The Email Wars

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.

As a creative interactive agency, we buy images from online sources for web design and email campaign projects. But we don’t always opt in for the email newsletter from the check out. I am sure that this is also the case for you and even for your own customers. So you can message them around transactional emails, product updates of products they bought and even ones like this that ASK them if they want to get on the newsletter list. If you do it right you can have a good lift into your house list. But automatically placing them on an email newsletter list is not the right thing to do and you will end up losing them or at the worse end of the spectrum, offending them.

So here is a good example of what Corbis did to reach out to me. Does not hurt that it is pretty to boot.

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How many of you have run or entered a contest online? I bet the majority of you as contests are still like crack out there to the general population. But how many of you have never heard from the brand after the contest has wrapped up? So many contests fail to use the YOU HAVE NOT WON email to it’s full transactional potential. Many brands we see let the winner know but have a hard time seeing how they can use this as a “award” touch point to those that did not win.

Timberland’s example illustrates this well by using the event to “award” a 20% off gift code on your next purchase. Now it is not that they could not have sent this type of email out on it’s own, but the fact that they closed down the campaign full circle and did not leave people out to dry or wondering if they ever made the announcement.

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Think about this from a consumer perspective next time you run a promotion like this. Email is a great channel to keep delivering an incentive even when you aren’t the winner.

This page was not sent in an email campaign, but passed on to me from a co-worker here at eROI. After watching what should be a standard ecommerce page it made me think that this is an amazing idea of how to create a landing page that drives a person through the page from top to bottom and then back.

Take a look at HEMA’s product page. You can’t order anything and it’s in Dutch but just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens. It creates a connection, even when you cannot read it.

If this was a landing page experience I would wager it would not only convert, but also drive people to talk about it and share it. Completely unexpected and very powerful.

We released a new guide today in our Resource Center.

Customer value — revenue, loyalty, advocacy

Brands preach that they are trying to build a base of customers who will keep coming back year after year, but all of their marketing and sales strategies point to a one-time sale so they can get their short-term revenue up. so, how can you stay away from this poorly designed sales strategy? Build customer value. Value comes in multiple forms — each requiring more involvement from your customer — revenue, loyalty, and advocacy. the following is a brief description of each and some ideas for metrics you can use to measure each.

Don’t just focus on price for the one-time sale to a short-term customer, build customer value. Value comes in multiple forms — each requiring more involvement from your customer — Revenue, Loyalty, and Advocacy. Learn how to make brand advocates out of your customer base.

If you have not visited our new resource center, now is the time. The new center allows a one time registration to keep track for you of what you have and have not read allowing you to focus on growing your knowledge through our experiences.

Get the PDF today

I subscribe to over 20 auto brand email newsletters to see what they are doing on the large scale. And from what I have learned, no one is perfect. Even a great brand like Mercedes Benz drops the ball from time to time. As an owner, I thought this was a good email. Cross selling me on some items I might be interested in for my car. Well as I dug deeper in the content (which as 500 pixels wide and over 1600 deep, what email clients are they targeting?) I was shocked to see that there were not any links I could use to drive deeper into a product site and get info and make a purchasing decision.

Missed opportunity, but without failure there are not any lessons to learn from. Fail Harder….

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With the online only brand of Piperlime created by the Gap company, they have been attacking email marketing with deeper links in email campaigns. I was actually excited to see that when I clicked on the SIZES in the email that it actually took my deep into the shoes by size. I know that this might sound logical, but so many times I have seen links that take me into a category and then have me make another selection. It only makes sense that they are taking you right into the action.

But here is another thought… now they have more info on me even if I have not purchased yet. Now they have the data to target me based on sizes that would meet my needs when they have products to clear out. I am interested to see if this will actually be data that they use only for the fact that so often in ecommerce emails I click through only to find that what I was interested in is no longer available in my size.

Whether it is size or anything else, you need to live up to the end users expectations of the offer.

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Another great idea on creating an event. Now this is not an over the top idea, like the one I saw this past week for the Westin of a “BabyVersay” package (leading up to the birth of a child a trip for the expecting parents.. where were you 5 months ago?) but it is a anniversary sale that felt creative and special. It’s a party in an email is all I could think of when I saw this one.

As customers we are expecting you to do the unexpected to capture our attention in the inbox AND as a brand. So mix it up and win the sale. I am watching this holiday season close as the doom and gloom crew is projecting a slower holiday retail season, so I expect some clever ideas in order to stand out of the barrage we are all about to get.

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