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.
I received a great email from the National Wildlife Federation looking to arrange a symbolic “adoption” of endangered animals by buying a collection of stuffed animals as gifts for kids. At the same time you’re making a donation to a very worthy charity.
With a clear “From Name” (“National Wildlife Federation”) and an intriguing subject line (“Adopt an Animal Today”), I felt like this was my chance to get a glimpse into Brad and Angelina’s world. I too could be honorable and socially conscious by adopting! I opened the email and then saw some snippet text summarizing the message and consistent with the subject line, “National Wildlife: Protect America’s precious wildlife by adopting an animal today!”. Based on who they were, the subject line and the snippet text, I was encouraged to view images to see the message.
Overall the visual layout was clean and colorful and images crisp and enticing. However, as with so many emails I see, the image usage was just too much. Literally everything is an image from top to bottom.
They did do a lot of things correct, they included:
• Snippet text at the top which is useful for email clients that show the initial text in an email (and mobile devices that don’t display full HTML)
• A web link to an HTML copy of the message to view in a browser
• Alt tags behind the images
• A lot of great links to their site as a navigation row
• Their URL and a contact phone
• Typical email marketing/legal best practices (opt-out link, add to safe sender info, privacy policy link, postal address, etc.)
However, they could have had an even greater impact by using HTML text instead of embedding all the text of the email in images. Readers shouldn’t have to take action to see your message or take action.
Throughout the message, the text at the top right, the navigation links, the main message/call-to-action, the names of the collections and the extra gift section have multiple opportunities to utilize text. Why is that so valuable? If someone doesn’t enable images (and most email clients have them off by default), they would only be looking at snippet text and alt tags (and keep in mind that not every email client displays them). Do you really want to risk someone not being enticed to view images and see your message?
In addition, the call-to-action could very well be below the preview pane “fold” in addition to being an image. So it’s forcing people to scroll down and take extra actions instead of just having a link ready to click. Also the text of the links, including the navigation buttons and the “Adopt Now” button, should all be underlined to reinforce visually that they are in fact hyperlinks.
It’s a good email supporting a great cause. However, the email marketing worker bee that I am just wants to reach out and grab the message and redo it so it really maximizes their efforts. With very small reworking, this email could look nearly identical with images on/off and ensure the maximum number of people view (and hopefully take) the desired action.
Being all image and low text content, they also increase the risk of spam filtering as it might look like this email was designed to avoid “word/phrase” filters. In addition, the balance between the HTML and text-only versions won’t be possible since there’s almost no text in the HTML version (something else that looks spammy to filters).
Hopefully someone at NWF will appreciate my humble words of advice and certainly with a full COMPASS report by our team, they (or anyone else) could have a full review of an email with extensive analysis of all the various components of an email. Given the cause and their heart being in the right place, I’m going to go ahead and order one of the collections…for my nephews… no really for my nephews.
I have been a member of The Direct Marketing Association for many years. I feel I owe the association a lot, because I won a scholarship to the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation Collegiate Institute back in 1980. Attending that program introduced me to an area of marketing that only occupied ten pages of one textbook in my marketing education at College. It also landed me in my first job in the industry (I was recruited by a company at the session). I’ve attended DMA conferences for years as both a vendor and as a purchaser of direct marketing service.
My wife and I started our company eighteen years ago, and when we launched our email marketing product SubscriberMail, we had strong hopes that the DMA was going to be our industry advocate. I feel this is one area where we were wrong. At that time under the leadership of former DMA president Bob Wientzen, the association took the most ludicious, and damaging position about the definition of unsolicited email. His definition defied best practices, and made the industry look evil.
For years the rapidly growing digital segment of the industry was ignored. Back in 2004 at the Annual Conference in New Orleans I posted about how the DMA was making a big mistake by not getting involved with our end of the industry. When the DMA initially approached it they purchased the Association for Interactive Marketing (interestingly enough the association’s web site still is up). They all but decimated it in a couple of years. Recently they purchased the Email Experience Council. It is one of several email entities in the market, but it’s relevancy isn’t clear to me even though we spend thousands of dollars to be a sponsor. In the meantime, numerous organizations such as AdTech and OMMA have displaced the association as outlets for digital vendors.
On several occasions, over the years, I have contacted the association about industry advocacy, only to find a complete lack of understanding on the part of association executives. The best example of this is several years ago when multiple states were introducing ridiculous laws related to email under the veil of child protection. I was involved with the lobbying efforts of the ESPC and asked the DMA for support. They referred me to a Lobbyist who in a phone call talked to me about postal issues. I finally said this isn’t postal, it’s email, and she informed me that she did not think she could help.
As a company, each year we participate in the organization’s Annual Conference. Participating in a trade event is an expensive endeavor. The DMA it seems has gone out of its way to create multiple expensive events and has done little to join the digital components of the industry with the mainstream vendors. In fact, at the annual conference in Atlanta it was so bad that my friend Bill McCloskey of Email Data Source dubbed the area they relegated us to as “the digital ghetto.” Many attendees at the show were unaware that there even was a special area set aside for the digital vendors, and never visited. This despite the high exhibit fees charged by DMA.
In the years I’ve been a member, DMA has never reached out to me as a member until a week ago when I received a voice mail from an automated dialing system asking me for my proxy. DMA has never worried about proxies in the past. The association board could basically do anything they wanted and members didn’t really get involved in the internal politics of the organization – so why now?
A month or so I started receiving emails and reading about a movement DMA board member Gerry Pike was starting to bring change to the association. Gerry made some great points about the organizations relevancy to the membership, and raising the issue of the outrageous salary paid to DMA President John Greco that was never approved by the entire DMA board, but by a compensation committee that Greco himself sat on (far above averages for similar-sized associations). Pike also makes the point that the slate of Directors put forth at the meeting is not open to nominations from the floor. I’ve never heard of an organization where members don’t have the right to openly nominate and discuss the merits of Board candidates.
Pike’s point is simple – we can no longer just rubber stamp the association managment’s plan – members have the right to raise these issues at the board meeting. You can read extensive details about Gerry’s plans and approach on his webstie A Better DMA. I urge you to consider sending Gerry your proxy. You can click here for a copy and instructions for sending it in. My hope is that the DMA really starts to listen to its members. Many of us are tired of spending large amounts with the association and getting little in return. I also hope that the DMA does not use some parliamentary or political loophole to try to stifle Gerry’s efforts.
Does your email marketing program operate inside a vacuum? Sure, you might give recipients the option to reply directly to your messages or provide a reason when they choose to unsubscribe, but more and more online communication is taking place outside of standard email. Are you turning a deaf ear?
While email remains an immensely popular communication tool, many users prefer to communicate using a combination of tools; social media and instant messaging among them (the interest surrounding Google Wave is largely due to its ability to consolidate these different communication tools into a single interface). Email marketers often talk about the importance of “engagement,” but their recipients’ definition of the term will keep changing along with their preferences.
For example, I get frustrated when I reply directly to a marketing message with a question and receive nothing in the way of a response—or worse, an automated message telling me my message would not be read. So, to avoid that headache, I’ve recently tried using Twitter to respond back to senders instead.
The first sender was Wrigleyville.com, a website that promotes happenings around the Wrigleyville neighborhood in Chicago near Wrigley Field. I received an email announcing a new partnership between the site and a new coupon website called the Daily Dinger. Apparently, some kinks were still being worked out, because I received the same message three times over the course of a few hours. There was a link on the email to the MyWrigleyville Twitter page, so I decided to send them a message on Twitter mentioning a possible issue. I received no response at all.
I tried the same approach shortly after in response to a message I received from Eventful.com. I had registered on the site the previous weekend, but did not expressly opt-in to any mailing lists. When I received a marketing message, I checked out my preferences and noticed that the opt-in boxes for quite a few mailing lists had been pre-checked. A little miffed, I posted an update on Twitter directed at the Eventful account. Shortly after, I received a reply on Twitter, complete with the email address of an Eventful representative who said he would unsubscribe me if I contacted him. I was able to contact him directly and offer some opt-in tips that might help reduce complaints, which he seemed thankful for.
In each of these cases, I operated under the assumption that an organization communicating with me through one medium would be just as likely to communicate with me through a different medium. As social media use continues to rise, and tools such as Wave begin to spring up, marketers will have less and less ability to dictate the realm in which these conversations take place as email recipients may choose to communicate with senders in other ways.
These days, what begins as an email could take the sender-recipient conversation down any number of paths—and isn’t that a good thing? After all, it’s the engagement you’re looking for, how you get there is less important. Lose the tunnel vision, and get ready to communicate outside the (in)box.
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.
I received a great email from the 
Does your email marketing program operate inside a vacuum? Sure, you might give recipients the option to reply directly to your messages or provide a reason when they choose to unsubscribe, but more and more online communication is taking place outside of standard email. Are you turning a deaf ear?
