The Email Wars

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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So I am a fan of personalization of emails. I love it when it is done right and makes sense in the copy, images, subject lines or other places in the email creative. What I am not a fan of is when it is just tacked on like an after thought. Really do you think that just dynamically inserting it at the top of the LARGE image you sent to your list is really going to make that much or a difference if you did not? With this creative and the offer it might as well have been left out as it is like there should be a line at the top with a FILL IN THIS BLANK field penciled out. It feels that personal to me. 

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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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I was growing tired of my subscription to MarketingExperiments from Marketing Sherpa. It was not due to the frequency or content as whole, but that the stuff that they kept sending did not feel relevant and I was not ever engaging it. So it was not a break up but more like a “It’s me, not you” type of thing. Well maybe it was a little bit of them. Still love the Sherpa.

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When you are using dynamic content in email, you better make sure that you have data in all the fields you are going to use for ALL subscribers. Often times I see people trying to get to a one to one relationship and they fail to check and test their data sources before they send. And what a bad impression as well as impact it makes on the brand. Especially when they send it to someone in email marketing. This example was passed on to me from Maddy Hubbard (whom we adore) at another ESP. Yep it is okay to like someone else at the competition.

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Hi, My name is Dylan and I work for a company called eROI. We have an ESP product called emailROI. We use it for our own email communications and are quite happy with it. So why in the hell would you send me an offer to get a Vertical Response account? I love these third party list rentals. They never know much about anyone on their list. Just happy with the CPM of an email address, and wham bam thank you mam… here you go Dylan an offer you just can’t refuse.

Wow. When I do a list rentals for clients I make sure to suppress against know addresses of comp, etc. Vertical Response you need to do the same. I know the shot gun approach can work from time to time, but you are not displaying industry leading best practices and most likely attracting clients that will do the same.

Best part about this is they are using my emailROI email address that I stopped using over 4 years ago. And this sender is something that I have never heard from before in my life nor have I got emails from them before. Crazy. Like the line in Animal House, “Pledge him, we need the dues.”

If you do any list rentals or partnering use this as a lesson of what not to do, or call me and I will be happy to walk you through best practices.

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Wow. This is one for the books. I was stunned this week at a client that moved to Eloqua, which I thought was a great system, when I was told that unless I was using Internet Explorer I could not unsub from the link. This is one of the craziest things I have ever seen with my own eyes in email marketing. Why would a profile system or an unsubscribe process be built to be platform or browser specific? Love that they gave me a link to download IE? I have it already but don’t use it as my default browser.

So in a world where web forms should work in any browser why can’t Eloqua make this investment to be cross browser compatible? I open this post up to any comments and explanations from them if they want. Please enlighten me? If I was a client and this happened to my email recipient I would be ticked. It is basically not allowing me to unsubscribe from an email with a simple opt out. Right? Or am I just a bit crazy?

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.

Let’s set this one up as “What not to do in email marketing”.

So not sure if this was done in a find/replace method or driven from a CRM.

Lesson One: Use the right company name in your email. We are eROI not Exact Target. Those are those guys in Indy. We are the sexy ones in Portland, Oregon (HOLLA).

Two: Proof it for any typos or grammar.

Three: Cold Calling sucks, make me learn about your event and the value prop instead of making me HEAR about your event from you. You move straight into the you need to buy pitch and I still don’t know what the event is.

Don’t want to stir any Cold Call Cowboy karma, but if you don’t plan your email outreach, even on a one to one level, you might as well not email.

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The timing was right, the offer was strong, the creative compelling, the message was clear… so what happened? This is the part of the email marketing issue that drives me nuts. I call it the loss leader email. If you have ever seen that car ads in the paper or on TV that say we have X car starting at X price, hurry in. Well an email campaign like this leaves me with some email remorse.

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Let’s set this up more.

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So I want to start by saying that I love video and I love email. What I don’t love is when you combine them and it not only does not work, but it looks like the below image (fished out of my Junk folder)

Let’s start at the top at the jump >>

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Okay, if you love Ben and Jerry’s raise your virtual hand. This stuff is like crack to me. Really it is one of the best things in the freezer aisle. BUT their emails kill me. So many missed opportunities to drive people to an online or offline location. This email started out great and delivered on a real simple premise, you are a VIT or Very Important Taster, and we want you to come by one of our shops and taste a few new flavors before they hit the shelves.

Good buzz factor, good pass along factor, good execution (except almost all images). Until I noticed that there was not a place to click in the entire body of the email except in the header logo. Really? Go to your local shop? Through a hunt for which is closer? (We have a few in Portland) How hard would it have been, and how much time would they have saved people by simply adding a link to a store locator?

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When you are driving people from an online touch point to an offline location, give them the tools to make it happen right there. The hunt takes them away from your site and to other places where you had the opportunity to capture some brand impressions at the very least.

Off to Google Maps now… oh wait there is a Baskin and Robbins 31 flavors a block closer… sorry Ken and Harry’s, someone else made it easier.