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 Marketing Strategy’
Keep Your Email Messages in the Strike Zone
Posted by Dave McCue on September 23rd, 2009
There was a time when I was, indisputably, the most feared pitcher in my small town Little League—for all the wrong reasons. Let’s just say that if you were within three feet of home plate, you had best be wearing a helmet, or you might soon be wearing a fastball. It got to the point that umpires asked my coach not to let me pitch, because my taking the bump meant a long afternoon of hit batsmen and/or walking the bases loaded each inning.
But it wasn’t always like that. Early in my Little League career I was a fine pitcher, but one season I got a new coach who decided that I should change my grip on the ball. Being so young, I didn’t know that the grip my coach insisted I start using was a curveball grip. Suffice to say, not everybody can control a curveball.
My being forced to throw wild curveballs is very similar to the situation faced by email marketers who must contend with “coaches” who don’t realize the damage they are causing. It’s a tough situation to be in; defy the authority of someone who could bench/fire you, or follow orders and hope for the best. Marketers are being told to send more often. Marketers are being told to find more people to send email to, permission-based or not. In a survey SubscriberMail conducted earlier in 2009, one reason cited by marketers who were not conducting adequate testing of their messages was “a C-level aversion to testing.” If that isn’t bad coaching, I don’t know what is.
Occasionally I’ll come across an article in my RSS feed or a post to Twitter that says something to the effect of “Email marketing study finds that relevance is key.” My initial reaction is usually to chuckle and think of similar headlines, such as “Drivers report difficulty when blindfolded,” but even though the importance of relevance in email marketing would seem to go without saying, it’s something that can easily be lost when a misguided mindset of “more more more” controls the strategy of an email marketing program.
For a pitcher in baseball, the ability to throw 100 miles per hour doesn’t mean a thing if the ball isn’t anywhere near the plate. The story is much the same in email marketing; the power is only effective if you can control it.
Proving You’re Wonderful!
Posted by Bill Leming on September 14th, 2009
A question came up last week regarding how to best measure the impact of a specific commercial email we recently deployed for a client and which, on the surface, appears to have produced nearly unbelievable positive results. While this endeavor is far more preferable than proving that you’re not guilty of lying, cheating or stealing, it’s nonetheless a challenge.
Anyone and everyone responsible for promoting the offer through the website, or via banner ads, social media, print and email wants to claim responsibility for the parentage of this genius idea and the attendant sales figures associated with it. So how do we “prove’ our numbers?
One suggestion that was offered was the idea of matching the email addresses of actual buyers against our email list to see how high or how low our match rate actually was. The hypothesis here was that a high match rate would indicate that there was a strong correlation between our list and those who bought and that either our email efforts must have been successful or that we had the ability to predict before deployment who was likely to buy.
Conversely, a low match rate would signify that our email efforts were less than successful. Without going into the various scenarios that might explain why this approach is less than logical and therefore less than irrefutable, suffice it to say that statisticians and most non-statistically oriented people will have problems with this methodology. 
MySpace Misses the Mark
Posted by Dave McCue on September 3rd, 2009
Imagine this scenario: you’re shopping at your favorite grocery store, the same store you’ve been frequenting for years, when another shopper introduces herself as an employee of a different grocery store and tries to convince you to start shopping at her store. For her to have any success converting you, this would require one knockout of a sales pitch, right?
The recently launched MySpace Mail attempted a similarly direct approach, but the execution left me wondering if they were sending the right message. The subject line of the “MySpace BUZZ” newsletter I received on August 26 was “August’s best movies, music and celebs,” but upon opening the message I was very surprised to see that it was being used to promote the company’s attempts to position itself as an email client for its millions of users.
For a company whose recent struggles have been well-documented, the launch of MySpace Mail was expected to deliver some much-needed buzz. With that in mind, I was more than a little confused as to why such a major announcement wouldn’t be the focal point of the message’s subject line. Inside the message, a large headline proclaimed “The New MySpace Mail Has Arrived” and the entire top portion of the message was dedicated to calling out the new features of MySpace Mail.
To MySpace’s credit, the words “The New MySpace Mail Has Arrived” were produced using HTML, and were the first words of the message. So email clients that display pre-header text would have shown that important piece of the message right in the inbox after the subject line. I was using Hotmail, however, so by not seeing that pre-header text I would never have known that MySpace Mail was being promoted had I not inadvertently clicked on the message and opened it.
On that same note, I’ve been using Hotmail for over a decade, and that familiarity would make it a tall order for a new email client to get me to switch over. Did MySpace—anticipating this—intentionally leave mention of MySpace Mail out of the subject line because they thought my preference for Hotmail would lead to me deleting the message? An interesting theory, but I’ll never know…
No matter what you’re selling or who you are selling it to, consider your email subject line the opening of your pitch. Always make it count, or everything that comes after might just be wasted breath.
The Preview Pane from your Customers’ POV
Posted by Drew Miller on August 27th, 2009
The importance of optimizing your email marketing messages for preview pane viewing cannot be understated. Once you’ve gotten someone to click on your message with a winning subject line, the next step would be to make sure that you capture their attention in the preview pane viewing area.
It’s important to keep in mind the varying sizes of monitors, screen resolutions and the actual preview pane itself. Taking a worst-case-scenario approach, here is a view of my inbox in Yahoo! on my 17” laptop:
Again, this is my size preference so others may vary, but I personally try to keep about half of my inbox viewable and the other half for preview pane viewing. Here is a look at a few messages once I click on them:
Sears:
Jet Blue:
Amazon:
Out of these three selections, Amazon does a really nice job of optimizing the preview pane with several links and reiterates the subject line promoting Blu-ray Movies. By having multiple touchpoints in the preview pane area, they have greatly increased their chances of getting someone to click.
For more great information on preview pane optimization, check out these other blog posts:
Email Marketing Minute – Power of the Preview Pane
Are Your Subscribers Organized? Why It’s Better to Assume the Worst
