A trend that I have been seeing lately used by some companies and consumer brands is the Q/A idea. What is this? Well glad you asked. It is to create the question at the top of an email and drive them down through the copy to find out where it is answered. Typically I have seen it at the bottom, go figure. This drives the full read of the email, or at least that is the intention of the idea.
As an email marketing journalist, my blog refers to lots of numbers relating to email — click rates, opens rates, comparison rates to prior quarters or years. Do the numbers really mean anything, though? Sometimes I actually wasn’t so sure — until this past Tuesday.
That’s when I attended a webinar that shared the results of the Email Experience Council’s Deliverability Roundtable study on Delivery and Bounce Metrics. In that webinar, Pivotal Veracity CEO Deirde Baird made a simple yet amazing point. She said, “The way we measure email is critical to proving the success of the channel itself.”
So you have a list. Is it physical addresses or email addresses? Why do I ask you this? Well because you can use this technique either way. We do this all the time for our clients using PIN Coded DM (use a campaign URL for DM to track response by media) to convert offline lists to opt in email lists and it works swimmingly.
Well my friend Tamara Gielen from b2bemailmarketing.com had a post this last week that I want to take the bad cop stance on.
She writes:
Stop Looking to the Big Boys for Creative Ideas
In this blog post, Janine Popick urges all of us NOT to look at the email campaigns of the “big boys” of retailing as a source of creative ideas because they don’t necessarily have it down when it comes to email marketing best practices.
A new study from marketing research firm Ipsos and the Email Sender and Provider Coalition provides a great insight into how consumers are viewing the email marketing landscape. Direct Magazine online has a good overview here, and you can read the original press release and executive summary here.
One of the more interesting statistics from the study is that 90 percent of email users would prefer to have a specific unsubscribe button on their inbox. This is backed up by the fact that 82 percent of email users say they trust the sender’s unsubscribe option, and that they’ve used it to remove themselves from a list. I’ve been an advocate of the unsubscribe button for a while now. For a refresher on the benefits, you can read my posts here, and here.
Thanks to Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey for this great article.
Well you know that my first answer to this question is NO. Never is it okay, ethical nor legal to harvest emails out there. This company Jigsaw has been on my radar for a long time as they provide a contact info trading service for sales people. And this new email has a new download that actually allows you to grab emails from web sites and add them to your contact list. Meets the goals of Jigsaw from a business plan perspective, but man such a poor goal.
My article last week on the lack of passion in the email industry itself provoked a lot of passion from the blogosphere. First up was Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, in his blog OnlyOnce, where he took me to task for implying that CEOs of email companies are discredited from leading (in his words). The specific part of my article in question was when I said that we need more evangelists and that folks like Richard Gingras and Matt don’t count because they have a vested interest in evangelizing the space.
I recently spoke to a college class about email marketing. (yes, I used the chalkboard just for fun). These were people who were either interested in eMarketing, or trying to improve their skill set.
I asked the class a question: “How many email lists do you subscribe to?”
I was frankly surprised by the lack of hands.
I know only 3-4K people showed up at OMMA, so some of you missed it. Again this is THE event to go to each year. Next one is this fall in NYC. See you there.
But the reason for this is to share with you the link to all of the great content. They posted in up last week and used BrightCove ( I like this media player a lot) so that you can catch up on what you missed.
Dear Email Diva,
I need a reality check and basic education.
I have a very small business. I recently placed a copy ad with text link in a content publisher’s email with a subscriber base of 16,000 — and received 50 clicks. Yes, 50 clicks. The publisher can’t even give me any other data on my ad except for # of clicks. They can’t tell me how many people saw my ad. They wrote: “Open rates is not something we look at because that is a very inaccurate number (doesn’t include pass along e-mails, or if someone opens the e-mail in their Outlook window).”
I wasted quite a bit of time and energy on this, for total disappointment. How do I evaluate what sorts of email ads to place? What metrics do I look for? What questions should I ask? And is this company giving me the runaround?
Frustrated