The Email Wars

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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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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So many people want to write about the death of one medium for the rise of another. TV is dead, email is dead, twitter is dead, RSS is growing, print is dead… blah blah blah. What is not dead is media as a whole. Media and media use is growing and growing in every way. We may not watch as much TV, but we watch it smarter using things like TIVO, SlingBox, DVRs, Mobile, etc. So why don’t we see more shows and brands using email to drive and grow smart viewership? 

I would think that even in this example they might think about not just saying TUNE IN TONIGHT, but use some alternate calls to action. Don’t miss it, set your TIVO. Going to be busy? You can watch it online later, but you can’t miss it regardless. 

The problem that many people in the entertainment industry are missing is that time and place are not the same thing anymore. We consume media how and when we want it, on the place and device of our choice. So why not start thinking about that type of inclusive and smart messaging in their email campaigns? 

Now not that I am jumping on to check out the next Diddy Band, but the use of video in this email makes or GIVES me some instant access to the event that might make me either want to watch it OR even better tell someone about it. I would have actually placed more emphasis on the video being higher up in the email and even making the TIME and DATE a larger font that stands out in the email. Heck we all know by know that MTV will rerun any show 500 times and we can catch it between other shows, if anyone even watches MTV anymore.

Email can be a powerful medium IF you stop to think about the audience and TRY to use alternate approaches to your messaging. But you already know this… don’t you?

I am sharing this campaign with you a little prematurely. Now I am not saying that this campaign has not gone out and did blow away the long running subscription control by a double digit factor, but it is getting a full campaign case study written up now. It will be out soon with all the details, but want I wanted to focus on was the slight factor that changed the response rate. 

When this creative was first passed by my desk I had to stop and think about it a little bit. How was it different from what was sent out prior? What would tell people what to do and would that effort beat that of ones prior? The whole idea of this campaign was to drive subscriptions and we did not want it to make people think of anything else besides the images and the value of having a print subscription. We loaded it up into an inbox to see how it displayed. Did it drive the eyes to the action. Did it convey value and on top of that did it make me want to get a subscription. Well it was close.

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Have you ever noticed the power of lists for driving readership of newsletters, email or any PR online? We as marketers long for more bullet points and ways that we can quickly take away some knowledge in small bite sized chunks. But I have also noticed that smaller lists have a greater impact? 

Why, well I think that it is simple… smaller lists address the problem and the solution while longer lists seem to just throw things up in the air for you to choose the solution. Here are some examples:

3 Ways to Solve Your Issue

100 Things You Can do to Combat Your Problem

When you say here are the 3-5 things in a short list, it seems that you know how to fix what is wrong, while when you have a list of 20-100 things you are just giving ideas to problem solving. 

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I am a big fan of the use of images to tell the stories in email. I know you will bash this as well images can be suppressed, but when it works and it done right pictures can evoke a click often times more that too much text. Copy, although important, is so often over used and truly just creates more things to do and drives less impact on the desired action to delve deeper into the story, item, purchase, conversion, etc. 

This example of Adobe is their newsletter which connects with people on so many levels. Not only for the fact that it is outright sexy, but that it can tell the stories quicker with images than it would with text. Simple layouts like this are growing and evident more in the movement to simplify our web interactions with the 2.0 design philosophy. 

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I have been reading over this study a few times now. It is well done and yet totally confounds my sense of thinking around keeping it short, driving home the point, telling me what to do, and being relevant. So if you have not read it yet it is the Alchemy Worx study that is reporting longer subject lines have a great impact on read to click as opposed to shorter subject lines that are just read…

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I have been watching surveys in email lately as more and more brands are frequently using them. The fact that they are asking is great. How they are asking and the method of taking the surveys are another story.

Many of the things that I found to be issues are:
1. You must log into your account to take the survey. Lost me. Will lose most people
2. You must log into to your account to manage your email preferences. Now this is not unsubscribe, but why can’t you click from a link to do this? They have all the info to pass already.
3. There is no action to take on the thank you pages to get me to go somewhere or make me an offer for the time and information I just gave you.
4. The sender email address is not the brand. The from field is, but everything else is from a 3rd party.

All challenges to goal completion in my book.

Apple:

The creative is nice and clean. Expected from Apple. But the sender email address is from a 3rd party survey company ghosting the Apple name in the sender field. Red flag to me. You?

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Great study from ReturnPath this past week if you have not read it already. But it hits on one of my favorite topics, the immediate trigger. So often when I am auditing a customer’s email marketing program it starts at of course the opt in. Great I signed up and then the first miss… the thank you page. Such an opportunity for a personalized cross sell, exposure to something else, and even just a simple “Here is what you can expect with your opt in”.

Then I watch for the thank you email. You had me at hello and now with your brand in my immediate conscious you have the opportunity to start talking to me or even training me to expect what arrives from you. This is an ideal time to set the standards of the from line and even give a little something-something where you can drive a special offer or even some proactive profile expansion with data you did not ask for at opt in. Progressive profiling of your opt ins works really well here as we are building a relationship.

But then on top of that many people/companies/brands miss the opportunity to drop that immediate trigger. A recent audit I did had a 2 week welcome email and I was already so detached from them. Even with a newsletter sign up you run the risk of a month between email touches. Stop the insanity and jump on the wagon. Get something out to them immediately, even if it is the most recent newsletter. Get them engaged and trained to get emails from you.

The benefit of immediate triggers holds many benefits for your program and the personalization effect helps to solidify the cognitive relationship you are trying to foster using email.

Read the Study after the jump>>

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Executive Summary

Image blocking has become pervasive, with approximately half of all email users suppressing images by default. However, email marketers have not fully adjusted to this reality and reflected it in their email design.

The two strongest weapons in their arsenal in the fight against image blocking, HTML text and alt tags, aren’t used nearly enough. Only 42% of the 104 top online retailers included in our study designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% used alt tags adequately or extensively.

Consequently, emails from 23% of the retailers reviewed in this study were completely unintelligible in an inbox environment–and there were some significant shades of gray among the 77% that were intelligible, because of lackluster HTML text and alt tag usage.

In addition to our observational study of retailers, the Email Experience Council and SubscriberMail, the sponsor of this study, surveyed 472 marketing executives in March. When it comes to designing for images off, only 47% of the survey respondents said that their company had taken action. Those actions ranged from adding alt tags or a “click to view” link to minimizing images above the fold.

Get the Full Study at the Email Experience Council’s Resources Center

Keep reading after the jump >>>

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Just like one of my favorite old time ads that is still running today (thanks to my TV watching with my 5 year old son) just how much copy does it take to get your point across? (Just How Many Licks Does It Take to Get to the Center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop… One…Two…Three. Three) I often see emails that I wonder just WHO was the copy writer? Were they paid by the word?

We have limited time in today’s world sadly enough, and as marketers we need to be cognizant of just what we need to say, how to say it clearly, and how to get them to take action. Simple right? Well not always.

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Highlighting this email is worthy as it delivers a clearly illuminated coupon code. I often find codes buried in the creative making it hard to instantly recognize them and take action. If you are in the business of driving sales with discounts you need to pay attention. Make it EASY for your email subscribers. They are in this ecom relationship not only for the updates but really for the deals. Sorry to let you down, but we are a society that is constantly on the hunt for a code to save us on a purchase.

You might want to look at your own ecommerce emails and rework the design to focus on showing me the money. Making it text is also paramount. I don’t want to flip back and forth to get some long alpha-numeric string, I want to easily highlight, copy and paste it into my cart at check out and move on. Even better is to allow the user to click on the code and dynamically populate my cart. Now I know not everyone can pass this variable, but what if you could. Taking down the barriers to purchase drives more sales.

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I don’t come across to many of these buy this and get this emails… aka the tie in. What is really interesting to me about this one (and this game is going to rock) is that they are tying in the Korn song from the game soundtrack with the Amazon offer. The email is from Ubisoft but they are channeling the pre-sale to Amazon. This is a win for Amazon not only from the sale lift, but with giving away the song they are gaining more exposure to their music store. Sorry iTunes… guess a few need to get away from you.

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Shoppers who want to save some trees soon will find a new option for rejecting receipts at the checkout counters of major retailers.

A service that will enable consumers to receive digital receipts through big box stores, such as Best Buy and Target, is set to launch May 16.

I have always loved how Apple stores do this for me and it is about time others do as well. I don’t need any more paper receipts crammed in my wallet or pocket. They get lost or thrown away. In the inbox is a great solution. Not sure the “green” factor as some studies I have been reading actually put data use in higher carbon/greenhouse gas levels than commercial airlines by 2010, but it makes sense none the less.

http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9937567-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

My question is have they thought about making this a transaction email marketing opportunity instead of JUST a receipt. If they follow best practices of a 20% use of the email for cross marketing/promotion, they might just drive online or even back to store sales with an offer….

So many examples to show you, but this one really hits on the simplicity of ecommerce email marketing. What is so special about this? Well not special, but it just clearly communicates the levels of interaction and what you can get by clicking the links. Not over the top, not too much copy, and the value proposition is right there in every call to action bucket.

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Often times I see emails with so many things to do, too much copy, and not laid out in a format that is going to display right in the inbox. This layout rocks.

Now to have full disclosure this designer used to work for eROI. So he earned his chops at the school of hard knocks. And it just doesn’t hurt as well that this designer is also my younger brother. Nice work Bryan, you make me proud that you stayed awake at eROI U.

Best part about this is his using Twitter as another communication vehicle in the footer. Not over the top, but right in link with his audience of young urban hipsters. Guess the tech addictive measures run in the family as well.

Still time to get your own shirt or limited run hoodie from his new line.