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.

In London? Want to meet up with some email marketing leaders? DMA UK Nov 4th.

I have the pleasure of being a speaker this event I am am very excited to be speaking with such a great caliber of email marketers. I hope that if you are in London you find time to join us at the event. I am only there for 3 days total but would love to meet anyone that has time for a beer.

What I am really excited about is I will get to hear many of these great speakers from Europe that I hope to learn a lot from. There are some differences in strategies that might give me some new ideas for email marketing campaign execution.

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OK, let’s lead off that this is NOT intended to be a bashing of Silverpop. They have a great email platform and I like a lot of their team that I have met. That being said, what the hell was this “Can Spam Compliance Test” they put out? Of course I answered and clicked through to see if I had a pulse. Whew. I did. I scored 4 out of 5. Well technically it was a 5 but they had the answer to number one as “maybe”. 

Make sure to click the image below to open it up and see the questions.

I understand the main point of this is education (hear the applause) but I hope that it is not being used to score people as prospects. Well they do have Vtrenz that is ran through when I took the “test”. What kills me is that these questions are so basic that they are not really helpful, but just a lead generation exercise. I mean if someone cannot answer these questions, do you really want them as a customer? To me it is a red flag of should we be working with you?

I would love to see a better tool or test put out there. That being said I am going to work with the eROI team to build one and release it in the next few weeks. I already started this week drafting 25 questions. Need to work on them, weed them down, build some intelligence into them and then I will share it with you. 

Maybe my stab at it will be better… maybe not.

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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Well not really going green, but starting a new weekly email newsletter focusing on “green” marketing and ad campaigns. It is a continuous segmentation and introduction of more email newsletters. I am not sure now how many they have but to me it is news that they could be adding into one of their existing newsletters as content instead of making an entire new newsletter. 

I share this for a few reasons. 

1. Do they have enough weekly content to justify another newsletter? From the looks of this email in this post the answer is NO. Why well look how empty the newsletter is. It looks horrible. Not really “green” to add more media vehicles to cover small news. 

2. I assume that they are just using this as many publishers do to add more ad sales inventory and drive more clicks into their site where more ads can be served and drive more page views. Fine as that is the goal, but it is not a good use of time and space for them or the subscriber. 

3. Look at the ads. Do they support the content? Are they relevant? Nope on both counts. They are just focused towards advertisers and marketers but not focused on the matching the content or possibly the subscriber base. 

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The ever loving eROI Crew are having their way with me again. I know I deserve it as I am a little non stop with my pranks and efforts. Glad I have brought them into my web. I received the new today via an email that I am the first in a series of eROI “action figures”. Sure this is a prank, and fun, but they forgot my iPhone, my email marketing belt, my pixel measuring glasses, and my Analytics staff. Must be the series 2 release. Slackers. Attention to details is a must, and excpet for those things… they nailed me. 

Funny to think about, but in another company if you were to do this to your bosses I don’t think that they would take it as lightly and laugh. Me I love it. The creativity here is infectious. Guys, can you just find out where to make me one of these for my wall please. It can join the gimp, De La Soul, DDay, Clint, Che and the 100s of others. 

Oh life at an interactive marketing agency. Love it.

But, this starts the war. HEADS Up Team.

I was driving home last night and thinking about a project I am working on for a client right now. They are having us work on their welcome messaging strategy and it had my brain churning. I am not sure why it was so important for me to think about, but I distilled it down to four things that I think are important when you are setting up a relationship via the opt in with email marketing. 

Identification, Trust, Understanding and Conversion. 

Identification:

You could make this simple: Who is sending this email and what will I know about them. Or you can think it out farther. We all know that you have a short time to capture the attention of the email reciepent. So what are the things you need to focus on? The from line, is it you or your brand. The subject line, what is the action you are intending them to take. If you can make this a Welcome/Thanks/You need to X subject line then you are ahead of the game.

This also lines up with the creative. Will they see your brand instantly? Will the creative match up with the look of the site that they were just on and carry over the voice of where they just came from online? You can focus on thinking about the split second reaction of the WHO to nail this. 

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