Email Marketing Minute: Email Marketing for a Cause
Posted by Drew Miller on October 1st, 2009
Have a cause that you want to promote in your Email Marketing campaigns? Learn the best practices for doing so in the latest Email Marketing Minute!
Posts Tagged ‘Email best practices’
Do These Spam Emails Look Familiar?
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.
Learn to Love Your “From”
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.
Email Marketing Minute: Email Review – The Container Store (Part II)
Posted by Drew Miller on July 23rd, 2009
Last time we reviewed The Container Store, their Father’s Day email went up in smoke. Are there any irons left in the fire for their latest campaign? Find out in this special Part II follow-up.
Haven’t Seen Part I Yet? CLICK HERE
How Social Networks for Email Marketing Can Damage Relationships
Posted by Drew Miller on July 21st, 2009
With more and more marketers trying to expand their reach beyond just a database of prospects, many are digging deep into their social networks – specifically LinkedIn and Facebook – to amplify their marketing message. While this may be acceptable within the walls of these specific sites, it by no means gives any marketer permission to do so outside of them – especially for Email Marketing.
I recently received Email Marketing from a person I was connected to on LinkedIn. This was by no means what I would consider a “strong” connection, but a person I had casually met through a conference a few years ago. I didn’t immediately recognize the from name, and wasn’t particularly interested in the subject line offer (solicitation for his website development company), but out of pure curiosity decided to open it anyways.
I could easily go through this email message and point out a number of things that were wrong with it, but I’ll save that for another email marketing review. What bothered me the most about this message was the little note about why I was receiving this email:
My first reaction was: “Wow – that’s one heck of an assumption.”
I’ve never visited my connections’ website, never opted-in for email (other than that within the walls of LinkedIn) and have never agreed to accept solicitations from companies my connections are employed by. Instead of trying to deepen the business relationship using a more personal approach, this particular person abused it.
The bottom line: Don’t get desperate when you are trying to expand the reach of your marketing message by dipping into trusted relationships on social networks. Abusing these connections and friendships might do more harm than good.
