I believe in email. I believe that it drives awareness and sales revenues. I know that it works, but in our consumer driven economy can we always expect everyone to want to hurry to buy from us? It is timing and segmentation. Not everyone is ready to buy anytime you have a sale no matter how fantastic or amazing the deals and creative may be. Reality check time guys.
I have long been a fan of the Scott’s Lawn care emails. The are timely, relevant and well done. But I was a little surprised when I got the most recent one and many of the blocks of copy and images failed to load. This was not due to any image suppression on my end of my email client, but just a misfire somewhere along the way. The email wars continue even when you are doing your best…. I even gave it a chance and opened it fully, went back to the inbox and loaded it again. No go.
We talk about best practices, we talk about learning but rarely do we talk about the fun the email channel brings us. It is a peculiar animal, primarily because it is used by practically everyone, and everyone has his or her own opinion of it. When someone asks me, “What do you do for a living?” my typical response is, “I run an email marketing business within an advertising agency.” The expected tongue-in-cheek response is, “So, you’re a spammer!”
Dear J.Crew,
I’ve got to be honest….you’re lazy. I like some of your products, so I signed up for your email list. Little did I know how little you actually care about me.
You email me 8-9 times a month (in 2007 so far). You told me I would be “The First to Know” about promotions, special collections, deals, etc….
Apparently, my interests don’t really drive these emails.
So many of you have decided that the post card email is really a retail tool. I rarely ever see businesses using the postcard style layout when reaching out to customers and prospects to get them to take action. Well why is this? Why is it that businesses try to use every possible word in an email and every pixel to tell you more and more WHEN they actually just want you to take an action?
There should be a minimum standard for invoking certain holidays like St. Patrick’s Day. It’s a minor holiday, to be sure — as tracked by RetailEmail.Blogspot, less than 4% of the emails sent by major online retailers on St. Patrick’s Day and the five days prior referenced the holiday — but it’s still a holiday that has a personality. Marketers need to make their references to holidays like this relevant — or do as so many retailers did, and not bother with it at all.
Interesting new site from Got and the EEC. Aggregates studies, research and best practices in email marketing, delivery, rendering, time of day, creative etc..
Take a look when you have a chance.
http://www.emailstatcenter.com/
Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.
If you have a TV or read magazines, you know then why we like lists. We like to see a ranking or maybe it is just the way lists organize data and information that make them so easy to browser and drive deeper. I was forward this email from a friend at Travelocity Business (She rocks by the way and I am going to look to her for my Best of Travel Email Installment) from SMU that does a great job of using simple lists and content organization to drive the clicks.
The recent brouhaha in the SEO world has gotten me thinking about passion, or better yet, the lack of it in our little world of the inbox. For those who don’t know, the SEO industry was rocked a while back by a comment from David Pasternack, co-founder of Did-it, that SEO was not rocket science. SEO consultants around the world got pretty passionately worked up, believing that what they did was indeed rocket science, and as a result launched a series of contests and initiatives to prove SEO’s rocket science-ness.
I stirred up my own controversy a year ago by suggesting that RSS was not ready for prime time when it came to marketing, even though a year later the impact of RSS on marketing professionals is still negligible.
We sent three of our team to SXSW in Austin Texas last week. What an event. George on our team, who leads new media wrote up some of his take aways on one of our other blogs EmailDays.com. If you are interested in things like Twitter, take a look.
Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.