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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A poll recently released by the Consumer Reports National Research Center shows that 82% of consumers are concerned about their credit card numbers being stolen online, while 72% are concerned that their online behaviors were being tracked and profiled by companies.

Although 68% of consumers have provided personal information in order to access a website, 53% are uncomfortable with internet companies using their email content or browsing history to send relevant ads, and 54% are uncomfortable with third parties collecting information about their online behavior.

The poll revealed that 93% of Americans think internet companies should always ask for permission before using personal information, and 72% want the right to opt out when companies track their online behavior.

Joel Kelsey, policy analyst with Consumers Union, said “Americans are clearly concerned… the vast majority of consumers want more control over their personal information online… “

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I have the priviledge of speaking on 4 topics on digital marketing at DMA 2008 in Las Vegas this week. So far it has been a good start to the week. All the players in the email space are here with booths and signage everywhere. I was happy to see as an industry and economic indicator that the floor was busy and the sessions were well attended. Some people that have been here in recent years past have told me that they don’t feel as if there are as many people here, and I can tell you that from the size of the venue here it would be hard to actually fill it up unless it is the Consumer Electronics show. 

What I did notice that I wanted to share is this: If these people are all direct marketers, why can’t they make their booths pop and get out infront of their target audience at this event. What I mean by this is that so many of the booths could have much more compelling graphics and calls to action. Half of them all feel like they are selling the same thing. I took a walk through trying to decipher what each company did and many of them left me unable to tell. The bigger issue is that was direct marketers one would assume that they would be getting out in front of these people and hustling the asiles. Very few of the folks, even in the email marketers booths were jumping out and bringing people into their spaces for conversations. 

In a year that is giving some people uncertainty I would think that these marketers would be getting aggressive and engaging the audience right there on the spot. Not so much. You need to take this thought to your email campaigns these coming months. IF we have a downturn in consumer spending going into the holiday retail season, you need to be that measure, articulate, engaging brand that uses email to bring people back and have a conversation.

Back to the trenches now. 

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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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 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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