Golden Leads

So a trend that is hitting consumer brands across the planet is the fact that “everything” is going green or is green friendly. I have seen so many brands use the “green” factor in emails of late. Now does letting people know that you are environmentally correct help lift a campaign? I know that from the stand point of brand association it makes me feel better as a consumer to buy things from companies that are responsible or have less of an impact on the world we live in and leave behind for our children.

Keep your eyes on this trend as I expect us to see it even more in the coming months and years.

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Thanks to The Email Wars for this great article.

Dear Readers,

One of the Email Diva’s pet peeves is the use of superfluous exclamation points. If your copy doesn’t express enthusiasm and energy on its own, punctuation will not help you. Rather, it does the opposite and makes you look like a huckster. But this idea, courtesy of Geene Rees at Acxiom Digital, is so good that it deserves an exclamation point — maybe two!!

Dear Email Diva,

Here is a recent posting from my blog, about driving relevant emails through search.

Search Born Content

2006 was a challenging year for email opens and clicks. I am always asked by my clients; how can we improve our subject lines? Consequently I spent most of 2006 looking at successful emails and subject lines trying to determine what it was about the subject line that led to a higher open rate. Sure, shorter is better and inspirational can be good, but how many new subject lines will drive higher opens. There had to be a better way.

And then one night it came to me: WHAT ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS SEARCHING ON in Google and Yahoo?

Why not take key word phrases and let those highly ranked phrases craft the email content? Of course. How simple.

I went through the exercise with a client in the eyeglass category and pulled all key word phrases that ranked high for their selected root words. I eliminated phrases that were not relevant and found that there were about 20 phrases that could easily establish content categories for my client. The information was not only USER-GENERATED; it would guide my client to establish an editorial calendar for their email newsletters.

It’s a beautiful, simple solution to creating highly relevant email content.

Geene Rees, Acxiom Digital

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News:

BITS, a nonprofit industry consortium formed by many of the largest financial institutions in the USA, has announced their “BITS Email Security Toolkit” white-paper, describing “protocols and recommendations for reducing the risks” in institutions’ email correspondence, addressing prominent problems such as identity forgery and phishing (password fishing). BITS held an industry e-mail security summit in November 2006, which developed these recommendations. The SPF Project participated in this summit.

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Now I find this current study very interesting. It seems that the luxury retailers in this study do not find email to actually be good for them, or at the end it seems like although 85% of them want to use email only 50% of them actually do. So maybe it is not a “not good for them scenario” but one that they either don’t have the time, resources or see the immediate payback from these efforts. TWO UPDATED Articles from this AM

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After spending the last three weeks at a client summit, on vacation and recovering from both, I found I had a lot of reading time and experienced a general “deafening” to what’s been happening in our space. This is a nice change, since normally I am so deeply entrenched in my beloved world of email and eCRM that I have difficulty getting an outside perspective to help freshen my thoughts and approach.

Here are some good reads from my vault.

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I keep a pulse on the world of SPAM regulations because we have a number of clients that mail internationally, so not only do we need to consider local regulations and laws, but those of other countries. Singapore recently changed their SPAM laws to be:

“an unsolicited commercial electronic message sent more than 100 times, with the same or similar subject-matter, during a 24-hour period, or more than 1,000 times during a 30-day period, or more than 10,000 times during a one-year period.”

It might just be me, but this seems like a very loose law.

Return on Subscriber for this great article.

That is right folks, today is National HIGH FIVE day. Now don’t act like you did not know it, but this is the reason you can justify SLAPPING 5’s all day long throughout the office, at a client meeting, with the damn meter maid leaving you another ticket, your kids, your spouse, heck… just about anyone you see.

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Google’s acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion last year should have been a wake-up call to all marketers that online videos are ready for prime time. Many retailers wisely took note and have been increasing their use of online videos, integrating them into their email marketing campaigns.

At least 18% of major online retailers tracked via RetailEmail.Blogspot have incorporated video into at least one email over the past six months or so. And I suspect that number will grow rapidly, and that frequency of use will increase as well.

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More than three years after it became law in the U.K., nearly a third of retailers still don’t comply with the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, U.K. direct marketing firm CDMS has found.

The Europe-wide legislation, which governs email communications with private individuals, forbids companies from sending email marketing messages to recipients who have not explicitly opted in to receive them. It clearly spells out that offering someone the opportunity to opt out of receiving unsolicited messages (or pre-checking opt-in boxes) does not comply with the directive.
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Well on the tails of so many emails I get that just can’t get the gender right when sending email comes this SIMPLE solution from Swell.com. I know that I have only bought hoodies, flip flops and a few pairs of shorts from them, but still maybe they don’t know. That being said why not play the safe bet right?

I am still amazed with all the email marketing tools that are out there that companies are not segmenting right or at all based on who they sell to. I mean if you have types of people then you should ASK which one they are at the opt in right?

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