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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I am not sure what to think about this idea. I have had messages from other email marketing experts that have started to use this service already. I can understand WHY people might want to use this system, but as an email marketer my thoughts are still out to vote. 

I have set up an account for myself but do not have enough data or experience to tell you WHY to use it. Here is the coverage on it below from last week. 

What still strikes me as odd is that it was created by one of the earlier founders of an Email Service Provider.

“OtherInbox is a service that helps with one of the growing problems of using Web services: e-mail overload. More specifically, services that take your information and sell it to third parties–thus filling up your in-box with decentralized junk.

OtherInbox works by giving you a special address you can use when you sign up for things and it helps you filter them in a central location with tags and layout akin to Apple’s Mail application. Each “subscription” reads like its own in-box.

The service may be most useful for figuring out what services are selling out your e-mail address to other parties, but it’s also good for handling bacn–the messages you may want from a service, but not necessarily filling up your in-box. What makes it special is that users can effectively kill off that special address making the messages bounce back to the people who would be spamming you.”

Today the team sent me an intervention email. It is not that they don’t like me, it was that they are “concerned” about my love and embracing of ALL things digital. I IM, I email, I Tweet, I Facebook, I Skype, I blog, I comment, I Flickr, I YouTube, I Vimeo, I post in forums, and most importantly I forget to notice that it is still sunny out in Portland, Oregon. I guess that they have a point now that I have taken the first step in admitting I have a problem. 

So I am happy that they took the time to intervene. At least they used email as the vehicle, as last time the all company “meeting” in my office was a bit over the top. Guess they forgot about the baseball bat and the fire escape so close to my desk…

But on the other side of the coin, this is one of the simplest and best sites using email as the “viral” vehicle that I have seen in a while. MeetUp used a great idea about all of us and our dependence on online communication, “friends” (watch the video and see if you catch the 433,000 BFFs copy there, classic), and the fact that we need to use these mediums to gt back out and physically interact with those in the real world. After all it is where LIFE happens, not the inbox or the web. Sorry to burst your bubbles.

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Just how do you drive a move to mobile email campaign? I was forwarded this example of eTrade making a move to get people to use their mobile version by giving away a free blackberry. That is one way. But what did they miss with this campaign? 

1. Where is the VIEW AS Mobile version for those getting this on a mobile device? FAIL

2. Why is the header of the email so massive? Anyone with a mobile device is not forced to scroll (or thumb) down to the content If they have HTML enabled. 

3. The email itself is over (I cut off the 2 pages of legal) 1200 pixels long. Not a very good practice in my book if you are targeting mobile OR even the typical inbox. 

So what would have worked better? 

First nailing the top three above. But on top of that thinking about the value prop of not just giving an incentive of a blackberry but a mobile device of their choice. Not everyone wants a blackberry so why pigeon hole yourself into a gift that might not appeal to your audience. I know that this is a deal with Blackberry as the content says “exclusive” but they need to be building mobile apps to be cross platform complaint. They might have missed some promotional opportunities to just touch an existing audience and move them to use their services from a value standpoint. 

What would you have done?

Email Preference Centers are important. Would anyone disagree here? We are seeing more and more marketers making preference centers more front and center in their list management and data management practices? Why? Well if presented with the opportunity to change email preferences, let me tell you more about myself, and using it as an outreach point in order have you get emails you want (or get off of those you do not) we can build a better relationship of trust. Together.

Trust and understanding is important. We saw some dialogues last week that stemmed from a post on this blog about this issue. We need to set up more points of communication of a two way dialogue and conversation. Email is not only about opt in, list growth, relevant emails and conversions. It is about trust and relationships. 

As people we are inundated with email marketing messages each and every day. We have the opportunity to take the high road and give less but of greater relationship value. I have used the example from IronPort (bought in the past by Cisco) in order to illustrate the approach to starting a conversation. Now I did not need the incentive of a new TV, but it is a touch of “What’s In It For Me” as a subscriber if they did not see the value of updating their preferences.

If you are not opening yourself up to learn more and communicate in a more open manner with your subscribers, then you are setting yourself up for more data issues in the future as well as poor performing campaigns. 

When are you going to set up your preference center and if you have one already… when are you going to let people know? 

Sure is was a funny sophmoric joke, but people that mess with email marketers data with false names, fake names, friends names, or my favorite asdf@asdf.com (look at your keyboard) make our jobs hard. Now to get some mileage out of you and your buddies getting emails from a brand or person that are dynamically loaded with the fake name you opted in with is fine in your inner circles. But placing your “joke” out there about how you loaded false data into an opt in form is crap. 

When you do this do you realize how many hours a year the marketing and email marketing industry is spending to clean out crap like this? These data points go into our CRMs, our ecom sites, our lead capture systems and more. And to top this off data that is bogus can cause us deliverability issues as ISPs that we all try so hard to avoid. Do us a favor, if you want something, sign up for it with real info, if you want to streak the quad, do it on your own site. 

Now Ken you are a persona in our space, and sure you got a joke out of this. Hell I do some pretty odd things myself, but data integrity is everything to our industry and to me this is insulting to us and not funny. 

I think that as someone that covers the industry and espouses the things that make us strong, tear us down, threaten our industry, and lift us up… you of all people should be helping us out and not hurting us.

Here is the article from Frank the Tank Magill. Enjoy your weekend at Bed, Bath, Beyond.

Now how many times you have you seen incentive to win a trip, a book, etc etc. Why not take that sign up for our newsletter and get X idea to something that really matters to most of us? Well we did. And we are giving you a drink. Actually more like one of our clients is giving you a drink on the house. Yes there are some rule around it, but hey why not sign up if you live in PDX, or are coming to visit us and get yourself something ice cold. 

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The other morning I was forwarded the email opt in from another ESP by a co-worker at eROI. Now I am not going to share it at this point as it got my juices flowing. I started to wonder… if all of the ESPs out there are stumping on their soap boxes about best practices, studies, and how people are not doing A-B-C of the basics of email marketing… then are they following these rules themselves. 

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The trend has been growing and I am very happy to see this I might add. The more that I see people asking for you to set and manage your profile, email preferences, and giving you the ability to tell them more about yourself makes me feel that the world is getting to be a better place for email marketing. Piperlime, personally love them, does a solid job each week with the creative but also stands tall as an example for retailers building the trust and admiration of their consumers. 

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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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I had the pleasure today to get a chart from Michelle Eichner at PivotalVeracity showing some testing of forms in email clients. I wanted to share this as we get questions all the time from clients if they can use a form in an email. Will it work? Will it work “right” is more of the question they should ask.

Forms will display most of the time in email. But will the submit button work properly is another answer. Sometimes and it depends on what email client. I typically steer clients away from forms if they cannot segment out email addresses by known email clients. Now who really knows 100% of where someone reads the email? I would wager no one.

From Michelle: “We conduct a research study yearly to understand which Email clients support Forms. There are two parts to the test, A) Do they render B) Are the operable. Below is a chart showing the results of the major email clients. * These clients allow you to access/send information via a form in the email but warn the user when the submit button is clicked.”

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So what do you do? You drive them to a landing page to complete the form and enter the data where you have some control on how it works. Getting it out of the email client is a much safer route.

As GI Joe always says, “Knowing is half the battle”, so good luck in your own personal email wars.

Typically I would not be even mentioning the two people in these ads, but I noticed these on a political news site the other night. Yeah, I follow politics. Who doesn’t? But ads typically don’t catch my attention much anymore. Just clutter around information in most cases.

But these two were calls for newsletter sign ups, so my interest was piqued of course. So I clicked through the first one which was for good old Newt. I had wondered where he had squirreled off to anyway. The lead capture page was good. It was clear what it was about, offered content to support why I would want to opt in, and then showed me a sample email. Great tactics.

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Every once in a while I come across something that I think is a great opt in form. Clear, simple, helpful, and a little bit of creative copy writing that makes filling it out actually enjoyable. I have been seeing more and more lately in the Web 2.0 space (I personally hate typing the phrase Web 2.0, there I go again, ouch). These forms are well done, and give us some other ideas to look at.

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Notice the following elements:

1. Watch for Mistakes - note by the email address. How many times have you had people enter a bad email address with what I call “Fat Fingering”? More than any of us care to count.

2. Explaination of why they need a valid email address - really this is good. Why is it important for you to give us valid information. Make it clear with the value proposition.

3. Time Zone - If you have the ability to better understand where your people are located, if even by time zone, you are better prepared to message them at the right times globally.

4. Frequency - Want a weekly recap? Asking upfront sets the expectations of when you are going to get an email.

5. Alternate email address. I don’t see this all that often anymore, but you might not want to get emails at the address you use to set up an account. Makes perfect sense. Maybe you want your account set up for business, but the email alerts/recaps/newsletters to go to another inbox.

Just a few simple ideas we can all leverage when we are constructing our account or opt in forms. The biggest take away is don’t ask for more information than you are prepared to use. Asking for too much up front scares people from completing a form. Progressive profiling wins every time. And in this case of an account set up, you can always get the other stuff in their profile or preference center settings/screens at a later time.

To lead off I really like the new look of the Ben and Jerry’s emails. They are much better than past emails I have seen. And being that we are moving into the hot summer ice cream months, it is timely to share this one with you. They have a good use of real TEXT in the image blocks which scores points with me for rendering if the images are off in many email clients, but what stood out to me is WHY do they have a link in the footer to ask me if I want to join the newsletter?

After some thought it became more obvious to me… if this email is forwarded it allows others to use the link to opt in to the newsletter. So is this a good idea? Of course it is. Word of mouth wins you more subscribers. And who does not like ice cream?

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Really it is 30 years today that the first documented spam email was sent. And look where we are today, still fighting the battle that Gary Thuerk started. Interesting history on Wikipedia, but would be even more interesting if we could mark this the year that we killed it off.

Mashable has a good article around it as well.

What can we do this year as email marketers to make it die a painful death?

1. Stop sending to people that don’t want your email. Sure they opted in in 2002, but they have not read it for the past 3 years and you keep them on your active email list. Time to purge them. They are of no value to you and you are of no value to them no matter what you think.

2. Start segmenting your lists and send relevant campaigns based on their profile, what they tell you, and past behaviors.

3. ESPs need to be more vigilante on the lists that their clients load into their systems. Although sometimes tricky when you are bringing a client onto your email platform that you have no history with, you need to set some guidelines, educate them, and keep your eyes on the feedback loops and bounce reports from an account by account level.

Help us all help each other. No one no matter who they are want spam emails. Really.