Archive for the ‘Email Marketing Best Practices’ Category
Posted by Dave McCue on October 28th, 2009
As email recipients quickly scan their inboxes, seeing the right offer or incentive can lead them to pause just long enough to give your message a chance at being successful. It may seem strange to think about, but that split-second pause is a tremendous victory for your campaign.
The content most likely to catch recipients’ interests is the subject line, which is obviously why marketers place so much emphasis on trying to craft the most appealing subject lines possible. However, emails I’ve recently received from Horchow illustrated what can happen when a sender falls in to a “subject line rut.”
Over a span of less than 10 days, I saw the following Horchow subject lines in my inbox:
10/19: FURNITURE & RUG SALE with FREE SHIPPING
10/20: LAST DAY: for FREE SHIPPING on FURNITURE and Rug Sale…
10/22: FREE SHIPPING TODAY ONLY + save on Marcus bed & bath
10/22: Time’s almost up for FREE SHIPPING
10/26: FREE SHIPPING on almost everything, 2 days only
10/27: LAST DAY FOR FREE SHIPPING
There are a few things about this strategy that I don’t like. For one, that’s a lot of email over 10 days. But beyond that, how much incentive is FREE SHIPPING at this point? Horchow tries to make the recipient think that free shipping is for a limited time, but it’s obvious that the offer is nearly always on the table. So, by consistently recycling this same offer in their subject lines, Horchow is doing nothing more than limiting the amount of characters they can use in their subject lines to promote actual products.
A great subject line can cause your subscribers to take that split-second pause where they consider whether or not to engage further with your message; re-hashing the same subject lines and tired offers is a good way to make that decision for them.
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Posted by Dave McCue on September 30th, 2009
If you take pride in your email marketing, you wouldn’t think your messages would contain elements found in some of the most Spam-tastic emails out there, right? Well, you might be surprised. To illustrate, I’ll be using a collection of the SPAM-iest emails I’ve received lately. If these characteristics sound familiar, it’d be a good idea to make some changes to your messages—the less you have in common with these bottom-feeders the better.
What’s the problem: (click to enlarge the sample message
The absence of a “To” address or any type of personalization leads me to believe that I did not actually win $2.5M dollars from Asia Power Ball Online Lottery Promo. This is also commonly found in emails sent by organizations who do all of their email marketing in-house, and often enter an entire mailing list of addresses entered into the “Bcc” field. The risk of accidentally using the “Cc” field instead of “Bcc” field is one possibly embarrassing reason to avoid this practice. Another is that seeing a blank “To” field can make recipients immediately suspicious as to the validity of your message, regardless of how legitimate you may think it is.
Using generic subject lines is another bad practice. You may not have content as enticing as a multi-million dollar prize, but it’s your responsibility to make it as enticing and informative as possible. And take care to avoid too much fine print or legal copy at the bottom of your messages—it can give recipients the impression that things aren’t what they appear, or that some “catch” is involved. If extensive Terms & Conditions apply, list them on a web page and link to it the way you would your Privacy Policy.
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Posted by Dave McCue on September 16th, 2009
There are those who fear change, and others who can’t live without it (I know people who sport a different hairstyle—or hair color—just about every time I see them). Email marketers often fall into the same categories, with some being reluctant to divert from their “tried and true” formula, and others constantly switching things up to keep things interesting. But even if you fall into the latter group, I would strongly advise that you learn to love your “From” name and address—or your need for change could backfire.
Looking through my email inbox earlier today, I noticed a message in my Junk folder that appeared to be from a trusted sender, Sharpie.
Now, if this was the first message I’d ever received from the sender in question, I would have simply chalked it up to a deliverability issue and marked them as a trusted sender for future messages. However, I actually remembered marking a previous email as being safe, so I dug back through my archives to see what might have been the cause.
As it turns out, my memory wasn’t entirely accurate; I hadn’t just marked one email from Sharpie as being safe, I had marked two. How did I know this? Because each message used a different From address:
Now, if you go back to the Junk example, you’ll notice that this message also uses a unique From address that was unfamiliar to my email client. So over the course of three messages (one each in July, August and September), I was asked to add the sender to my safelist all three times. After realizing this, I almost didn’t mark the third message as safe because I thought it might be a scam—but then, sometimes writing a blog involves taking some risks.
The third message, as before, turned out to be a legitimate message, but I can’t help but wonder how many of those messages never made it out of the Junk folder. As I wrote in a previous post, for recipients to label your message as safe or add you to their address book requires a certain level of trust. It’s pushing your luck to make that same request more than once and expect the same results.
If you hate the idea of your messages not being opened, learn to love your From.
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Posted by Drew Miller on August 5th, 2009
While scanning through my daily emails a few weeks ago, I came across an enticing offer from Hotwire.com: “For you: $15.95 car rental in Chicago found by Hotwire”. Being a frequent business traveler to the Windy City, this deal seemed like a no-brainer, but in the back of my mind I was thinking: “Too good to be true.”
Upon opening the email, I saw the offer visible in my preview pane:
Naturally, I clicked on the “Show me” link to learn more about this great offer and possibly make a purchase. Instead, I was redirected to this page that asked for my travel dates:
Although I was a tad disappointed that I wasn’t able to learn the details behind the Hotwire offer, I still believed my $15.95 rental car was just a click away. Unfortunately, after clicking “Search for cars”, I found the least expensive rental car for my travel dates was $66.95 – $51.00 more than their email offer.
At this point I was finished with Hotwire and their false promises. Out of sheer curiosity I searched multiple dates and finally found my $15.95 rental car, but the price was a weekend rate – not what I was looking for.
How can Email Marketers avoid landing page letdown? Here are three easy ways:
1. Make the specifics of your email offer highly visible and easy to understand. Had Hotwire made a visible effort in their email (not buried in small, light gray text in the footer) to explain the specifics of the offer, it would have created a far better user experience.
2. Ensure that your landing page is consistent with your offer. If you are promoting $15.95/day rental car’s in Chicago, then your landing page needs to use the same style, design, verbiage, etc. Not doing so might give Customers the impression that they clicked incorrectly, or that the link simply isn’t working.
3. Make the process of accessing your offer easy. Customers click because they are interested. Don’t bog down the process with additional steps – make it easy for them to get what they want. If you must use additional steps (like Hotwire did with choosing travel dates), it helps to inform Customers the purpose behind it.
Looking for more on Landing Pages? Check out our video blog: Successful Landing Pages
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Posted by Dave McCue on July 10th, 2009
Successful email marketers are constantly looking for ways to tweak and optimize their messages in order to come as close as possible to the elusive “magic” formula that guarantees the best results. But one aspect of email creative that even these folks are reluctant to change is the From address via which their emails arrive in subscribers’ inboxes, and with good reason.
A very valuable—yet exceedingly difficult—component of email marketing is getting subscribers to “safelist” a From address, which ensures that future messages from that sender will be delivered directly to the inbox without issue. This is why many email marketing messages list the From address in the pre-header with a request for the recipient to add it to their address book.
Messages from senders not on recipients’ “safelist” will often appear with the content obscured and trigger a warning message such as this (from Hotmail):
Obviously, inclusion on the “safelist” is a big victory for any email marketer. So what happens when you—for whatever reason—need to change your From address?
You could take the approach that Nautica took on a recent email I received. Having been on their mailing list for some time, I was a bit alarmed to see the above “You may not know…” warning display in my preview pane when I clicked on the message. My first thought was that a spammer was trying to trick me by using a familiar sender name as a disguise, but reading the subject line didn’t give any indication that the message would be harmful. So I checked the From address, which was “nautica@email.nautica.com.” This is where the importance of branding came into play, because if that From address had looked in any way suspicious I might have marked the message as junk (remember, the content of the message was blocked in my preview pane, so I had no visual evidence to verify the safety of the message). Seeing the From address with the Nautica domain name eased my fears, and I marked the message as safe.
Upon doing so, the message content displayed in my preview pane, and it was immediately clear what had caused the confusion:
Nautica did a good thing on this message by calling out the fact that they had changed their From address, and doing so in a spot where I would be hard pressed to miss it. In just this top portion of the message, there were two mentions of the new address with the standard request to add them to my address book.
There is a risk involved with changing your From address, as this situation showed. If it must be done, just remember the importance of maintaining a brand-friendly sending domain and—as Nautica did—it wouldn’t hurt to go the extra mile and inform recipients why your message was suddenly being flagged as potential SPAM.
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