The Email Wars

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.

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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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.

I thought that using ALL images in your email was a common fact that we all know is not in any of our best interests. The fact that so many email clients have image suppression set up and that filters look for emails with all images bodes poorly for all the home and fashion brands that MUST think that they are too good or too big to have it matter to them. 

Maybe I am wrong here. IF so someone let me know. But it kills me when I see emails like this. I can commend them on the creation of a new idea of a “Falliday” but with all image email I feel more like it is ripe for a “Fail-A-Day”. I will not fault the design or the concept, just the execution. 

Does anyone have any recent studies that show the number of email clients or of subscribers that suppress images? I would wager that quite a few of their subscribers get emails that are just ALT tags at best. My advice, and yes it is free advice so take it with a grain of salt, but you are setting your campaigns up for failure if you take the design road of “Well we have this catalogue and these images, can we just use those images since we already have them and this copy we took from the print has already been approved.” 

Email is not print. 

You got past the filters. You made the From line and Subject Line clear. Check. But now I open the email from you and I am bombarded with so many brands. Most of whom (if I don’t read all the M&A news) I would not know why they are in this email. I built my relationship with Snapfish, but now you have some new parents and it seems that you parents might be more proud of their brand than the one you have spent so much time building. 

In this email from Snapfish you are immediately placed off guard by seeing the Comcast(ic) brand header at the top. When did Comcast lead again? Is this an ad for Comcast or an email newsletter form Snapfish? Now I realize that when one brand buys another brand it takes time to move the customer from one expectation in branding to another. I expect to see some brand confusion at first as they build knowledge and association, but not a brand hijacking. And this being said… I am a marketer. If I threw this up to the “Mom” test we always like to use, she would be confused. Please, if you have a mother, make sure that she sees this first. If she gets it, then we will get it. 

I think that there is another way that could have been approached on a brand education standpoint than what we see here. This hodge podge of Comcast, Snapfish and HP does not work. I know eventually that will change as we get used to it, but in the mean time remember your subscriber. Remember who you has built the relationship. Remember the brand value. And most importantly respect the trust that the brand you just bought has built in our lives. It is not easy to get trust back once lost.

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.

No this is not a study about what the top use of word choices are in email marketing and subject lines. What this is about is Day Two of the Obama/Biden Campaign and their email marketing Suckiness. Did Biden’s team take over at 9pm PST on Friday and take the internet away from Team Obama? 

So first they missed the alert that they would control all the information stemming on the VP choice. FAIL. Now they are sending an email From “Joe Biden” (Note from info@barackobama.com so much for best practices) with the first time subject line of “Hello”. Weak, yes. Powerful, no. Expected, not at all. How about Introducing the next VP of the United States, Joe Biden OR from Barack with “Meet Joe Biden” if you want to keep it relevant and short. 

I don’t know if I am over thinking this but with the 206 emails I have got (yes you do the math on email frequency) since opting in to the Barack Obama campaign June 27th, 2007… this might be the weakest outreach. Right after the one yesterday telling me I could now get a car magnet for the campaign. I hate to sound jaded, really I do, but the voice in email of this campaign and the outreach is going south. They need to tighten up the reigns and head towards the finish line in a blaze of glory driving the vote, not the stickers, hats, t-shirts etc of the Barack-economy. 

And I have to end on this note… “Goodbye”. 

So much was made these past two week about the strategy of Barack Obama using email and sms to alert those following the campaign and supporting the campaign to learn about the VP he selected FIRST by these two methods. So what happened late friday night when the news was released to the world? 

Well I was out that night, but learned of it first not by email or SMS from his campaign, but from Twitter, websites and friends that the announcement had been made. Heck the news channels even had it before anyone go the SMS or the email letting them know that the choice had been made. 

Others noticed this as well: 

“Word of Obama’s decision leaked out hours before his campaign was scheduled to inform supporters via text and e-mail messages, and hours after informing two other top contenders for the vice presidential nomination – Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia – that they had not been chosen.”

So the email finally arrived in the AM on Saturday after 7am. I have attached it below for two reasons. 

1. The promise made across the web was that you would know FIRST by signing up and opting in. And yet we knew from more sources besides those two 12 hours earlier.

2. The email I thought would include video a photo and some excitement from his staff since this announcement was so hyped and so media hyped for so long. What a let down to just get this HTML text email. 

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The Challenges with email and a lack of email standards across all the inboxes is that from time to time we can experience what we term an email blow out. What is an email blow out? Well is it quite simple. When you design an email there is the opportunity for it to hit an email client or inbox and go to hell in a hand basket. What you thought you might have designed has an issue you did not design for and will cause a table, a tag or an image to throw a wrench into the works and kill your formatting. 

What went wrong here? Well I am quite sure that it was a combination of a table and data feed error. I get this campaign every week and it has not had this issue ever before. What it looks to me what occurred is that the data being pulled from the CRM, CMS, or RSS feed had a character in it that did not play well with the formatting that this automated email template was prepared to handle. 

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I am not sure how many of you look at the spam emails you get, but I would wager that you all take a peek from time to time. I could be wrong, but they amuse the hell out of me. Not for the fact that they are so unstoppable but that they are so ridiculous. I saw this one today, shield your eyes if you are afraid of BAD emails, and I had to share it. Sorry if you are offended in any way but I had to tell you why. 

First: Look at the entire email header. The From line is completely inconsistent, the subject line is that of a pop star, the to line is to someone that does not even exist at this honey pot email address we have set up, and what the hell is that URL they spoof it coming from? Wouldn’t this stop you right there? Well maybe you but I have to look sometimes. 

Second: There is an attachment. When is the last time you saw an email marketing campaign that was legit and professionally done with an attachment? Warning… yes. 

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Yes Virginia there is no Santa Claus… and while we are at it there is not an email marketing fairy sitting over your shoulder at work either. Am I sure you ask? Well if anyone had a magic fairy it would be the marketing machine of IKEA. I have seen free boats in NYC to Brooklyn, Cars, Ads, Online and everything else they do rock and actually be creative in many places. But what bit them the other week… email personalization. 

I am fairly confident that I have covered this quite a few times as it is one of the trickiest beasts out there. Many of you might think… “Why is this so tricky? It is just a variable you associate with a subscriber data point that exists in your system that dynamically loads that HTML, offer, copy, image, subject line, link, etc into the email one at a time at a rapid rate of speed.” I hear you there but do you truly feel that is is an easy event? What have you forget when loading the coal aboard the express train to Hades? 

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Why the head of Vladimir? Well why not. He was a great revolutionary that would love the Wars we are fighting for the best email campaigns out there. So that being stated, I don’t want his head. I have 24 of them. Yes I buy random things that bring me some sort of joy or inspiration (stop by my office sometime). I have 24 of these Heads of Vladimir Lenin that are Cola Flavored Pops… and one of them can be yours?

Really you can have one? Yes and here is the deal that will get me to drop one in a special cola flavor sealing envelope and ship it right to you. 

1. You need to find an email campaign

2. It can FAIL or it can Exceed Expectations

3. It can be your own or one of someone else

4. You need to write up 150 words of why it was a success or failure and send it to me via email. Those that want to submit should COMMENT (I know soooo scary, but it is ok as I will not publish them all if they don’t need to be published to communicate with me) and I will email you my info if you do not have it already. 

Contest ends when I run out of pops.

After I get them all, I will read through them, share them with some of the eROI team and then select and present the winners. Note employees of eROI you are open to enter this contest as well and will be judged the same as anyone else. BUT I will not ship you a lolly. I will bring it to your desk.

That is all for now Comrades.

Interesting that Pizza Hut would take this approach. It is sorry we F’d up email, but they sure do alot of appologizing. Why not take that opprtunity to say sorry, and then give them the pickle (old saying about give them something that they don’t expect by a famous ice cream parlor owner) which would be order one now with an extra topping or save $1 on your next order with us. 

What is trying with this opt in process is that in order to place your order online for a pizza you HAVE to opt in to email from them. Not sure when that became the standard. It is an aggressive strategy and has been written up on blogs like The Consumerist and others. 

Try to do what you would like done to you in this situation if you ever come up against it. You only have one time to have a bad customer experience while giving people the best treatment over and over again keeps them coming back. 

Here is the email:

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How often do you get emails spoofing or looking to be from a brand name that you trust? I get them every now and then but this one had me double taking, looking at the headers, and opening it up to code to see what or who it was really from. Now when you go to this length to use a brand like CNN and deliver creative that makes even me think, it has to impact your brand.

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WIth the 2008 Olympics in full swing I wanted to highlight two examples that I got right around the start of the opening ceremonies. Now why I am sharing both of these is for the fact that they are from the same company, but they manage the shopping experience for NBC online. They do a good job of tying in the sale of merchandise to a real life event and use the creative, products, and subject lines to capture your attention. 

The first one from NBC does a good job EXCEPT they failed at the above the creative personalization techniques. Why if they know my name do they call me “Dear Olympics Fan”? That to me is dropping the ball on the 3 yard line when you are heading in to score a touchdown. 

The creative is nice but the header is a little to fat so that it causes you to lose the rest of the email in the preview pane. They could mix in a salad in the design to think about how long the email is and how it renders when quickly reviewing it before fully opening it. They take the bronze here. 

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