The Email Wars

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.

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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