the lower boxes, they might have used them in another campaign. The real call to action was the top box and the lower info just felt as if they had this layout so just used it. I wonder how many people even took action on the call out boxes below.

Another reason why this failed was that they have so much copy. It is too much to digest and read quickly and made me just want to hit the Trash button in my email client. Make is easy. Make it clear. Make it actionable. 

I added the FAIL stamp to it for this final reason. They had text, but they decided to make the TEXT images not fonts. IF this email was to arrive in an inbox where images were suppressed it would have just been one big blank image with a ton of footer legal copy. What is the value of that? As a basic principal you need to be using real fonts in your emails so that you do not give your campaign any reason to fail.

OK, let’s lead off that this is NOT intended to be a bashing of Silverpop. They have a great email platform and I like a lot of their team that I have met. That being said, what the hell was this “Can Spam Compliance Test” they put out? Of course I answered and clicked through to see if I had a pulse. Whew. I did. I scored 4 out of 5. Well technically it was a 5 but they had the answer to number one as “maybe”. 

Make sure to click the image below to open it up and see the questions.

I understand the main point of this is education (hear the applause) but I hope that it is not being used to score people as prospects. Well they do have Vtrenz that is ran through when I took the “test”. What kills me is that these questions are so basic that they are not really helpful, but just a lead generation exercise. I mean if someone cannot answer these questions, do you really want them as a customer? To me it is a red flag of should we be working with you?

I would love to see a better tool or test put out there. That being said I am going to work with the eROI team to build one and release it in the next few weeks. I already started this week drafting 25 questions. Need to work on them, weed them down, build some intelligence into them and then I will share it with you. 

Maybe my stab at it will be better… maybe not.

This is a constant question from email marketers and worthy of monthly studies and opinions from all over the Web. DJ at Bronto covered it this week from a conversation some of of were having VIA Twitter. Yes we are all on Twitter having conversations daily… are you?

But what we talked about was: Does it work? We have seen so many clients and brands use it effectively and they have seen a lift. But then, like this Marriott email we see it done bad. This example shows (I had to circle it to show you where it was) how it can be useless. The use of fonts was so over done that I did not even know it was there until I looked at it for a third time. And did it make me feel different or want to take an action? Nope. It was a poor execution IMHO. 

But if you use it clearly and it stands out I have seen where it does work. It is not about the fact of doing it… but doing it right. Make it POP. 

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Well not really going green, but starting a new weekly email newsletter focusing on “green” marketing and ad campaigns. It is a continuous segmentation and introduction of more email newsletters. I am not sure now how many they have but to me it is news that they could be adding into one of their existing newsletters as content instead of making an entire new newsletter. 

I share this for a few reasons. 

1. Do they have enough weekly content to justify another newsletter? From the looks of this email in this post the answer is NO. Why well look how empty the newsletter is. It looks horrible. Not really “green” to add more media vehicles to cover small news. 

2. I assume that they are just using this as many publishers do to add more ad sales inventory and drive more clicks into their site where more ads can be served and drive more page views. Fine as that is the goal, but it is not a good use of time and space for them or the subscriber. 

3. Look at the ads. Do they support the content? Are they relevant? Nope on both counts. They are just focused towards advertisers and marketers but not focused on the matching the content or possibly the subscriber base. 

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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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I guess that if you get a few emails a week from a campaign that it can continue to give fodder for a blog post. I noticed this email from Michelle tonight but I was a little confused about who it was targeted to? I realized that they had never asked for gender preferences, wait, or preferences as a whole at sign up or ever. I think that they asked me for my Zip or state but that was it. And even that I am not sure of. They might just be matching my data back to another database for state voter records.

So in following best practices… shouldn’t they be doing some progressive list profiling with all the opportunities/campaigns they have emailed me since last summer? Maybe one email that says “Tell us more about you”, or “Take a moment to allow us to learn about you and what is important to you in this campaign?”

Overall it has not made a lick of difference until this email. This email, IMHO, would be best served to be sent to women influencers that would spread the word to other women, not to men that would spread the word. Using like genders would have a greater impact.

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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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Ok, had to share this. You might laugh, you might say it is dumb, etc. Regardless I got a hoot out of it and I am a dog person not a cat person. The below post is really illustrative of two things. One we create bad terms and more bad terms every day. Two we need to focus on understanding what we hear before playing the game of telephone.

But what spawned this was someone today asking me if I had heard about “cat phishing”. I was not sure what to think. Many ideas ran through my brain of what it could be, but in the end after searching and searching it turns out that is was “copy cat phishing” they heard. Yes now that makes more sense. 

It is something that all brands have to consider as it is everywhere and could negatively impact your own brand and the consumer trust in your brand. But then again so could the avian bird flu, a wayward mack truck, or the news. So until you find the magic brand protection bullet (I think it is co-ownership with the consumer/partner) let’s just enjoy some cat phishin’.

Now the image is funny, but the problem is not. It is kind of like opting in for a camapaign with a name like Mr. Poopypants. I bet there are quite a few other ways we could make a dent here, like a public service campaign of education about email marketing from the DMA, EEC, DM News, and all the other ESPs and marketers. That would most likely help all of us if we took this to the public proactively instead of just sitting back and dealing with it. 

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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