Posts Tagged ‘email list building’
Posted by Dave McCue on March 18th, 2009
The day was February 25th, 2009, one day removed from Fat Tuesday and a few beers with a co-worker. Was I hungry? You bet.
Then, like an oasis in the desert, the following subject line appeared in my inbox: “free sub.” It was from an old college buddy of mine, and his message was short, yet effective—”Get a free sub…I did it, it actually worked!”
The link he included took me to the Quiznos web site, where I discovered they were in the middle of a promotion dubbed the “Million Sub Giveaway.” I instantly signed up for their email list, which was the only action required to qualify for my free sub. The Thank You page confirmed that I would be receiving periodic email updates from Quiznos, which I deemed an acceptable sacrifice in light of the redeemable coupon for a free sub that was certainly en route.
The site even had a rolling tally of how many free subs had been given away so far, and it crept closer toward the 1,000,000 mark with each new opt-in. This, I thought, was list-building at its finest. It featured a good offer—the kind that held no value unless a valid email address was supplied—and it was made very clear that signing up for the promotion meant being added to their mailing list. I certainly wasn’t going to complain, in fact, I hoped that being added to the mailing list might mean more delicious Quiznos could be had on the cheap through future offers.
I waited…and waited. I even had a text message queued up to send to my wife that said “don’t need dinner – free Quiznos for me!” Alas, that text message was deleted, never to be sent. The email never arrived that day. Or the next day.
A few days later, subsisting on leftovers and determined to right this injustice, I used the Contact page on the Quiznos site to say “what’s the deal?”
Quiznos’ response, received the next day, went as follows:
Now, it’s bad enough to have a Mesquite Chicken & Bacon-covered carrot dangling just out of my reach, but I’d at least like to be addressed by name on a communication designed to resolve an issue (especially when I know that my contact information has already been gathered). Not only that, but the link on this follow-up email took me to another online form where I was asked to provide my physical mailing address. Fueled by my insatiable desire for toasted carbohydrates, I grudgingly provided the information.
To recap: I was now an officially opted-in subscriber to the Quiznos email list, and now I had possibly been added to a direct mail list as well. All for a free sandwich that was never received…
It has now been 21 days since I opted-in to a mailing list under the guise of being rewarded with a free sub, and my hunger grows. Do I try to contact Quizno’s again, only to receive a follow-up email asking for my social security number?
Nah, I think I’ll wait and see what happens. Maybe I’ll get a Quiznos 2010 wall calendar delivered to my home before an email for my free sub. Better than nothing, right?
The lesson? Just because you can’t see the people who take part in online marketing promotions, you’re still dealing with real people, and they expect that any promises made will be honored in full. Failure to do so, and failure to make a situation right after it’s been brought to your attention, is even more unforgivable.
I wrote a post back in December called “Self-inflicted Brand Damage.” The Million Sub Giveaway was a perfect example of what an effective online marketing initiative can do to promote a brand—and the sour taste it can leave when the “take” outweighs the “give.”
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Posted by George Palatine on March 9th, 2009
Email newsletter sign-up… triggered welcome message… hard bounced email. What just happened? The cause is most likely an email address input error by the user. Anyone who has been involved in email marketing has probably seen typos in their database, the question is what did you do to correct/prevent it?
Now this topic is not a new one in the email marketing best practices handbook. Unfortunately however even as validation technology improves the statistics have not. A 2008 FreshAddress study of leading internet retailer’s email validation practices reveals that email registration errors have shown little or no improvement from a similar 2006 study.
According to this research, 6.6% of email addresses are input incorrectly but suggests that it could be as high as 25% if no validation methods are used at all. Think about that, if your business collects 100,000 emails a year, 6,600 or more of them are wrong! Aside from the obvious economic implications of a lost opportunity there are additional concerns.
- Customer dissatisfaction with your company/brand because you did not perform as expected.
- Negative impact to your company’s digital reputation due to a significant amount of hard bounces in your list. This is a real problem because this will likely affect your email deliverability rates.
- Wasted marketing dollars due to bad list data.
Worst of all, just taking a few steps to insure accuracy could prevent this.
Many of these bad addresses are a result of simple syntax or misspelling errors. Some of the most frequent include;
- Using a comma instead of a period in your email address
- The @-sign mis-keyed as “2” (shift key not pressed)
- An accidental space within the email address
- Transposition of .com to .cmo
- Misspelling of Yahoo or Hotmail
So how do you fix these before they make it into your database? Here are a few simple/less technical suggestions.
- Make sure the size of the text entry box on your website form is large enough. The average email address is 26 characters long. If your form can only display 15 characters before the text scrolls out of view then customers could make a mistake and not even see it.
- Double entry of email address on a web form is a simple method but in most cases users will just cut and paste the first line into the second so it does not significantly improve your results.
- Reaffirm your offer and ask that people take a second look at their email address before they submit.
Some additional methods that require a bit more technical implementation but can be highly effective include;
- Email validation code on your web form. This can be a simple low-tech test for syntax errors to very sophisticated real-time validation/correction software. Which you use should depend on the value of each missed opportunity within your organization and your observed email failure rate.
- Confirmation page before posting the data to your database. For example, after a user clicks submit, a page can display asking them to take another look at what they just input. Be sure to allow them to make changes on that page or to confirm accuracy and continue.
The moral of the story is that you should monitor the email error rate within your organization and take the appropriate steps to reduce it. In this economy every little bit helps.
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Posted by Dave McCue on January 28th, 2009
“So I don’t actually have to do anything?”
“No sir, this is just a courtesy call to let you know that it’s been taken care of.”
I love courtesy calls like this. Being told that something has been done to benefit me—and knowing that I didn’t have to lift a finger to make it happen—holds a lot of appeal to me.
However, I recently received an email informing me that I was about to be added to a mailing list unless I took action to request that I not be added. By not lifting a finger, my reward was to start receiving email I never took action to sign up for; naturally, this “courtesy email” held much less appeal. (see excerpt below)
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Posted by Nic Winters on January 15th, 2009
When looking to grow your email list, consider this simple strategy that will help your current subscribers bring along interested friends and colleagues.
Subscribe and forward links are two fairly common items that can be found in email campaigns, however very few email marketers are utilizing both types of functions together in their emails.
Incorporating a forward link within your messages allow your subscribers to pass along a fresh copy of your email to others. With many of today’s HTML emails mimicking fully designed websites, things can go awry if you leave it up to the forward button within their email client to send on your message (mangling the code along the way). With an email service provider like SubscriberMail you can incorporate a forward link that also allows the subscriber to enter their own message to their friend or colleague above your forwarded message.
In addition, our forward link functionality also contains a subscription link inserted above the forwarded message – allowing the friend or colleague to easily subscribe. However, even if you incorporate a forward link in your emails, you can never prevent your subscribers from continuing to pass along your messages using the forward button within their email client. Thus, consider also including a subscribe link to allow recipients of a forwarded copy to easily sign up for your future messages.
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Posted by Dave McCue on December 11th, 2008
A typical foray into my personal email account involves one strategy and one strategy only; deletion with reckless abandon:
“10% off…” – Get back to me when it’s 50. Delete!
“Fwd:…” - No time for forwards. Delete!
And so it goes—sometimes even emails from my mother accidentally get caught up in the carnage.
But today I actually took a moment and looked at the many unread email messages waiting for me, all boldfaced and hoping against hope that today would be the day, and it occurred to me; at one point, I really did ask for all of these.
That email about getting my credit report sure looked spammy, but I was the fool who signed up on one of those free credit websites a few years back out of curiosity (tip: they aren’t free). Did I really ask to receive email updates from a site that sold posters? Yes, upon further reflection, I did—because I used to give really lame Christmas presents.
Signing up for emails has become a very “shrug-and-move-on” sort of transaction, similar to swiping a debit card to make purchases. Not until the inbox begins to reach the brim (or the bank statement arrives) does it become clear how quickly such things add up.
I don’t think I’m much different from the typical email user in this regard, which is why the issue of crowded inboxes is such a challenge to overcome for email marketers. While I—unlike many email users—only use the “Mark as SPAM” button in obvious cases of abuse, I do tend to delete messages in bulk rather than go through the unsubscribe process for each one. Somewhere out there, an email marketer is racking his/her brain trying to figure out why I haven’t been opening the emails I’ve been receiving for so long.
Of course, this is where the issue of list cleansing comes into play. Am I currently a source of revenue for these people? No. Was I at one point? Yes. Taking me off their list, when I could theoretically be thiiiiis close to making my next purchase, is a tough call in light of how inexpensive it has been to keep in contact with me all this time.
Much like the sign-up process, deleting unread messages rather than unsubscribing is the type of action I (and many other email subscribers) perform without much thought. But if, one day, I received a “We Haven’t Heard From You in Awhile” message, it would likely flip the switch in my head reminding me that I don’t want this email, and I can end this wicked game once and for all by taking a few extra seconds to unsubscribe.
By pushing me to take action in order to stay on their mailing lists, these marketers would only risk losing an uninterested subscriber—increasing their open and click-thru rates in the process—and my mother’s next email might go unscathed. Everybody wins.
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