The Email Wars

Over the past few months I have personally been under a massive attack from people now using the “Freemium” model that so many small business ESPs have opened up and offered to their “clients”/personally I want to call them users. This is a personal stance post here and should have no reflection on anyone but me, but I am quite tired of the free ESP services. Why? Well they are giving anyone with the ability to upload a list the ability to email me. It opens up the just because you can does not mean you should debate I often have with people new to email marketing (yes there are always people new to it).

I am a firm believer that not everyone should have access to an ESP platform unless they have some skin in the game. Use your gmail, msn, yahoo, personal email to get a personal relationship with me. Free accounts simply allow people to take liberties with email and blatantly goes against all the best practices and rules we all fight so hard to instill and drive.

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We know that so many people spend time and money to create an email template that works well in all the email clients, save time and money with each new campaign, build an expected email for subscribers to know where to look and what to do, and give some flexibility for promotions and new content. But what gets to me is when people fail to actually use and complete a template leaving a area of it blank. It feels so JV to me and makes me wonder why they don’t take the time to see what else can be added, or simply edit the template to work for that campaign.

As I travel frequently I am signed up for most of the Airline emails and am impressed with most of them. But SW seems to frequently be the culprit in using an email template and failing to use it right. I mean they are a discount airline so could this lack of content save them money? Doubt it.

What I would hope that you learn from this post is to look at how you are using your templates if you use them in your email platform and find ways to create a few versions of them so that you can not leave massive blocks of emptiness in them. It feels unprofessional and to me shows a lack of effort by the email marketer. Even taking the time to reorganize the content in this case could have helped them to deliver a flushed out email, avoiding the gaps.

Have you ever been guilty of rushing a campaign out the door with a lack of content or taking the time to button it up?

Here is the funny thing about this email that I am critiquing, I actually booked a flight from it for a trip this month… so maybe it does not matter in the short run to conversion, but instead does some harm to the overall brand.

Thoughts?

I pulled out an article I wrote recently that was featured in iMediaConnection that you might enjoy. It covers some past posts that I wrote into one article that highlights the things that you should look at to learn from with your email marketing campaigns.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The Ultimate Email Fail

The more experience you gain as an email marketer, the more you come to understand the true purpose of an email. It isn’t simply to blast something to subscribers without relevancy or reason. It isn’t to make a quick, dishonest buck off them. It isn’t to pull off a massive bait-and-switch. It isn’t even to release the hounds on the competition. It’s about nurturing, building trust and relationships, and ultimately increasing and solidifying the reputation of your brand.

Every email sent must have a purpose and needs to personally relate to the subscriber. If the email lacks personalization or has no purpose, you’re taking a risk that may cause subscribers to not only opt-out of your emails, but also mentally and emotionally opt-out from any future engagement with your brand. When this happens, the recipient immediately becomes emotionally unsubscribed. We in the industry identify it with a very technical term: email marketing fail.

Everyone fails at some point. A recent study by Return Path discovered that up to 20 percent of top brand marketers continue to send emails to addresses on their lists that have unsubscribed — more than 10 days after a confirmed unsubscribe request.

Read the full article here >>

I have not come across this horrible spam Frankenstein ever. Now I have seen parts here and there but this one takes the cake and took some time to bake. Yes is is a horrible email and most likely you would not check it out, but here at eROI we take one of the team for you day and day out.

1. Spoofed from Field to be the same as the To Field.

2. Baked in some MSN preference center love to give the pharma spam some legitimacy.

3. For good measure ripped off iContact’s footer and preference center links

A complete rip off trying to legitimize spam. Man will it ever end?

But it’s not done here. What can we do to combat this or anyone else doing something similar? IS there a fix?

I know that all of you are under a increasing barrage of spam and junk lately, if you are not consider yourself lucky. Personally I have had over 700 emails arrive in my junk folder just in the last 24 hours and those are the ones just making it through. Whew. I have seen others talking about it online and in places like Twitter. So things like this email just put me over the edge on why all of a sudden valid emails are being targeted again.

But I will digress a little on that topic and wanted to share with you this Train Wreck of an email. And why is it so bad for me? Well let me show you.

First it is coming from a valid company but being sent from someone spoofing the offer. Actually I think that it is a third party trying to drum up some business for Vista Print.

Next up is the ENORMOUS header text link to show images. Really is that your main concern ahead of the email offer and creative? So you know you are having issues with images being suppressed when someone gets this stuff.

Then we have the box of copy telling you NOT to respond to this email as this is a email address that is not monitored. That is a great tactic to use with email marketing. Hey we sent you this but don’t bother responding as we don’t read the emails you send to us. Nice.

But is ends with my favorite thing. THIS IS AN ADVERTISEMENT with a whole footer all about Can Spam compliance and how this email is not a violation of this law. Really if you have to state it, then it most likely is unsolicited email and worthy of a complaint.

In the end I think if you need to use all of these things in your email message and cannot just focus on doing the right thing then it can join my Hall of Fame of crap. Please do me a favor and keep your emails to yourself. After all I don’t respond to junk.

No matter what the next NEW idea is it only takes a short time until the clowns of the internet think of how to pollute it. I share with you one of my personal favorite tools, Twitter, and how the hucksters are quickly finding out that there is an audience there and that they have a chance at pulling the same scams as they have in all other online medias. It amazes me to see how these guys pop up as soon as a new idea gains some traction. Think about how it hurt email, myspace, facebook, RSS, IM and more.

These people pray on the uneducated online and in the end end up doing damage to the real people, marketers and companies trying to create a good experience. But are they the only ones to blame? Not exactly. Sometimes the technologies themselves are not able to act fast enough to head them off as they should. You would think that we would have all learned by know what to look out for and how to spot them and kill them off. But alas we are slaves to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

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We could call is psuedo misrepresentation in email marketing. I had signed up for the Flight of the Choncords newsletter and show alerts and it seems that also let HBO focus on sending me something not on topic for my expectations of this opt in relationship

HBO sent me a store clearance email that had little to do in anyway with the opt in for Flight of the Choncords. But what made me want to share this is that the FROM line is guised as an email that I would normally get from them about the shows.

It was a complete bait and switch and all about buying merchandise in a sale campaign. I read through the copy thinking that maybe I just missed is a little bit. Nope. It was a list swap in its truest form.

So is this okay to do? Well from a marketing perspective the answer is yes. But from a relationship and expectations from those that opted in to a certain list it is a definate nope.

My lesson is that you need to think not only about your own goals but carefully consider the relationship you have established and the trust that you have put in place.

This is not going to lead me to opt out as I love the other emails, but it does make me think twice about my email relationship with this brand as a whole. Might it have the same impact on your customers? Something to think about.

As I was working today I was forwarded an email from a co-worker that called to my attention something that did not completely shock me, but did surprise me. You would think with all the emails I see and all the articles I read that very little could shock me. But what was in this email threw me a little bit. Could it be because of the “economic downturn”, publishers reaching for revenue, or simply it was just part of our sales plan? Not sure the exact answer to my question really, but Ken Magill’s Direct Mag sent out a third party email. Wait, let me take that back… he rented his “list” to target us with an ESP ad that was neither targeted or wanted. Now I understand the publisher model of driving revenue with advertising, partnerships, exclusives and more… but what kills me is the lack of targeting.

Ken, with all of the things that you write about it throws me for a loop when you rent your list to other marketers to send non targeted offers. Now I know that it is part of the business and a great revenue driver for most publishers, but it just seems off brand for you to allow. I understand that you don’t have control over your publisher and the sales team, but you might want to have some level of oversight on how you are used as a brand for your own reputation. The articles you write slam other people for how they use their lists and as a “beacon of light” for the industry I would think that you would think twice about this practice, OR at best, maybe run a suppression or filter list against it to make sure that it was getting to the right people that might take action. Well maybe I am wrong here as I am not perfect.

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Once in a while I get a campaign from a video game company and am floored at the attention to cool but lack of all basic principals of email marketing. What do I mean by this? Well take a look at the creative.

I understand from working for years with Konami and Sega about making things that are cool thought provoking and viral, but this email let me down not only on the “mystery” factor but also on the basics. First there was ZERO copy in the email. Not even an image as text. So what the heck and I supposed to do? Well of course click on it to learn more, but then the landing page took 4 minutes to load the flash. FAIL. After waiting patiently for the flash to load, I was greeted with a very cool landing page, but the whole thing failed when after waiting it just ended with a link to a PDF of the icon. I assume that there is some storytelling going on here for those that know, or even a online treasure hunt of sorts, but there were not any prompts of what to do. So I bailed.

Second the fundamentals are missing for Can Spam complaince. No footer with an unsub link, physical mailing address… anything. Now that is not cool but risky. Blows my mind that a company can miss this. It is a complaint or lawsuit waiting to happen.

So what is the balance between cool and right? Would you have clicked on it?

This question has been on my mind this past week as I worked with one of our banking clients on a new project. What entered my mind was not what they were doing, but what others deem the difference to be.

Now my understanding, and I would love your thoughts, is that a transactional email is one that:

1. Confirms an order or action that you need a confirmation email

2. An alert in a change in status or account

3. A change in relationship, privacy policy or access

Now there is a fine line in transactional emails where you can (using best practices) allocate 20% of the message to allow a marketing message. Apple does this well with iTunes transactional email receipts. They do not lead with it, nor does it interfere with the transactional email message. Subject lines are clear, copy is clear and the message can be easily scanned to know what is occurring.

But then this weekend I got this email from Technorati. I had to pause to understand if this was a transactional email OR a marketing email. My first thought was that it was alerting me to changes at Technorati in regard to features and my account. But as I read through it more, it seemed to be a straight marketing message.

So then why would they not add CAN SPAM compliance to this message? No unsubscribe, no address footer, nothing. I was a a total failure. The subject line was deceiving to me in that it made me think that it was a service message about Publishing Content on Technorati. Take a look and tell me your thoughts.

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I don’t normally use an email marketing competitiors emails to show failures, but this one is a good one to have a discussion with you. When is personalization needed and not just something that gets thrown in. As you can see when you personalize and you do not have the data point in the CRM, it is simply a FAIL.

Now personalization can be a powerful medium, but when used as simply as “FIRSTNAME” it is weak sauce in my opinion. Would it really lift this newsletter by using my first name in a “Dear Dylan” (oops they did not have my firat name) scenario? Not likely from tests that I have tried before.

What would have been better was if they knew a releavant article or subject line to engage me with instead of JV personaliztion. This is a good example of why you can get into trouble with using it. When you have a small list it is easy to check and see, and even more relevant is that you need a back up plan for any data point that could possibly not exist in just one record. We often use a tactic of coming up with a generic word that would be inserted into any field or rule set that would populate data/elements if none exists.

Do you think that simple personalization works in a scenario like this? It is a newsletter. Something that you send to everyone, so why would my name make it better opened, read and clicked on?

Something to think about before you engage in your next campaign with data elements.

It always amazes me when great retailers go the route of one massive image file for their email campaigns. Not I can attest that this example is an amazing work of graphic design, but there has to be a better way to use Web text and chopping the images to ensure that if images are blocked that you are not just getting an empty email with a footer. 

This is most likely the work or an over zealous designer with little knowledge of email marketing that is only focused on the LOOK of the email and not the purpose or function of email marketing. With so many resources on the interweb why can’t brands start to be smarter or just hire people that have their best interests at heart? 

Design is just the start of the battle in order to win the hearts and minds of your subscribers and customers. If you have a designer on your team that continues to create your emails like this example, please walk over to their inbox, go into the settings, and turn off all images in their system. Then have them test send the email to their own inbox. Sit back and watch the look of horror on their face when their work arrives empty. That might help them to see the light in email design. Then ask them to show you what they want to buy in that email. You can then explain to them that this could be the experience that your customers will have with this email. 

As a final point, show them a blank check. Now this is not to allow them to write what they want to be paid, but help them understand that unless the emails they design work, then this is the type of payment they will be getting when you do not make a sale. 

Lesson over.

So just how many brands and individuals are using the new president as a way to jump into the marketing efforts of the BarackEconomy? I have been on the look out for brands that have started to use it as a way of cashing in on search and tying themselves to the “optimism” in the new president. I also noticed this AM while on a call with FastCo/Inc that they have an article on just this subject as well. Timely.

We have seen JCrew use the Michelle Obama reference to where she buys her clothes not only in email but also in search, which in many cases shows up in the inbox as well with paid terms. Now hitting my inbox is a new flavor or Ben and Jerry’s. What is next… Borders using a list of Top Books Obama would read? (OH WAIT ABE BOOKS IS) Or an email marketing service provider releasing a new Obama version of their software?

I understand that the natural tie in is going to happen. We are seeing a grass roots retail trade shape up on the streets of major cities with beannies and t-shirts. That is to be expected. What I am not ready for is brand marketers in consumer packaged goods to jump on the band wagon. I feel that it is really a bad play. I mean why wasn’t there some Bushio’s or GW Pop Tarts? Oh yeah, he had a bad reputation and not many of us would have bought that junk. Would have sounded like it tasted good, but stuck to the top of your mouth for 8 years.

Getting back on target now… think twice about how you decide to tie your brand to some things in life. I personally feel that some things should remain out of the political realm. Including my pint of ice cream. Or maybe I will just go upload my dog’s photo to use this promo I found to place your pet as the new First Pet. I mean why not just take the insanity to the next level?

I have been seeing more brands getting aggressive towards their comp in the email campaigns lately. The campaigns are just not marketing about themselves to their opt in lists, but ones that are clearly defining who the comp is and how they are better. Is this something that is a good idea? To me it feels as if they are hurting their brand more than they are strengthening it. 

Think about this in the agency or email world. What if you were to start sending emails to your prospects about how your agency compares to your comp. You are basically going “playground” IMHO on using negative techniques to show how you are cooler or better. It is a play that does not make me feel that you are better if you have the need of slamming another brand in an email or campaign.

Now there is some merit to show how you stack up in some regard, but when you start pulling other comp brands into your messaging it is an all out war you are starting. You can bet that the comp is on this email as well as in your own world your comp is subscribed (maybe with a gmail account) to your lists to keep an eye on what you are doing. So prepare yourself for a negative war, or maybe these other brands will be the bigger person and focus on their relationships instead of lining others up for a game  of dodge ball on the playground and then cheating to win.

I think that I have a lot of understanding and knowledge of industry terms, but this unsolicited (check out the footer of one time email) email threw in the term in the header about “Please push your “picture bar located directly under the Subject line.” Am I confused? Can anyone shed some light on this term? 

I was thinking that maybe they meant that if images we not displayed that you could use the show images button in your email client. Maybe this is it, but I have never heard this term before the way that they wrote it. 

The other thing that made me just plain angry was in the footer that this was a one time send, no way to unsubscribe and that if I did not want it I should just delete it. Pure crap IMHO. Sorry we sent this to you and we have ZERO relationship with you. Matter of fact you most likely have no clue who we are and that is just too bad. But we promise you will never get THIS SAME EMAIL from us again. You might get another one, but it will be totally different. Just so we are clear, this is not spam, just an email that you did not want, ask for, nor want. Well maybe you did, but we won’t send it to you again, so read it and make sure you don’t want to talk to us. 

This is one of those emails sent by people that are clueless that drives our industry one step back for the three steps we are all trying to move forward.