The Email Wars

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.

Every once in a while even I unsubscribe from an email. When I get some emails that are just off the mark and make no sense as to why I would benefit from them, like DEX – when it the last time I used a phone book or even went to a phone book website – hello google. But what caught me on this one was when I went to opt out they tried to get me to opt in to others?

Now I would not typically fault this, as it is a good idea to give people options if they are leaving, but why would I want to sign up for offers from someone I have no idea who you are giving my email to? Is this a new trick to make some money from co-reg with the yellow pages? I know things are tough, but they could have executed this much better. Maybe give me some ideas of what I would be opting in to get? I am sure that they trick some folks with this move, as the unsub is not the marked select but the offer to get emails from others is. To me it is just bad brand marketing. 

So goodbye DEX and thanks for trying to make something off me.

I had to use that title for this post as I know that many of you out there are always jaded when it comes to list rental campaigns. Now I am not talking about buying lists, but partnering with other like brands or list managers that have double opt in lists where they have allowed subscribers to opt in for emails from like or relevant brands. 

Now here are 4 reasons why I dislike them (yes I changed my mind from hate).

1. They often will not perform to the expectations. Many brands expect these lists that are so well found and segmented to give them the same reach and performance from their own lists. This will not happen, ever. These are lead generation campaigns and if executed right can drive new subscribers to your lists and even sales/conversions. But don’t expect miracles. 

2. They are not from your brand. And they should not be. They should be sent from the brand that has the relationship and contain your offers. Many times they are sent from that brand and the disconnect with the user is bad for all. They can result in more list attrition from the list owner in the end if done wrong. 

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Study Finds Some Top Brand Marketers Are Struggling To Provide Adequate Email Unsubscribe Options

Twenty Percent of Marketers Sent Additional Email Messages To Consumers After Confirming The Person Had Unsubscribed

Twenty percent of top brand marketers sent additional emails to subscribers after confirming an unsubscribe request, Return Path discovered with its new research study titled Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After “Unsubscribe Me.” Eleven percent of the companies studied emailed subscribers more than 10 days after confirming an unsubscribe request – a violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act. Marketers risk impacting their overall email reputation with spam complaints if they have a faulty email unsubscribe process.

Return Path, the leading e-mail deliverability and reputation management company, conducted the study by unsubscribing from the email lists of 45 companies from the retail, consumer goods, travel, and media/entertainment industries. Return Path originally subscribed to these email lists to conduct its Subscriber Experiences study.

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It is not very often that I see an email that is meant to challenge and deflate the market factors hitting a competitor. Could you imaging a brand like Starbucks using email to say, “Dunkin Donuts Coffee not good enough for you? You should try ours.” I could not fathom a brand using email to build a campaign around the failures of another brand, but maybe that is where the business world is heading now. When their is market share erosion and brand fears just add email to get the word out. 

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If you have ever tried Fat Tire beers you are most likely a fan. But why do some brand kill themselves with bad email marketing. I have long been a subscriber to many beer email lists (for business reasons only I assure you) but these guys kill me. I think I might need to make a charity phone call soon as these emails continue to hurt my good senses each time I get them. 

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This past two years I have been amazed at the gall of politicians and political parties that are in essence spamming me when I have not opted in to their emails. I have also been forwarded emails like this from many of you across the nation with this same gripe.

Even though there is a loophole in the CAN Spam law that allows politicians to send emails to people even when they do not have an opt in (this needs to change by the way) why do they assume that they should email us. I can tell you that I am not a registered democrat. Now this does not mean that I might not vote that way this time around, but when I (or you) get an unsolicited email from a candidate or a party I cannot understand why they think that this email might make me either trust them or like them more. 

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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.